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Comment by spiralganglion | Hacker News Reader

As soon as we see people getting work done on the Kindle Fire, I'll grant you that.

If your work involves a lot of writing, then the iPad isn't an obvious boon [1]. But if you can do your work more efficiently by treating data and actions as symbols, the iPad is just overflowing with potential, much of it already being realized. Musicians, artists, animators, logicians, teachers, doctors, researchers; the list of professions offered new ways to work is getting longer and longer. To these people, the iPad can be life-changing.

I don't think the Kindle Fire will change anything. It's just not in Amazon's DNA to make a product focused on anything other than buying and consuming content — and there's never been a shortage of ways to buy things.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/09/doable-or-not-my-e...

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To me the e-ink Kindle is life-changing ... it's what I wanted since 10 years ago, an affordable e-ink reader and access to the biggest library of books on earth, just one click away.

You mention researchers and logicians using the iPad. Can you give any examples?

I tried using the iPad, but the lack of support for LaTeX or papers in svn, git or mercurial repositories made it completely unusable for anything resembling work.

In my field (Information Systems), most papers are served as PDFs. My advisor has switched almost entirely to his iPad for most work, especially when reading/annotating articles.

Most journals in my field require Word docs, and don't use LaTeX. It's been my observation that the field is filled with business people who use computers, and relatively fewer computer people who ended up in business. Sure, there are some of each, but the former seem to outnumber the latter.

Logicians? I'm not seeing the iPad app to write math papers without, y'know, writing.

Logic is a game of symbols and relationships. The iPad is the best tool I've ever seen for working with symbols and relationships.

Being a practicing mathematician means generating and publishing results. I am interested to see your iPad app for diagonalization results or computability proofs.

Have you ever seen a whiteboard? I do anything remotely logic based on one.

My whiteboard even has a fantastic multi-user interaction system!

   Musicians, artists, animators, ???

Any serious professional will have a maxed out task specific equipment.

    logicians??

Lol I take it that you are not being serious!

teachers, doctors, researchers!

haha Doctors need to enter lots of information and prefer a laptop / proper keyboard. As far as researchers are concerned any serious researcher will be either using legacy software or cutting edge software that runs on specialized machine. And oh if you actually leave your hipster utopia you will realize that teachers get paid peanuts.

please iPad is a toy and kindle fire is a cheaper and much more affordable toy.

>Doctors need to enter lots of information and prefer a laptop / proper keyboard.

Any reference for that?

I would also be mildly skeptical about that claim; I think there have been some fairly successful uses of custom UIs in medicine.

Well, an anti-reference: The (admittedly few) doctors I know enter simple keywords into some predetermined fields - perfect for an iPad. For anything longer they record a message that someone else transcribes.

I have made a living as a musician, as a 3d animator, and as a software dev. My parents are both teachers. I did a lot of research in my University days.

In all of these areas, I can see the potential for multitouch-based applications that go far, far beyond what we're currently seeing, or have ever seen on a traditional mouse/keyboard computer. In fact, in my current line of work as a developer, I'm pursuing these very things.

If you're in a line of work where you're attempting to push the boundaries of what's possible with a computer, I find it hard to believe that you aren't fully aware of the realized and unrealized potential of multitouch devices.

Just because the iPad feels like a toy right now, doesn't mean it's limited to that sort of usage for all people, from now on. I just don't see Amazon playing any role in pushing user-facing technology forward. Silk is brilliant, but the Fire doesn't really enable anything that wasn't previously possible, and I don't see that changing. The iPad did.

I'm pretty sure by "feels like" you mean "is".

Maybe multitouch will make all kinds of exciting differences. Maybe it won't. As long as you agree that you can't point to any of these exciting results yet, we're on the same page.

One example: http://www.blogher.com/ipad-nearmiracle-my-son-autism

..and all the stories about grandparents getting iPads. These are all anectodes of course, and we'll have to wait for the peer-reviewed papers to come in some years from now.

You can call the iPad a toy all you want. I'm sure some Delta and United pilots will disagree (hopefully they don't allow games on the iPads they have).

Lots of people called the first Mac a toy with its silly mouse and GUI when it was released, yet here we are.

The problem with touch interfaces is that they're low-resolution. Most "professional" software allows manipulation of a large number of parameters. With a keyboard and mouse you can do this fairly efficiently but you just can't pack that many widgets onto a touch screen unless you make it much larger than 10". Compound gestures may be more expressive than mouse clicks but they're also more error-prone and much less discoverable.

  > much less discoverable

That's not necessarily an issue if we're essentially talking about power users. If the app is worth its salt, then professionals that can make use of it will learn the ropes (so long as there is sufficient material -- help docs, tutorials, screencasts, etc). A good example is to look at text editors like Vim or Emacs. Much of their functionality isn't very 'discoverable,' but the power locked inside drives people to learn. Especially if you plan on diving into a particular profession. You want to use tools that make your job easier, even if there is a steep initial investment of time to learn the system.

> haha Doctors need to enter lots of information and prefer a laptop / proper keyboard

You are just making that up, right?

Health care is the one area where tablets did very well even before the iPad, and iPads have proven to be popular among doctors.

It seems useful to mathematicians: they spend most of their time reading, thinking and writing. An iPad can help with the reading, which is one activity out of the three!

The Kindle is not for getting work done. It is for consuming content.

That’s the point.

The potentially interesting question is whether the iPad is actually good for non-consumption tasks. All the faculty in my research group purchase Apple products, and most of them are wandering about with iPads. They're all quite happy to use them for reading papers, reading email, etc. However, none of them, despite having been using the devices for some time (close to year for some) even feel comfortable using them for technical email, let alone writing lectures, presentations, or papers.

Again, I don't know whether the software to make those tasks workable _could_ exist; I simply have experiential evidence that it does not yet.

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