Certain Habits

With the iPad now available for order and software companies, publishers, and game providers having had several months to begin product development, demonstrations of future products are starting to trickle out on Youtube.

What the demonstrations show, I think, is that the user interface / user experience potential of the iPad is much greater than the “it’s just a giant iPod Touch” critics realize.

Penguin Books

Take, for example, Penguin’s video demonstrating example eBook applications.

Fast Company explored the implications of Penguin’s first example, children’s books. They argue that the iPad could revolutionize the way kids learn and become a must-have parent’s accessory. (If so, a fortune awaits the maker of the first smash-proof, smear-proof case for the iPad.)

I’ve worked with a client who publishes children’s books. The educational value that immersive media and non-linear interactivity is difficult to underestimate. Combine that with intuitive book-like navigation, and you have a new category of educational experience for children.Read the whole thing.

Even more exciting to me, however, is the travel app Penguin demonstrates. An iPad guidebook could be the ideal travel companion. Not only can an electronic guidebook overcome the limitations of printed guidebooks—page count makes it impossible to fit enough relevant information inside, illustrations and photos are never large enough to inform, and they’re difficult to navigate—but it will save space and weight too.

The Penguin travel app illustrates something else that’s important about the iPad: mobility. The iPad doesn’t just promise more interactive user experience. It’s about having that interactivity in a form factor large enough to be useful and yet small enough and convenient enough to be used on location. While in general “tweeners”—those devices, products, roles or ideas that compromise between two extremes—are usually doomed to fail (who wants the compromise of luke warm water?), this may be the rare instance where the compromise device creates a new, or at least newly useful, category.

Wired Magazine

Chris Anderson spoke recently at a conference covered by PSFK, which overlayed some quotations from his talk on top of Wired’s iPad demonstration video:

Read the whole post for quotations where Chris Anderson explores the difference between packaged design—possible in print and on the iPad—and the experience heretofore possible on the web.

Given his observation about how the web is great for community creation, I have to wonder if the high-experience value of packaged content won’t get in the way of community building. One of the things that has democratized web communities is the crappy design. It puts everyone on a level—flooded—playing field.

Sports Illustrated

Those still doubting the power of the iPad for news and magazine use should look at the Sports Illustrated demo:

Clearly rich media and anyway-you-want-it navigation is a win for readers. Its impact on advertisers is less clear. The reluctance of readers to navigate to ads is likely to ensure that advertising becomes more interruption driven. Or it will (rein-)force the movement of advertising toward the creation of useful, enticing content, further blurring the line between content and advertising.

Notebook

Fast Company also shows the demo video for PadNotes, a notebook app for the iPad.

I’m not sure how big a win handwriting is for text entry. But you can imagine how the ability to draw, mark, and sign documents makes touch-sensitivity a big step forward for some applications.

Update — March 21, 2010

Vincent Laforet posted on “The iPad and the Future of Print” and highlighted the following demo for VIV:

Very creative. The video is available at: VIV Mag Featurette: A Digital Magazine Motion Cover and Feature for the iPad from Alexx Henry on Vimeo.