Just one year ago I took possession of Flatland, my iPad 3g. And just this week I’ve received Flatland 2 – my new iPad2 (64GB, 3g, black with Red case).

A laptop free year. After getting Flatland, it took a while for it to dawn on me that I had immediately started living Laptop-Free. In fact, in the past year, I carried a laptop only once (when I had to do a Skype presentation from Des Moines to an audience in Czecklosovakia).

This is quite significant. I travel about twice a month on business. And that travel extensively covers the US – from Florida to California to Boston to Oregon and points between. On these trips I leverage the iPad extensively. I create spreadsheets, Word docs, & presentations, show presentations on projectors, play back video, stay in touch, write blog posts, write scripts, review our TV work in progress, and do a whole range of other work. Flatland has been fully sufficient – even much better than my previous laptop.

It’s also interesting that around Portland I never carried a laptop much. But I take my iPad all the time and regularly get things done at the coffee shop, lunch, or waiting at my son’s swimming lesson.

Apple, great job! I might even have to bite the bullet and use the word “magical” (tho’ I despise it’s use in marketing anything but Disneyland).

App Developers? I Sure Hope You Get it Together…and SOON! After my year-long experience, App developer weaknesses are my one lingering disappointment in Flatland.

Seems that App developers must be a pretty thick headed group. The Apps they create (a) refuse to take advantage of the pad’s strengths and/or (b) abuse the screen by wasting it on “white space” that abuses my screen space productivity.

A small handful of examples:

– Why is it that Huffingtonpost’s iPad app is so weak? (I’m not alone. Many other iPad owners complain about it. (It’s weird, because they’re iPhone app is good.)
– Why can’t WordPress get a good app? One year later, it remains buggy, tricky to use in some cases, and seems to have been left to fall apart on the sidelines.
– Why don’t Apps like CBS Sports, Bloomberg, and many more have the most basic interface fundamentals – like indicators to tell you when you’ve selected something? This is a user interface basic!
– There is no single App that does what I need to do with Office documents. There are 3 that each have strengths. But each has a major weakness. And none of them work well with MS/Word tables.

App after App simply doesn’t live up to the potential it SHOULD bring to the iPad. Obvioiusly, I’m getting by quite well. But it remains disappointing that every App I download shows up one or two significant weaknesses in major areas. My guess is that these weaknesses result from a few things.

App developers learned their skills with phones but haven’t grown up to tablets. This is too bad. Survival will require that they figure it out. Phone users are more forgiving – tablet users aren’t at all. With a tablet, size is everything and I want apps that use the screen size to become more effective – not just to show off how cool they can be. That doesn’t mean to avoid white space. It means that if you use white space, use it to deliver a better app – not just meaningless space or cool hype.

Developers Don’t Charge Enough. So many apps are cheap – really cheap. Clearly, they are too cheap to be well crafted. Maybe this is driven by the mythology of the companies who build little gimmicks for no investment then sell millions of them at $1.99 each. But I’m pretty well past those cheesy cheap apps. It’s time for real ones that we pay more to buy. How much? Clearly I’d not hesitate to pay over $20 for the right high quality app.

Android’s strength may lead developers to make apps that are lowest common quality (Android). My students describe Android as “the Windows of mobile operating systems”. And that’s not far off. So I’m guessing at this leads to Android “dumbing down” because the Apps feel like they’ve been built with the same hamfisted approach we find in many PC applications.

Of course, history suggests that developers will probably blame Apple (lack of tools, communication, kickbacks, so forth). So I’m ready for it. But I doubt it (having worked briefly at a developer and watched the developer battles since the early 1990′s). In fact, my first software development project was in 1982. And I’ve watched software progress with tremendous interest since. The mistakes I’m seeing are mistakes of an immature industry.

App Developers Need to Catch Up to Apple. The way I see what Apple has achieved in the past 10 years is that they turned technology quality into consumer quality. Nowhere will consumers put up with the fundamentally poor finished quality that is delivered in electronics – except in electronics because they haven’t had a choice.

But in the iPod, iPhone and iPad, Apple has delivered fully consumerized electronics products. Despite Apple’s figuring this out, the rest of the tech manufacturers really haven’t. They’re still delivering products with the same fundamental messiness that they were delivering in 1995. (The specifics may have changed, but the overall experience remains the same.)

Other than game developers, App Developers haven’t figured it out either. Many of the game developers already consumerized their software – but they had to because their “under 10 year old” audience required it.

Apart from the big games, I wouldn’t say that there are many Apps of exceptional consumer quality. Yes, I can get things done. And, yes, the Apple business apps are the best ones (although they still have some unusual failings).

App developers, help us all out. Set a higher standard for yourselves. Set a standard that your apps have to deliver dramatic value and exceptional satisfaction among the mass audience (and not just the tinkering digi-rati).

And I’ll bet that the first one who does will dominate the world within a very short time. Because those of us who live in our own Flatlands will become your fast friends.

Copyright 2011 – Doug Garnett – All Rights Reserved