What do I do on my iPad?
Read books. My preferred reader is Bluefire Reader, though iBooks wins points for the ability to read on iPad and iPhone with progress synchronised between them. Some deride iBooks for having graphical frills to make it look like a “real” book, but the screen is big enough that these don’t get in the way. They are also static and don’t obstruct my reading.
Read comics. The iPad makes a wonderful vehicle for reading comics, despite the confusing array of apps, each with their own distinctive way of navigation and zooming.
Listen to books. I have listened to lots of books via Audible (mostly on iPod/iPhone) when walking to work, or at other times when my eyes are needed for other tasks. I am a big fan of audiobooks, especially with a skilled narrator. Sometimes they include the odd bit of music, but usually only when announcing the title. When commuting, even with background noise, I can usually keep up.
Listen to radio plays. Less often I might listen to a radio play. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a big favourite. Music, sound effects, lots of voice actors. Very effective and engaging, but not so effective on the move, where background noise can mess with the atmosphere.
Watch movies. Don’t do this very often to be honest, but they work pretty well. Just like a radio play, but with moving pictures!
Play games. The iPad is not short of games, my particular favourites are mostly board game conversions that feature tight rule sets and online asynchronous play. There are even a few electronic editions of the old Fighting Fantasy books, and a wonderful program called Frotz that lets you play the old Infocom interactive fiction adventures (and modern pretenders).
Play with digital toys. There are a number of cute apps that serve no real purpose except for being something tactile that you can fiddle with. Interactive music apps like Bloom, or kaleidoscopes like Annamika are neat diversions that you can interact with in a number of satisfying ways.
Now what would happen if you took all these activities and blended them into one? Well, if they were all fruit you would end up with a delicious smoothie. But these are all quite different activities and the effect is more like taking a five course meal, popping it into a blender, and making an amorphous slurry from it.
Where is this leading? Well, I won a copy of Papercut in a Twitter retweet contest, so perhaps it is a bit uncharitable to dismiss it. I am just not sure what niche it will fill. It is an interactive iPad “book” app. With sound. And touchy bits. Technically it is solid, my only gripe on that front is that sometimes it isn’t apparent what to do, but perhaps input is blocked when certain sounds or events are being played?
The app has three short stories to it, each with its own unique look, and different means of navigation. Sometimes sound plays, or videos play in a part of the screen. Some text appears in a portion of the screen and can be scrolled, which triggers further events or items to appear on the screen. This is where it all starts to fall apart for me. Reading a story is linear, one paragraph after another. This is still linear, but with interruptions and distraction, with few clues as to whether any of the interactive bits are important or simply ambience. Do I just concentrate on the text? Or explore everything on screen in case it goes away suddenly. I don’t want to miss out on anything.
I haven’t sat down and read any of the stories from beginning to end, which I suspect is meant to be done in a single setting, with headphones. More like a semi-interactive movie with lots of subtitles. Whatever it is, it needs a new name. It may be the future of something, but I don’t think that it is the future of books. It seems to me to be a technical solution in search of a problem. Perhaps it would a good way to bundle electronic training material?
