We've been trying to get my mom to use a computer for as long as I can remember. She tried a few times to learn how to 'get on the internet' on a PC but never really used it herself. She'd get my brother to send emails from her email account.
A few months back we got her an iPad. She instantly took on to it. She was emailing recipes, sharing pictures and connecting with friends and family on Facebook within the first week. She picked everything up surprisingly quickly. Seeing the iPad have this effect on a person who hasn't used a computer for more than a day or two in ther life time was shocking.
Agreed. That's what I'm talking about here. Seeing people who aren't tech savvy, who have always found computers frustrating, and then suddenly discovering that using their iPad is enjoyable is awesome. For me as a geek it really puts a smile on my face seeing my mom and other people actually enjoy using software.
I have a feeling my mom is going to start using her iPad more instead of just watching the cooking network while on the couch. The biggest problem with cooking shows is you can't really follow along while on the couch which is frustrating. You're inspired to cook, but you have to run to the kitchen. Instead of having a TV in your kitchen, an iPad on a stand with your favourite cooking app seems like the ideal way to go.
>She just calls them “apps” which clearly shows the power of Apple’s marketing influence.
Huh? I have never owned or used an Apple product, and since I don't watch television I don't think I have ever seen an Apple commercial, and I have called programs "apps" for over a decade. It is a common term across all OSes.
Contrary to what you may think, the layman doesn't go around saying "I just installed this awesome app". Before the iPhone got "apps" the reality is that the term itself wasn't popular until Apple started referring to "applications" as "apps".
It first started with Steve Jobs calling them "apps" then eventually Apple started renaming everything in iTunes and their documentation from "applications" to just "apps". If your non-tech savvy parents start using the term "app" then I'm pretty sure that speaks for itself and Apple deserves some credit.
No, the media has been referring to them as such since the Apple iPhone campaigns. Everyone else has been saying Apps or App in reference to word application for a long time. It is a natural shortening of the term. Just like people refer to videos as vids, automobiles as autos, facsimiles as faxes, and so on.
It saddens me how much of this marketing mythos of "Apple invented $ANYTHING_COOL", even when it has existed for a long time, is so prevalent. It would not surprise me if someone out there was trying to claim apple invented skinny jeans and Jobs was the first jazz musician.
"Web apps" has been around for a LONG time. "Apps" meaning general applications also predates Jobs.
I don't doubt it's more common now that millions of people have an iOS device that connects to the AppStore, but it was by no means an obscure piece of jargon pre-iphone.
We're talking about consumers here. I don't think anyone doubts the term has been around for a long while in development and business circles but typical consumers never used the terms until the Apple campaigns. My mom also knows what an app is now, only because of her iPhone.
Seriously? On this holy day, when Jobs was so good to the world he sent his own son, you choose to blaspheme that Apple did not invent the App? Do you know know of the teachings that Apple is the one true source of all good ideas, and others are mere knock offs. I shun you to the corner for an hour sir.
Not to doubt these stories, but I know a mom just got an iPad, and she's not comfortable using the thing at all (she uses Macs for her day-to-day computing). She's not remotely dim--she doesn't doesn't naturally work the way an iPad works.
My Mom used the iPad my Dad bought in a pretty sparring manner, mostly to look at Flickr and MLB (listening to games not on MLB Package on cable). She didn't like reading on it.
My brother and I got her an Apple TV for Xmas and so far that is going very well. Netflix is a hit (after we convinced her she wasn't paying for each show) and so is Flickr to see the grandchild on the big tv. It also helps all the video Dad has from iTunes.
Actually, she is pretty much a tech hater, but the DVR supplied by DirecTV and then the local cable company sure helped. We described Netflix in terms of a DVR and it seemed to take. The new remote (aluminum) for the Apple TV works well since it is so much simpler than the cable companies remote.
Epicurious so far with the paid account sync option so she can sync recipes. Mario Batali's app looks pretty neat as well since they recently added native iPad resolution support.
No problem. I think overall there is a lack of really polished cooking apps for iOS. Mario Batali's app seems to have some nice typography from the screenshots I have looked at, but doesn't have as much content from what I can tell in comparison to others.
http://wegottaeat.com looks interesting, but subscription seems somewhat expensive ($15/year) for what you get, and it doesn't look like there's been any updates since February (which incidentally seems to be when it moved to paid subscriptions).
Spent a good minute staring at the device once it was on trying to figure out where Firefox was on the screen she was on.
Spent a good minute, once I told her she needed to use Safari, wondering how she could bring up a keyboard to type the address she wanted into the browser.
Spent a good minute once she was on the sign in screen for gmail trying to figure out how to enter her username/password combo. Then she spent another 30 seconds looking for the enter key.
Once she was inside gmail the delete key took a mentioning, moving to the next page of her inbox was a lesson in futility, and while her fingers are substantially smaller than mine, she couldn't work the checkboxes without selecting the row above or below the one she wanted.
Apps? Apps? Are you kidding me! (trying to do my best Jim Mora impression)
While the iPad is great, and personally I love mine (doesn't hurt that I won it from a Rackspace marketing survey), it has huge way to go before it passes the Mom test.
So what? It took her 5 minutes to get to her email the first time she ever used an ipad. Do you really consider that a failure?
I'm sure that after learning that the keyboard comes out automatically and having used it for a while she can do it in 30 seconds without having to think about it.
I got my parents an ipad about a month ago. My mom has a macbook air and my father an Imac but now they use the ipad much more than the computers. They got it really fast compared to OSX that they still don't understand completely.
Also it's normal to not hit what you want the first time you use a touch screen. It even took me some time to get accurate at it.
My parents have a kitchen and living room laptop which is used to surf the web and (not so often) write emails (using Gmail) nearly all of the time. An iPad would be a perfect replacement but the big problem is Office. My parents very rarely would also like to write something or open some document and they will get annoyed pretty quickly if that doesn’t work without a hitch. They need a laptop with Microsoft Office installed, an iPad (through no fault of its own) just doesn’t provide that kind of fidelity.
I bet they would have loved to use an iPad in the living room and in the kitchen before they had a laptop but it just doesn’t cut it anymore. They are used to their laptop.
(This equally applies to other “alternative” devices. A Chrome laptop would be so close to perfect for my parents. Google Chrome already is the one program they use all the time on their laptop. But Google Docs just isn’t good enough.)
iWork tends to fail in interesting ways. (They have an iMac as their big desktop computer and I tried to convince them to use iWork at first but pretty quickly had to resort to installing Office.) My parents need perfect fidelity all the time. People tend to send strange documents around and they have to be able to open them.
I use my iPad on a stand beside my computer, with a bluetooth keyboard, for email. The idea is to keep the email monitor separate from the computer display so I can focus on one or the other. It's not a bad setup, although sometimes I tend to forget and fire up gmail on my mac. The typing experience is great, though - the text selecting shortcuts from OSX are all there.
I bought my mother an iPad for christmas (got her the 16 GB 3G version for when she's stuck at her store). My biggest concern was typing, so I also opted for the keyboard dock instead of a bluetooth keyboard or a case.
So far, she really likes it. The first thing she figured out was that the dock plugs into the computer and the iPad plugs into the dock, so she didn't even know about the onscreen keyboard until I told her to unplug it (about 30 minutes after she got it).
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to really observe how she uses it, as she lives a few thousand miles away, but she seems to really enjoy it, compared to her slow, heavy, unreliable, and virus-laden Windows laptop.
I have the Bluetooth keyboard, but it (sadly) doesn't solve that: the apps are just not mature enough for serious typing in many situations (especially if that "typing" includes "coding").
I've heard people say that. I can definitely understand some may type slower. I prefer a physical keyboard for long form writing, but I'm actually pleasantly surprised at how quickly and accurately I can type on the virtual keyboard. It's pretty comfortable for me to write a 2000 word piece on an iPad. For some though, they won't be comfortable doing it.
Mine isn´t speed. I find myself typing just as quickly on a virtual keyboard, but it just starts to get overly tedious and annoying because of the extra level of focus it requires. If I´m typing anything more than a couple of sentences I quickly become irate from it...
These posts make me think I should no longer follow ycombinator.. I have a hard time keeping up with all the posts, if you post that much irrelevant stuff.
I'm going to assume you're not trolling, based on your long account history, and point out that this site is evolving, much like everything else on the internet. It's certainly not the "Startup News" it was when I signed up, and at this point this site is popular enough to a point where even the definition of "Hacker News" will probably shift slightly.
But that's Ok. The important thing is, we're evolving together. (Ok, it's technically a benevolent dictatorship, but you get the idea.)
If you want to see this board have different sorts of content, poke around and submit interesting content for us to read. I assure you, Hacker News does not have a monopoly on interesting technical content. The reason it does get the quality of content that it does is that people like you are free to submit stuff that's cool. And if this week is a little slow, forgive us a bit - it's the holidays, and people are distracted from reading technical papers for a bit.
If next week you still find we're not the droids you're looking for, there's plenty of other great tech sites on the internet - but I sincerely hope you don't leave because you felt you couldn't make a difference here. Try to think positive - I think it'll help both your enjoyment here and people's reactions to your comments - and have a great holiday.
A few months back we got her an iPad. She instantly took on to it. She was emailing recipes, sharing pictures and connecting with friends and family on Facebook within the first week. She picked everything up surprisingly quickly. Seeing the iPad have this effect on a person who hasn't used a computer for more than a day or two in ther life time was shocking.