I've long been one of those "bleeding-edge" geeks who has to get the latest bit of technology as soon as it comes out. It goes all the way back to childhood for me - at age 12, I had a wall of stereo equipment, a half-dozen electronics kits in the garage, and a strange obsession with high-power air pumps for my aquariums. Because, you know, you just can't have enough bubbles.
I have to assume this is genetic, because it followed me into adulthood – as a grown man, I stood in line for hours to buy the first iPhone. And the second. And the third. In fact, it’s only recently that I’ve begun to temper my obsession with the latest shiny thing. I’m sure my wife and daughter are thankful.
Still, there are some technological advances out there that are awfully tempting. Once you get past the slick veneer of technology products like smartphones and tablets, you ask yourself the question: Can I actually get real work done on this? Or is it only useful for checking my Twitter feed and watching Netflix?
Last week, I decided to put it to the test. Grabbing a shiny (well, not so shiny, since it has a new anti-glare screen) new iPad Air 2, I tried to get most of my work done without the keyboard, trackpad and somewhat larger screen of my trusty laptop. I’ll walk you through the things I do, and tell you whether or not I was able to do them on a tablet without clawing my eyes out.
Email
An unpleasantly massive chunk of what I do for a living involves email. I wish it wasn’t that way, but there’s no getting around it – it’s the dominant form of business communication. Thanks to a great tool called Sanebox, I actually have pretty effective email filtering and triage – only important stuff generally makes it to my inbox. Still, it’s a lot, often hundreds of messages per day.
Surprisingly, at least to me, email management is a great fit for tablets. If you lean toward the more verbose side of email communication, you might not agree; lots and lots of typing just isn't fun on a touchscreen, no matter how good you get at it.
But if you subscribe to the "shorter is better" school of email like I do, a tablet is an effective device for filtering through messages quickly (touch scrolling is probably faster than the equivalent action on a desktop) and responding to them with brevity. In fact, if everyone used a device that was a little less easier to type on for their email, we might have less email bloat in the world, and that would be a great thing.
Messaging
Our company uses a lot of instant messaging because we're spread out geographically. Messaging, when used effectively, can be a great substitute for phone calls – questions can be resolved quickly, and everyone has a handle on what everyone else is working on.
Our tool of choice for the last year or so has been Slack, which has replaced a number of other messaging tools and even cut down greatly on email and project management message traffic. It's great, and if you haven't ever looked into it, you should check it out.
Slack is pretty fabulous on a tablet, but then again Slack is pretty fabulous just about everywhere. I had no problem moving in and out of Slack, responding to messages as needed, and generally getting a bead on everything going on in our company. Slack proved to be a great fit for tablet life.
Project Management
I manage a ton of projects, and I use a number of tools to do so. I'm not proud of that – I'd love to find the holy grail of project management: a tool that covers all my needs, all our company's needs, allows our clients access to their projects, and gives me useful insights into all of it. Unfortunately, after a decade and a half in the technology business, I'm convinced that such a thing does not exist. We've tried them all, and none of them manage to get that bowl of porridge just right for us.
So I live with a mishmash of tools: Wunderlist for quick task input; Basecamp for client-facing projects; Trello for internal projects and brainstorming; and Evernote for note-taking and organization. Oh, and Skitch for annotating screen shots, which I do all day long, to assign various tasks to developers and designers.
The bad news is that I have to use all those different applications just to get through my day. The good news is that they all work really well on a tablet, much like they do on the desktop. In fact, the very visually oriented applications like Trello seem a little more intuitive to use on a tablet; they're almost more fun. I had no problems handling the basics of project management and client meetings with a tablet. True, I couldn't type as fast as I'd like, but I prefer pretty minimal notes anyway, so it worked well for me.
Design
Nope.
Seriously, there are some great design tools on the iPad – Adobe has developed stunning applications for doing very complex design and illustration right on the tablet. And if there were ever a device that seemed purpose-built for drawing and designing, a tablet sure seems like the answer.
But I can't do it. I'm an old-school Photoshop guy; I remember when version 1 came out, and I used to train design firms on how to use it. I'm so anchored to my keyboard shortcuts, pre-set styles and saved actions that doing any real design or production work on a tablet seems impossibly inefficient to me. That's not to say that I couldn’t learn with enough time. But for now, it's back to the laptop (hooked up to a big external monitor, of course) for any type of design work.
WritingNoooooooope.
I've done it before – in fact, I’ve written entire columns for this august publication on an iPad. But it's just not fun, and certain things are incredibly annoying. That old reliable spacebar on a physical keyboard? It's too easy to hit twice on a tablet, causing sentence-ending periods when you don't want them. App makers have tried to build better writing apps for the iPad, with predictive text, cursor movement buttons and things like that, but it still feels forced and uncomfortable.
I have no doubt that my daughter will probably type out her college papers on a touch screen – she's grown up with it, and her typing speed on a smartphone screen is nothing short of amazing (I just hope those college papers aren't filled with "LOLs" and "OMGs").
But for these old, fat fingers, a regular keyboard with keys that bounce back after you press down will probably always be the way I write anything longer than an email or a quick message. I know that I could connect a keyboard to my iPad and get that springy, responsive feeling that I so desire. But at that point, isn’t it really just another laptop?
Brent Buford is a co-founder of eBlox, a Tucson, AZ and Austin, TX-based web development firm. He can be reached at brent@eblox.com.