Points of Entry: This Week's Recommendations APPETIZERS Before you commit to an iPad, watch app demos on YouTube or elsewhere. You feel as if you’re in a detail-perfect estate up on a cliff over the Hudson River or in Malibu or, yes, south of the languorous Kansas River, in the beautiful outskirts of Topeka. And in the very best apps, you don’t feel like a fraud in a McMansion. Though there’s certainly less pressure to produce out here in the apps, and life’s a little sleepier and more summery, it’s plenty soulful. This analogy may seem, to those of us who grew up on the shibboleth of suburban soullessness, to disparage apps wholesale - but it shouldn’t. Apps like Gravilux awaken an “Avatar” -like sensitivity to electricity in the body, power in the palms and general connectedness.Īpps are to the Web what suburban houses are to the bustling city. When you shove around “stars” - the speckled interface seems to have some astrophysical significance - you direct the universe. A similar effect is derived by Gravilux, an art project that lets you manipulate static. It also makes our earlier almanac efforts to describe and respond to the weather seem meager, goofy and. The Weather HD app also elevates the user, placing her at cloud level for a hushed real-time weather tableau that puts the Web’s goofy sunshine-rain-cloud icons to shame. Players of contemporary video games, by contrast, don’t get this strategic aloofness. The games that define games - go, chess, backgammon - exist on boards, so players can assume god roles, dwarf their tokens and look down on them. Take the Checkers app: the tablet becomes a game board in a way that a TV, a PC ora smartphone cannot. Often an iPad interaction feels like nothing I’ve done before, or nothing I’ve done for a long time or in real life rather than dreams. Maybe the iPad is like a person with an American accent who turns out to be Dutch or Australian. Once yielded to, it’s scintillating for being uncanny. In spite of early carping that the iPad is merely a bigger version of something we already know, the experience of it is not familiar. You get to relive the childhood fascination of writing with fingers on a steamed-up car window - the window becoming legible-illegible, transparent-opaque. Suitably, the device when vertical is said to be in “portrait” mode horizontally, it’s a “landscape.” (Makeup apps like the mysterious iLash take advantage of iPad’s physiognomy the meditative Magic Window app turns the screen into a porthole.)Īnd then there’s the fact that the iPad wants to be touched, albeit lightly. At 9 1/2 inches by 7 1/2 inches, the iPad approximates the dimensions of a face or an airplane-cabin window if you like human faces, and you prefer the window seat to the aisle, the iPad’s size will please you. These “productivity” apps are now among the most popular in Apple’s App Store.Īt the same time, I’ve held onto the promise that the iPad should give pleasure. But right around Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 4 last month, which distracted tech pundits from the iPad for a while, a curious thing happened: producer types embraced the “consumption machine.” They started productively downloading apps like Pages, for writing Keynote, for writing speeches and Things, for making to-do lists. I also felt hugely relieved not to have to pretend the outsize iPad was useful for on-the-go phone calls and e-mail - a charade that I’d bridled at with the undependable iPhone. Alex Payne, a tech entrepreneur, found the iPad disturbing: “a digital consumption machine.” On the great tech site Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow - while resolving never, ever to buy an iPad - took the trouble to remind us that a consumer is (in the novelist William Gibson’s acid words) “something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka.”īecause I do spend solitary, darkened days in hippo-potato mode, consuming media in Brooklyn’s equivalent of a double-wide, I figured I’d like the iPad. Producers are still imagined as lean, fierce and manly, where consumers are seen as feminized, passive and fat. Though the Web would seem to have blurred the line between content producers and content consumers, old antagonisms die hard. At its christening in April, the Apple iPad was declared an instrument for consumers of media - a sort of cultural spoon.
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