Most of you may not know that we at BSN* have always paid for our Apple parts that we review [or use] just like the rest of the consumer world. That being Mac Pros, Mac Book Pros or thousands of dollars in Software. Recently we bought an iPad [16GB WiFi] for review and while paying for an Apple app [Pages] discovered something that is downright ridiculous.
Pages, for those of you that do not know, is Apple’s document creation application. On a fully featured Mac it is not bad. I have used it and find it to be about on par with Word or any other productivity application. With the iPad, Apple wanted to create a mobile version of this software [along with Keynote and Numbers] to help push the iPad into the netbook market a little farther. This is all well and good. The Apps are pretty cheap at only $9.99 each from the App Store or iTunes. But where things fall apart is in the way they work.
For some reason [which we will cover in more detail in our review of the iPad] Apple has decided that the default ‘work’ format is portrait. This is odd as every computer [or tablet] that we have used has a landscape desktop and work area. Yes the actual document is in portrait mode, but the application id designed for a landscape work environment. Why does this matter? Well remember Steve Jobs said the iPad was a device that can be used for work. It is a productivity device, we were told that.
Well here is the rub. When you open up pages in Portrait mode you have a nice toolbar, you can adjust fonts, text size lots of things. But in that mode the keyboard is awkward, especially for people with larger hands. Still fear not, Apple has a solution. In the help section it says;
“To use a larger keyboard for typing, turn your iPad to landscape orientation. This is especially helpful if you’ll be typing a fairly large amount of text.”
Great, right? Nope. As soon as you do that you lose the tool bar. It simply goes away and there is no way to display it. In fact Apple lists it as one of the ways to get rid of it if you do not want it. So, Apple is telling you to use the landscape mode if you are typing a large amount of data but then takes away the useful toolbar at the top of the screen. The only way to get it back is to rotate it back to portrait mode, use it, then go back to the more comfortable and familiar way of doing work.
After working on this document in that manner we have to say it is extremely frustrating to say the very least. We cannot see someone sitting with this thing in portrait mode and typing away. It is downright silly and shows that Apple did not consider this at all when developing this device. It reminds us of how long it took to get a landscape keyboard on the iPhone. Just as an added item, if you consider the design of the iPad, Apple is telling you how to use it. Even the extra Keyboard accessory is limited to Portrait mode. All this due to the poorly placed 30-pin connector; but all of this is for another article.
Original Author: Sean Kalinich
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