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There's an app for that, but it probably sucks

I have not taken my iPad with me to the gym or to my weekly poker game, but otherwise it has been with me whenever I have left the house. I haven't necessarily used it often while out - I still have 238MB of the $15 data plan I bought on May 1st - but I have been glad to have it now and then.

Yesterday I had to run a package to UPS and I didn't take the iPad. I didn't forget; I just felt it would be a quick trip and there was nothing I'd need it for. Yet before I was half way to the store, I missed it. Not that I needed it; I just missed it. I wanted it to be there on the seat beside me. It seems to be like having business cards: I probably won't need them, but I feel incomplete if I don't have them with me.

I hope we have established that I am a genuine Apple iPad fan-boy, scornful of iPad detractors and thoroughly convinced that those who don't want an iPad are confused and sad creatures.

Now let me say something that might surprise some and may enrage others:

A lot of iPad software is pretty crappy.

Hold on, don't send the lynch mob just yet. I love this machine. You will have to pry it from my cold, dead hands to get it away from me. Nonetheless, a lot of iPad/iPhone software is pretty poor stuff.

There's an app for that, but it probably sucks.

I don't just mean free apps. I mean paid apps, even Apple's own apps. Crappy. Crappy as in non-intuitive, crash-prone, buggy, feature poor, badly implemented.. and I'm talking about the apps I like and would cheerfully recommend, not the junk I deleted after first try.

Examples? Why do we need a third party app to do something as obvious as searching within a page in Safari? Why was I able to type a half page of text in Notes only to find it gone after momentarily leaving to look something up? Why.. Oh, never mind, this could take all day!

There are good excuses. Developers can sometimes fairly blame the API. There are weaknesses and difficulties therein. Developers within and without Apple have to live within a limited amount of RAM also. It can require more than imagination to cram in all the features you and your users might wish for.

I was hoping that the 4.0 SDK might introduce paged virtual memory, but from what I am reading, it doesn't seem to. Instead, apps are just suspended to disk when inactive. Obviously the iPad could implement vm paging - a Google search will turn up hacks for that - but Apple seems not to want this. It certainly can't be for lack of disk space on the larger iPad models, so it must be that they really are concerned that it would slow performance too much. Perhaps there are security advantages also. It may be that we'll have to wait for another generation of hardware to see enough available RAM to write better apps.

By the way, one app feature I just can't get used to is the games that want you to shake the device. First, that just feels wrong. I know, I know, it's all solid state, you can't crash anything. But more than 30 years of experience disinclines me to shake my computer. It's just not right.

Moreover, while it is very easy to shake a device like an iPhone or iPod Touch that you are holding in one hand, the iPad doesn't really lend itself to shaking. Simply said, just because you can do something in code does not mean that you should - shaking is a bad interface choice on the iPad!

But, inferior as the apps may be, they are good enough and (with some frustration at times) they get the job done. The iPad gestalt more than makes up for application shortcomings and deficiencies. For the iPad, the whole truly is much more than the sum of its parts. That does not stop me from hoping for improvements, but it does mean that I can put up with the problems

Until something better comes along, that is.

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