Some Initial Thoughts on the iPad, and I've Published an iPad App in the App Store!

I'm waiting for the end of this month to buy the iPad with 3G built in. And yet I bought an iPad on Saturday! What gives? Sometimes I wonder myself! Well, I bought it as a gift for a friend who just had a birthday. And, I must confess, I wanted to play with it before I gave it away!

I can say I really like it a lot! The eBook reader is very cool. Doing a search in the bookstore for "free" brings up lots of titles that I would want to read. And...

And I got to test out the app I did for the iPad on it. I bought it from the App Store and tried it out. It was the first time I had ever run the app on an actual device! Before it was just using the iPad Simulator included in the SDK. That was very cool! The app is a 56 page long eBook full of poems called "I Lost My Underwear Today and other flights of imagination." The owner is charging $1.99 for it. Unlike just a plain ol' book, you not only see the pages of text and illustrations, you can hear the author reading each poem by pressing the Play button at the bottom of the page.

If you would do me a favor, go and buy it, read it, listen to it, rate it, and leave a review. The guy who wrote the book is a great guy and could use the revenue. I will not be receiving any money myself from the purchases.

Anyway, I took the paper version of the book and converted it into an iPad version, recorded the author reading his poems, and put the whole thing together. It was cool working on my first iPad app.

Also cool was seeing it in the App Store. Nice! This is my first app in there. I think this is rather funny for a couple reasons:

• First, I've been working on and off on a couple of iPhone/iPod Touch apps on and off now for over a year and am still not finished. These apps will be published by me, and God willing, I will get the revenue from them after Apple gets their 30%. But this new app up now in iTunes isn't my app! I wrote it for someone else!
• Second, even though I have run my own apps on my iPhone to test them, I never had a chance to with this new app. As mentioned before I ran it on a device only after it was in the App Store!

Some Other iPad Thoughts

Talking about something other than the iPad App I wrote (I admit I'm a little giddy), there are some other observations I want to mention about the iPad that I played with.

You can't just use it out of the box, you have to hook it up to your computer and fire up iTunes to set it up for the first time. If on a Mac, iTunes will probably come up automatically when you plug it in (but you probably already knew that).

Saying that thought, this configuration process is very fast and easy.

I did note that the battery was at about 86% right out of the box, so, if that is average, you can begin using it right away. No charging needed ahead of time.

The bookstore is really cool as mentioned before. A lot of the books that were free are classic that I have read and like, or ones that I want to read. I am a big book reader! Boy, I can't wait to get my own iPad at the end of this month!