Yesterday, to the amusement and bemusement of many in my team (a small crowd formed), I spent about forty minutes in the presence of iPad In response to requests from one of my clients, I wanted to find out what would iPad be like as a presentation tool.
The device is sleek, shiny, slightly bulbous and a bit heavier than maybe one would ideally like (prediction: iPad 2 will be thinner and lighter). The screen is great, but in a well-lit office with skylights the viewing angle was susceptible to reflected glare. Overall, I do worry that all of these tablet type- and smart-phone devices are going to turn us into a nation of hunchbacks. Whilst the human-computer interfaces I'm sure now are ergonomically sound, the physiological impact of them is yet to be seen.
IPad without network (as I realised in the Dixons store in Heathrow recently) is a sleek, shiny doorstop. Connecting iPad to the test WiFi network in the office posed my first challenge. It's probably because I'm used to the Android touch screen interface, but I hadn't realised that the enter key on the on-screen keyboard had re-named itself “Connect”, and I was looking for a non-existent confirmation button on the dialogue box that came up to enter the wireless access key. It is this kind of subtlety that lends weight to the claims of Mac or Windows users that they can't use the other platform (using a Mac always makes me realise how much I right-click in Windows, for example).
Once connected, I had one mission alone. Not for me the delights of multi-touch piano or the infamous Fart gadget. I just had to try and get a presentation to be presentable on screen, full-screen. First step – a Google Docs presentation, for this, my friends, is the future.
Although maybe not quite yet on iPad. The presentation, by default, seems to render as one, very long, HTML page, which you can swipe down a screen at a time. With no obvious way to take the browser full screen (a la F11 on a Windows browser), you are left with a browser bar across the top too. OK, but not slick… And remember that this whole exercise is to try and make us look cooler than the opposition.
Next up… A PDF presentation. Now with this I can't quite work out if I was unable to escape from the Google docs environment, or if it's just that the PDF viewer on iPad is a bit crap, but overall it had a similar visual impact as the Google Doc… It had a navigation bar permanently across the top. I don't know why, but I'm also kind of loatheD to recommend that anyone uses Adobe software on Apple devices at the moment.
And so onto a PowerPoint file in native format. At this point, trying to pull the ppt file from Google Docs, I realised that Google gave the option to switch between Mobile (the default) and Desktop modes. In mobile mode, you just can't get to any source files… the Google service renders a presentation in Docs. Switching to Desktop mode means that a native Docs presentation renders much better (identical to on a proper computer except that the chat function doesn't work because it needs Flash). However Desktop mode also allowed the download of the PowerPoint file which then opened up into Keynote. At this point, at last, we were up and running with a full-screen presentation.
But with one problem.
For about a year I have been trying to convince our creative community that we need to ditch our in-house fonts for all of our own work, and rely on using 'standard' web fonts for everything other than logos. (Clients, obviously can have whatever they like, but enlightened companies like Ikea have already made this step). The reason is because these days we never know where our material might render.
In Keynote, for example, on iPad. Looks like that if I am going to have to provide some of the darn things, at least I can use it as a strong lever to get some better Web-centric typography standards in place…
mmitII 