MyPad

So I bought an iPad.

It's an iPad mini 4 with a 7.9" screen, a dual core CPU running at 1.5 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD, and 4G. It's golden. I use it for reading comic books.

It's rather overpriced for what it can do but there simply were no small Android or Windows tablets available running a current version of their respective OS and with support for the cellphone network.

I called it Abaqus. I already called my Samsung phone Golda. And the iPad looks a bit like an abacus, I thought.

What surprised me was how difficult it is to use. I tried downloading some files from my OneDrive and open them with Chunky, a comic book reader, and couldn't figure out how to do it. Windows and Android are more straightforward, iOS is a bit of a riddle for me.

Apart from that, the device is quite ok. Look at him run.

IMG 0010

I immediately bought a few apps. Some came back from my iPhone days, including Deep Green, a Chess program and a Tintin game (which refused to run because the OS was too new) and some other games (which all refused to run because the OS was too new).

I bought Chunky, an excellent comic book reader, iOS versions of my usual French and Hebrew dictionaries (Ascendo French English Dictionary+ and HEBREW Dictionary Prolog), and Continuous .NET C# and F# IDE (which I had heard about in a podcast). I have yet to use the C# IDE on the iPad. I also installed Microsoft Office for iPad.

All-in-all, as a comic book reader the device is excellent. But as a general purpose tablet computer, it's a bit limited and the compatibility with older games is a joke. As long as I switch between Chunky and the French dictionary and do nothing but read comics and look up words and browse the Web a little, all is well. Once I try to do anything else, the limits are reached and I am grasping for my Android phone or, better yet, my macOS or Windows laptop.

Oh, and I think I like the iBooks application. The bookshelf looks nice. I imported a few ebooks I bought from Packt Publishing. (Some are duplicates because I imported all formats and don't know yet which one iBooks prefers.)

IMG 0013


Update: Abaqus and Citrix

IMG_0066

I created a user account specifically for the iPad. The most annoying feature of Citrix Receiver is that it cannot remember passwords.



 © Andrew Brehm 2016