iPad Tips, Tricks and Observations

iPad Tips, Tricks and Observations - Pat Egen’s Weblog

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iPad Tips, Tricks and Observations

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I’ve had an iPad since Christmas and have been going thru growing pains and plugging my way thru figuring out what I like/don’t like and thought I’d share some things I’ve learned along the way.

Recently I upgraded my iPad (version 1 – no 3G) to IOS 5 and found the multi-tasking feature. You grab the screen with all fingers and slide up. Presto – you have a multi-tasking bar where you can switch around to other programs running or close them. Ok, that’s cool.

I was typing an email and accidentally hit the space bar twice and up shows a period and my sentence ended. Not exactly what I wanted, but cool enough to make me go, hm, ok, that’s cool.

Reading books on my iPad has become one of my favorite things to do (other than the Angry Birds game – “hi, I’m Pat, and I play Angry Birds.”). When I hit the screen to move a page sometimes I hit too long and the circle comes up. So that led me to find out what that meant and it’s to copy text. Or go even further and look up the meaning of the word. That sort of takes reading to another whole level. Can you imagine what it would have been like when you read a book in school – you clicked on a word – and a dictionary popped up. Besides jumping clear across the room from fright, you have to admit it would have been pretty cool.

Delving even further, tapping and holding a key on the keyboard brought up other ways the key can be represented. That was cool.

Tapping and holding an icon make it start shaking and wiggling. I finally figured out that it meant I could move things around. What I do is move things down to the bottom so I can then slide over a page and move the item to that page. I’m sure there is a better way, but for now that works for me.

Coming soon to my postal mailbox is an adapter for VGA that I will use with KeyNote. I can take my Powerpoint presentations, and put them into Keynote, then using my new adapter, plus into an overhead projector, and show my presentation. Like how cool is that.

Finally, and this is what really brought this device home to me, I was attending a conference in July. I had the Instant Messenger app, Twitter, Facebook, my Gmail into the email and my Keynote app. A message would pop up when one of my staff sent me an IM. A box would also pop up if a Facebook or Twitter message came in, I could move over and read my emails on the mail app, and then type up notes in the Notes app. I could upload the notes into Dropbox so the rest of my staff could read them later. Using Safari, I went online to Sage ACT Connect to look at my ACT details – I’m liking that more and more. Oh, and I could play Angry Birds if I got bored. With a device that weighed a lot less than my laptop. And used a lot less battery. And was cool.

Ok, I’m hooked. Now, I just need to go find out what other apps I need to download from the Apple store. All this from a died in the wool PC-holic. My friends at Apple must be laughing their hearts out.

Moral of the story…iPad’s can really make a difference in a business person’s life. Don’t discredit them. Tablets are here to stay.

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