I'm Todd Sieling, and I've been designing information architecture, software experiences and product management for over twelve years. I help product managers, marketing agencies & dev teams develop web and iOS products that are humane and business-smart.
Learn how I help make better software experiencesA few months doesn’t seem like very long to look for changes in the landscape of wireframing apps for the iPad. But this is the App Store where life moves fast. In the realm of apps for wireframing, those reviewed last time around have made steady progress while a snappy new player has entered the field to challenge their early dominance.
Meetings of any size suffer the moment a laptop comes out; the open screen creates no end of distractions pulling participant attention between shared and private contexts. For that reason alone, I’m a paper notebook guy at meetings. But the iPad seems a way to have the benefits of a digital device without the weird social barrier that laptops create, so I’ve been on the hunt for a note-taking app that could replace the Moleskin.
It’s like like panning for gold: lots of junk with only a couple nuggets that are, well, noteworthy. SimpleNote, which I fell in love with on the iPhone, dominates my text-only note-taking with its superb synching between iPhone, iPad and desktop (using JustNotes as the front-end). But for creative work I need something beyond plain text and with features that get into the iPad’s tablet groove.
After the jump you’ll find short and merciless reviews of seven apps, with the best ones saved for the end.
Consider, for a moment, a table.
Knowing where the table’s edges are make the experience of using a table possible. If you don’t know where it begins and ends, things will just fall off. Hold that thought, as I think it’s a good metaphor for exploring the point that content publisher brands have found themselves at, and the bets that they’re placing on the app-format being spun out of the emergence of the iPad.
A week into having an iPad in my tool (and toy) lineup I’m still sussing out what aspects of work this new beast can take on, and what parts are still best suited to my main workhorse, a 15″ Macbook Pro. As my work involves a fair bit of wireframing, I was keen to see if the touch interface could serve as an effective design tool.
Two early contenders have popped up in the App Store to meet that need and I’ve spent a few hours with each of them, with some mixed results that other iPad early adopters may find useful: Omnigraffle and iMockups.
The reviews here have been updated to reflect recent developments.
Joe Clark has a near-perfect short post that rejects the grandiose wailing of bloggers falling apart over the iPad. I’m tempted to quote the whole thing, but this is where he hits the bulls-eye:
…one’s inability to hack an iPad means precisely nothing. Nobody needs to program an iPad to enjoy using it, except those who have no capacity for enjoyment other than programming and complaining about same.
This was the weekend those of us with high standards lost their remaining residue of patience for ideologues who hyperbolize about open systems without actually creating something people want to use.
Amen. That treat was all the more enjoyable after finding it especially hard to read Cory Doctorow’s over the top rant against the iPad…
Last week I got into a discussion on the blog for Spark, a weekly CBC radio show about technology and culture. From the comments came an interview with Dan Misener, and part of that conversation made its way into an episode that asks why computers are so hard to use. The segment starts at the 40-minute mark, and should you be disposed to listen you can do so.
As with most interviews there are parts that get cut. While I liked the parts Spark included, one part I wished would have made it on was about the importance of the iPad’s adoption of unmediated input. The following is a tidied-up crib of those thoughts.
Just over three years ago Steve Jobs closed a keynote with notice that Apple Computer had changed its name to Apple, Inc. My first reaction was that they were taking the business more towards the iPod model and away from Macs. Later, I wrote that I saw Apple taking the direction towards digital appliances and what that meant for watching movies at home. I’m happy the Mac is still central to their strategy, but in the iPad we see more of what Apple sees: the general purpose computing paradigm is a dead end.
Lots of techies are upset, seeing the future of making software as a Facebook experience: whitewashed, right angles and the turfing out of anything not deemed to fit by corporate interests.
How did that happen? There were plenty of chances to make things easy and for everyone, like the marketing copy we keep slapping onto our product descriptions. But we blew it.
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