Repeat visitors to the site will have noticed some changes, yet we’ve failed to offer a public explanation. Part of this is because we were first testing things out and wanted to see how it went before we fully commited, but now we’re ready.

Sixteen years ago we launched mendax.org – both a landing page for an abstract organization and the whisperings of an e-zine. In reality, the domain came to house a smattering of ideas and projects, loosely organized into what would become our blog – our central online presence.

When we thought to transition the site away from WordPress a few months ago, it provided us an opportunity to look more closely at the site’s various stages – periods in which we focused on one aspect or another. To be honest, much of the older content was poor, both in focus and presentation, and while we still use the site as more an avenue for spilling recent musings rather than publishing finely edited prose, we feel that the site has matured in recent years insofar as what we post.¹ Our focus has narrowed, even though our target audience still isn’t singular.

We considered rebranding the site several times in the past, and even made a half-assed attempt with the WyldKard.com domain name, but we never fully pulled the trigger. We realized it came down to sunk costs, but there remained an emotional attachment to the original domain.² Still, with several forces colluding at the same time, we recently decided to move ahead with scratching the old domain, which is why it now redirects to our renovated home, The Beast Within.

We say “renovated” instead of “new” because we decided to keep using WordPress after all, so moving all our old content was a fairly simple task.³ The Beast Within will continue to pay homage to the subtitle we’ve used at mendax.org, “A mental brouhaha”, for though we hope to continue focusing the content at the site, we’ll likely still jump around between various topics, as many bloggers are wont to do. In other words, we consider The Beast Within an evolution of the old site, not a displacement.

We hope to write a more concise mission statement moving forward. In the meantime, let us know what you think about the new look.

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Over the past several weeks we’ve explored a way to simplify our blogging workflow. While we’ve used WordPress for years, we find the process of getting a blog entry published somewhat cumbersome. Admittedly, it’s not WordPress inherently, but more on how we use WordPress, or more accurately, the manner in which we self-constrained our blogging paradigm. For most users, WordPress entries are a matter of loading up their blog via a browser of choice, and then drafting an entry within the WordPress admin panel. Basically, a post from beginning to end is all done in the browser. Since we migrated to an iPad-centric paradigm, however, this doesn’t work for us, because WordPress doesn’t play well in Mobile Safari.

For awhile, we juggled this limitation by utilizing native apps, but the results were mixed. The WordPress app could post a new entry, for example, but couldn’t alter a post’s slug or set other post parameters. It’s also a very unstable app that’s prone to crashing. We tried several blogging apps that work with WordPress, but these were all either similarly unstable, or added unnecessary HTML formatting into our posts. When we began writing in Markdown, we decided to compose posts in a text editor (usually Simplenote) and then cut’n paste into the WordPress app, or paste into the WordPress interface in Mobile Safari.¹ Neither option was particularly lengthy, but neither option was particularly efficient, either. Simplenote gave us the freedom that cloud-enabled apps bring, as we could work on a piece anywhere and from any device we own, but getting the post online involved additional steps.

Our annoyance with this workflow was further burdened by our dislike of general complexity. Self-hosted WordPress provides several benefits, but it also adds additional burdens. Sometime in December, we started to look into baked blogs², a trend that began among some techie bloggers earlier in 2011. The idea of a baked blog is to save posts in plain-text (written using Markdown or similar), and then having a minimalist blogging engine convert the text files into HTML. Such a blogging engine uses templates, so site design is usually constrained to a handful of files (e.g. an index, an archive, a post page, and an associated CSS). In this manner, one’s blog is never stored in a database, and article retrievals are therefore expedited and less CPU intensive. Obviously, baked blogs aren’t as modular as dynamic systems that can use plugins and execute code, but with HTML5 and CSS3, there’s actually a lot that can be done design-wise on a baked blog. But more importantly, it’s the simplicity of baked blogs that make them appealing, and why we explored them in a desire to move mendax.org in this direction.

Unfortunately, while there are several merits behind baked blogs, there are also complications. For one, the blogging engine compiling the post files needs to reside on a computer that’s always on. In a typical setup, post files are stored on a desktop, or accessible by a desktop using something like Dropbox, and then the converted HTML files are either served to the web via a local web server, or pushed to a server somewhere else.³ This intermediary requirement makes the system wholly unsuited for our iPad-centric paradigm.⁴

One option would be to not rely on a cloud service like Dropbox, and instead copy text files written on the iPad over to a web server via FTP, and have the blogging engine run there. This is a reasonable solution, but it’s still more complex than what we’re aiming for. After all, such a system would be no quicker to post to than the one we’re currently constrained to using WordPress.

The new breed of hosted Dropbox blogging engines.

When we stumbled upon Scriptogram and Skrivr, we thought we finally found an elegant solution. Both platforms are hosted baked blogging services that tie into Dropbox. This means you can use any text editor that can access a specific Dropbox folder, and after formatting the file appropriately⁵, the post gets published to your blog. Both are great systems that are in their infancy, and both allow a degree of customization that services like Calepin do not, like being able to edit the site’s HTML and CSS templates for custom layouts.⁶

A definitive advantage of Skrivr is that it stores the HTML and CSS templates server-side along with posts.⁷ This means that you can use any Dropbox enabled text editor to tweak your blog’s layout. Unfortunately, Skrivr currently requires complete access to your Dropbox account, instead of to just one folder. Hopefully this will change in the future, but for the time being, it means security-conscious users will want to create a second Dropbox account for Skrivr’s use.⁸ Second, the out-of-box themes for Skrivr populate a drop-down menu linking to old posts, so you can imagine what happens when you have dozens of posts. Skrivr desperately needs a better way to handle archives, and while we’re sure this is in the works, it’s currently a major downside to the service for bloggers who post frequently. Skrivr also utilizes categories, which the included themes are designed to use. While there may be some SEO advantages to employing categories, we find them rather unnecessary for our purposes, and so we don’t want our blogging tool to require them.

As far as transparency of development goes, Skrivr has had fewer updates from its developer(s) than Scriptogram has, and that’s surely holding back adoption. It looks to be shaping up well, but at this point, there are enough rough edges to the system that we feel it best to hold off before we employ it full steam.

Whereas Skrivr automatically scans its Dropbox folder for updates, Scriptogram does not, and relies on the philosophy that bloggers should have to manually assert their will to post a new article. Practically speaking, this means that users must go to the service’s web interface and press the “Synchronize” button before blog changes are processed. This is somewhat ironic, in that the service is supposed to foster the notion that bloggers can simply get away with using a text editor and a Dropbox account, but the reality is that they still need to rely on a web browser. This in itself wouldn’t be too cumbersome of a process if it weren’t for the fact that synchronization is not particularly quick after many posts are stored in the Dropbox folder. We tested this by migrating over 400 posts from mendax.org to a Scriptogram-linked Dropbox account, and the biggest flaw in the process was the long synchronization time. Per the developer, the system only looks for modifications to files and doesn’t re-sync the whole folder, but this still isn’t a particularly quick process, and the last thing we want to do is stare at our browser window for minutes after we write a new post. Ideally, if we have to click on a button to synchronize our posts, the button would merely tell a process to run server-side, such that we can immediately close our browser tab and move on.

Both services don’t currently support nested file hierarchies in Dropbox, which means that navigating the folder containing all your posts is slow. At least two Dropbox-enabled writing apps we downloaded couldn’t handle displaying 400+ files in a single folder, so kept crashing. The two apps that did work for us were Nebulous Notes and iA Writer, but we found that their flaw was when we lost our internet connection: we could create or edit a file regardless of where it was in our Dropbox account, but if we lost our internet connection and tried to list our Dropbox files or start a new document, the old one was lost. For a service like Scriptogram or Skrivr to work well, there needs to be a text editor that will maintain recently-viewed files locally so their changes won’t be lost. Otherwise, you need to create files locally, and then move them into the Dropbox folder later, which is a less elegant solution.⁹ Scriptogram will have a native iOS app in the future, so perhaps this problem is already considered, but for now, it means neither service is as frictionless as they would seem if your internet access isn’t always-on.

Both Scriptogram and Skrivr are still in “beta”, so their growing pains are to be expected. We have no doubt that these platforms will evolve nicely in the coming weeks and months, but until they play a bit friendlier with the iPad, they’re currently better services for those using conventional computers.

What of Tumblr and Posterous?

When we decided to wait a bit to see how Scriptogram and Skrivr shape up, we caught wind of David Chartier’s migration to Tumblr. We never gave the service much interest in the past, but on David’s recommendation, we explored it a bit more thoroughly. Tumblr is of course free, and while some folks on the web complain that it suffers more downtime than other blog hosts, it’s really not that bad.¹⁰ Tumblr natively supports Markdown, which immediately makes it an attractive choice, and the third-party Tumblr iOS app Tumblita means posting on-the-go is easy.¹¹ Layout is customize-able, though Tumblr has the same problem here that Scriptogram does, in that the only way to edit the blog’s template files is to use the system’s respective web editor, which is not iPad friendly. This means to make layout changes, you still need to rely on a conventional computer, which we’re not fond of. Another annoyance with these systems is that starting a template from scratch isn’t intuitive, particularly in Tumblr’s case. You can modify the HTML of an existing theme, but creating one from a blank template leaves a lot to be desired.

The nice thing about Tumblr is that it has a strong community, so options for pre-built themes are considerable. Because of how the system shares tags across all hosted blogs, it’s easy for other Tumblr users to stumble across your blog. The downside is that in exchange for this readership boost, SEO isn’t as easy as with a self-hosted solution, because even though you may decide to use a custom domain, your content is still tied to the tumblr.com domain as well.¹²

Of course, Tumblr isn’t as clean a system as a baked blog, but it’s a decent alternative for those who want a pretty quick blogging workflow with basic functionality for various post types. It’s a bit overkill for mendax.org because we don’t rely much on non-text content, and we still prefer easy access to post text files. This means that even with Tumblr, we’d end up cut’n pasting content from our text app into Tumblr, Tumblina, or Mail. When we want to edit a post to make changes, the workflow becomes unnecessarily complicated.

Posterous is not very different from Tumblr, and is arguably its chief competitor. We looked into the service to see how it stands up, and while it doesn’t feel as sexy as Tumblr, it’s just as powerful. That said, Posterous does offer a couple things that Tumblr doesn’t, including a way to import posts from other platforms into Posterous, as well as a custom HTML/CSS editor that can actually be modified from Mobile Safari. Posterous charges for custom domain setup on an annual basis, and the mobile app seems a bit more stable than the first-party Tumblr app. For supposed security reasons, Posterous also doesn’t support javascript, which is a blow against it. Neither Tumblr or Posterous seem very flexible when it comes to displaying posts, unless you’re willing to really dig into the APIs.

So what’s the ideal system?

In the end, the system we want doesn’t exist. This dilemma has prompted other folks to write their own homebrew apps, and a quick web search will uncover dozens of baked blogging engines written in almost any web-friendly language you can think of. The problem is that these are all designed to work with conventional computers, and not mobile devices. This means there’s a clear niche for a developer to step in and create a solid, frictionless blogging engine for iOS and Android, with the following features:

1. Text file storage in the cloud for posts and template files, whether it’s Dropbox or another service.
2. Markdown support.
3. Ability to cache posts offline.
4. Text file to HTML converter, nicely packaged as an iOS/Android app, which pushes the final blog to a web server.

We’ve seen at least one Objective-C based engine that could potentially be ported to iOS, but the developer has no apparent plans to do so. As more bloggers rely on tablets to get content online, however, the demand for more streamlined blogging solutions on iOS and Android will undoubtedly increase. The upcoming Scriptogram iOS app seems to have the most potential to fulfill our criteria, but in the meantime, we’ll stick with WordPress and keep looking.

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We’ve thrown this around in our head for some time now, and we finally decided to pull the trigger and disable site comments. There was no particular event that forced us to do this, and we weren’t encumbered by moderation problems like much larger sites are. So why bother nixing comments?

Over the past several weeks, we read various opinions across the blogosphere on commenting, and we decided that we agreed with the camp that many single-author sites fall into, which sounds something like this: “This is our blog, and if you want your own voice, comment on your blog.” It’s not a matter of control, or humbleness, but rather a philosophical stance that we believe harbors more useful commentary and discussion.

For one, mendax.org doesn’t get a lot of commentary to begin with. Of the commentary it does get, a good percentage is from people we’re already familiar with, who we already follow on Twitter, or Google Plus, or simply know in real life. Those people can just as easily comment using any of these networks, and we can easily comment back. The rest of the individuals who want to comment probably use one of these social networks also, so it’s easy for them to utilize these networks to comment here if they so choose.

Of the remaining individuals who choose not to have a social networking account, and still want to comment, there’s always e-mail. This should cut down on the number of non-productive comments we get, as feedback that’s direct (either via an @WyldKard at Twitter, else a direct e-mail) tends to be more constructive.

Two, we believe that a lot of useful information sometimes gets lost in a site’s comments. We’ve felt this when leaving commentary elsewhere, and we took a stance some time back that, if we have a real position worth leaving a comment for, we’d sooner write about it at mendax.org and give a link back to the post we’re commenting on. Not only does this help drive traffic to the person we’re commenting to, but it tends to make our response more thought out.

In a way, we liken this to the back-and-forth that philosophers and scientists had yesteryear, which was by way of letter. This slow, almost tedious approach provided both detailed thoughts, as well as a more three-dimensional banter between parties. The same can be done across blogs thanks to trackbacks and tweets, as a more detailed picture of the involved parties can be drawn in the context of their own blogs. As a bonus, this fosters a more personal exchange, and therefore, one less prone to personal attacks.

Three, our own comments to our posts often get lost over time, when a detailed response to a reader could just as easily become its own post. We believe it makes more sense to flush such responses out as a new entry, than to minimize its importance to our position in a sub-comment.

Four, the decision follows a more minimalist approach.The site is simpler, and in our opinion, cleaner because of it. No longer do we need to worry about whether our anti-spam plugins are working, and no longer do we need to worry about catching a comment alert via e-mail, or in WordPress’ admin section. Rather, we can rely on notifications we check for other purposes daily, and be better engaged with our audience. From a plugin perspective, it also means there’s less WordPress needs to handle, and less load the server needs to provide.¹

We’re not necessarily attached to this change long-term, but would like to try it out to see how well it fosters discussion and cross-linking over the near future. If it doesn’t seem to be working out, we can always go back, but this change seems right for what we envision the site to be.

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John Gruber countered Jared Newman’s writeup defending Windows 8, and we won’t rehash the whole deal. But we will comment on Newman’s ridiculous statement about blogging on the iPad:

While it’d be nice if Microsoft created touch-based versions of its productivity software — and don’t rule it out just yet — there’s only so much work you can do with a touch screen. Trust me, I’ve tried to blog on my iPad countless times, but I can never get farther than tapping out a rough draft and switching to a laptop to finish the job. It’s not just the mouse and keyboard that makes the difference. It’s the little things, like keyboard shortcuts, right clicks and easy access to a file manager.

Gruber wonders how this statement is not a denouncement of the lack of keyboard and mouse, but then acknowledges that the iPad isn’t a catch-all solution, and is merely a tool for certain jobs, not all of them¹. Fair enough. But it’s a response to a rather ridiculous assertion: that the iPad is a poor tool for blogging. If Newman were talking about doing CAD work, Photoshop designs, or something for which there is no adequate software for on the iPad, then Gruber’s response would be more appropriate, but here Gruber almost acknowledges Newman’s complaint, which is just silly.

So what’s Newman’s issue with blogging on the iPad, considering others seem to be able to do it just fine? If his problem is with the lack of a keyboard, then he has a simple solution: get a bluetooth keyboard. If his concern is with the lack of a mouse, we wonder why he needs to right-click so badly? This sounds more like the complaint of someone who doesn’t want to do things differently than from someone who can’t do the task efficiently because it’s outright impossible on this newfangled device.

If Newman’s problem is with the software, then why doesn’t he download something better? Out-of-box, there’s no reason he can’t draft blog posts in the default Notes app, or even on the web using his blogging platform directly. There are a handful of good blogging apps on the AppStore, some of them even offering TextExpander support. Plus, there are a wide number of text editing apps that offer file management beyond the coverflow-esque approach that Apple’s Pages app touts. Either Newman is blatantly ignorant of the variety of iPad apps and accessories, else he simply wants to slam the iPad in whatever way he can, regardless of whether the complaints are truly valid. If we were to base a platform’s capabilities on only what comes in the box, then no platform would be considered a true workhouse.

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Lately, all the Apple talk has been around the MacBook Air’s ability to serve as one’s primary computer, but we say that’s not going far enough. When the iPad was released, we embarked on a revolutionary experiment: replace our 17″ MacBook Pro with a 3G iPad, and see if the much smaller, sleeker device had the oomph to serve our needs.

Of course, there’s a mandatory disclaimer behind this experiment:

1. We bought the 64GB iPad in an effort to alleviate as many storage concerns as possible.
   
   
2. A Mac Mini server was purchased alongside the iPad to further address storage concerns for our media, and to serve as a means to update and backup our iOS devices. (As a bonus, the Mini, in lieu of an Apple TV, acts as our media server; the Mini is generally headless, though we use our 46″ LCD television as an output device when watching Internet-based video in our living room.)
   
   
   
3. The iPad is our home computer; we typically use company-owned computers during business hours.
   
   
   
4. We no longer actively develop code, or have other requirements that would limit us to a particular software suite or IDE.

That may sound like a lot of “buts,” yet it makes us a fairly typical computer user. We spend most of our computer time split between surfing the web and writing text, with the rest of our computer use consisting of entertainment (e.g. games and videos) or dabbling in content management/creation. A good chunk of this computing time is done strictly in our house, which means our office, living room, occasionally the kitchen, and when weather permits, our patio. We also like to take our computer on trips, and since we don’t have a business computer for business trips, we take our personal computer along for personal entertainment/tasks.

The disclaimer, realized.

To further allay the concerns some readers have with the four-point disclaimer we noted above, we admit that we played it somewhat safe when embarking on this journey. That is to say, in practice, we could have gone with less purchases as a safety net.

For one, the 64GB iPad was overkill; for many months, we didn’t come close to filling even half of this capacity. This is partially due to the fact that we don’t use our iPad as a music-playing device outside of, say, Pandora, which means we don’t need to use up storage space for a vast mp3 collection. The few mp3s we do maintain, we keep on our iPhone, which, among other things, serves as our iPod.

We do keep movies on our iPad, however. We have a select few reference videos that we’ve ripped and keep synced via iTunes, and before most trips, we rip a couple videos to watch while traveling. The brunt of our storage use is from apps, however, of which games probably take up the most space.

In reality, we could easily get by with a 32GB iPad. The 64GB merely lets us be less disciplined with juggling media. And, when on vacation, when we use the camera connection kit to offload raw images from our digital camera, that extra space can come in handy, as we don’t need to juggle around extra SD cards.

Two, dumping our 17″ MacBook Pro meant we technically had room in our lives for a Mac Mini server, which we’d been considering for some time. The purchase itself was overkill, we admit. For the purpose of acting as an iTunes portal for backing up and syncing our iOS devices, we could just have kept the 17″ MacBook Pro on a shelf and used it specifically for this purpose. So too, could we have purchased many a used Mac for same.

The Mac Mini solution, instead, was made because we desperately wanted to experiment with a media server hooked up to our television. Going the Mini server route was because we didn’t want to deal with external drives, and the server version came with extra storage capacity, which at the time of purchase, made sense since we had well over 500GB of files saved from the last 10+ years of computing. Sadly, a Time Capsule failure (we used the drive networking feature) meant that we lost all our files thanks to not having redundant backups. So by the time we had our iPad in hand, even the capacity of an old MacBook Air would have been sufficient.

The lesson here isn’t just that redundant backups are good, but that for people considering duplicating our iPad experiment, a much less capable Mac can be used if all one wants to do is sync iOS devices with iTunes.

Three, we’re not getting away with running fancy apps on work computers; even in the office, there’s little reason that we couldn’t get away with using an iPad for most computing tasks. We simply clarify as a matter of full disclosure, not because the iPad is incapable of providing the necessary tools for our job.

The add-ons.

While the iPad itself is core to the experience, just as one might purchase peripherals and accessories for a notebook computer, the iPad is not without its complimentary needs.

Let’s start with the most basic of needs for getting new media onto an iPad, as the lack of disc drive is a huge red flag for most people considering an iPad-only lifestyle: in order to get videos onto an iPad, they need to be in iTunes, and in order to get them into iTunes, they need to be downloaded or ripped. The former method doesn’t need much explanation, but the latter requires an optical disc drive. This isn’t an issue for most people who have a Mac or PC for iTunes use, but in our case, about four of five months into our project, we went out and bought a Superdrive for ripping DVDs (since the Mini server doesn’t come with a disc drive). From here, the process is obvious, but since we went the (mostly) headless route, what did we do when the TV was in use, and we wanted to use the Mini?

Enter iTeleport, a fantastic VNC client for all iOS devices. iTeleport is what we use both at home and on-the-go to access our Mini. It’s what we use to manage iTunes and sync devices, as well as running, say, RipIt for adding media to iTunes. Basically, if the TV is in use, we use iTeleport to simulate our Mini’s monitor, so we can do what we need to in order to support our iOS devices (e.g. managing peer-to-peer clients like Transmission, and basic iPhoto management tasks). If you have a Mac you’re using for iTunes that already has a monitor, then you don’t need a iTeleport, but it’s still a handy utility regardless.

Another obvious hurdle out-of-box was the lack of a physical keyboard. We didn’t anticipate that the software keyboard would be as useable as it is (it’s remarkably good once you’re used to it), but for longer writing sessions, we knew we’d want a physical keyboard, too. For us, the Apple bluetooth keyboard fits the bill. It’s only slightly taller than the iPad itself, which is about perfect for sitting on our lap while we type away, and it’s not too large to take along when we’re traveling. We use the basic iPad dock for propping the iPad up in portrait mode for when we type, and this works splendidly in most environments. Per our earlier post, setup time is quick and easy, too.

We don’t keep the iPad in a case, though when not in use, we pop it in a Saddleback sleeve so it doesn’t get beaten up in our satchel. Thus far, we’ve found no immediate need for the six-foot power extension cable that Apple sells, though we can picture a need for it in certain environments.

With this three-piece office ensemble (iPad, dock, and keyboard), and iTeleport, we’re perfectly able to perform most every task we need to at home and on the road.

The changing of the lifestyle.

The biggest difference with our computer use after going iPad-only is that traveling is more enjoyable. Schlepping around our 17″ MacBook Pro was a pain in the ass, but with how much smaller and lighter the iPad is, we’ve downsized our briefcase considerably. And, since we have the option of leaving the keyboard and dock at home, we can travel even lighter on short trips when we don’t expect to have much time for writing.

This easier ability to take our iPad on the road means we take it with us more often than we did our MacBook. (Mind you, we keep mentioning our old 17″ MacBook Pro, but the same held true for the 15″ MacBook Pro we had before it.) We wouldn’t have considered taking a notebook computer along on a camping trip, or most day trips, but the iPad is a great travel companion.

And with a battery life of some 10 hours, we don’t even worry about packing a power cord along for most day trips, either. The small footprint of the iPad also means it enters our kitchen more often, say, for looking up recipes. (And yes, it’s great for surfing the web from the shitter, too.)

But perhaps the biggest advantage to the iPad other than the small footprint is the 3G capability. Many have said they’ve heard people regretting a non-3G iPad purchase, but never someone regretting spending the extra money on 3G capability. For the extra dime, the option of 3G access is great, especially since 3G users aren’t on a contract, and can opt-in one month at a time.

About the only downside for new iPad buyers regarding 3G is that the unlimited data plan is no longer available. Since we use wifi at home and at Starbucks, the first couple months of use meant that we didn’t use that much 3G data, so we briefly dropped down to a lower plan. Given our use pattern, however, we occasionally spike: during a couple days of heavy 3G use when we were away from home and had no free wifi available, we burned through the capped data plan, and had to jump back to the unlimited plan. (We could have doubled up on the capped plan, but at that rate, why bother?) Maybe that’s not a huge problem for most people’s use, and arguably doubling-up on a capped plan may suit most people’s needs when such spikes happen, but it’s still something worth noting.

The surfing of the web.

Most people we talk to about going iPad-only bring up Flash as soon as internet use is mentioned. We consider this practically a dead issue and won’t rehash the anti-Flash sentiments in detail, but regardless of what sites are still using it today, the fact remains that Flash eats battery life like nothing else, and every mobile implementation of Flash offers a poor experience. With HTML5 being supported by most sites (like YouTube), it won’t be long before Flash is a footnote in web history, much like the blink tag of yesteryear.

That said, have we been frustrated on occasion that certain legacy sites don’t offer non-Flash versions? Yes, and in these cases, we either move on to the next site, or rely on iTeleport to give us a Flash version via our Mini. But as time moves on, we rely on this latter procedure less and less, in great part because developers are realizing that non-Flash alternatives need to exist. In fact, we’re contemplating removing the Flash plugin from our Mini altogether at this point, as we’re that confident that we don’t need Flash in our web-surfing lives.

Overall, the web-surfing experience on the iPad is fantastic. We don’t need to zoom around on a page like we do with the iPhone, and about the only common annoyance is dealing with web forms, which aren’t as quick to navigate as on a traditional computer, especially when the on-screen keyboard is used and cuts off a drop-down box (rendering it smaller, not obscuring options). Certain web pages also are not iPad-friendly, such as Facebook, which either remove options (Facebook chat, for example) or have broken functionality (Facebook photo uploads). Fortunately, there are apps for some of these issues (like third-party Facebook apps that enable chat and file uploads), but the inability to upload files via a basic web form on, say, an online forum, can be very irksome if you rely on such functionality.

The only other complaint we have will be addressed in iOS 4.2, and that’s conducting text searches in web content.

Given the iPad’s form factor, surfing the web in bed, or on the couch, or wherever else, is simply a more intimate experience that having a keyboard and mouse between you and the internet. If anything, web browsing is where tablets shine much brighter than conventional computers.

The writing of the text.

We’ve already covered writing on the iPad to some degree, but let’s rehash: the software keyboard works well for basic tasks, like taking brief notes, filling in web forms, et al. And, it works well in both landscape and portrait modes; though a lot of people criticize the software keyboard in portrait mode, we’ve found that it works about as well as the landscape keyboard on the iPhone, with the only minor downside being the weight of the iPad being a tad awkward if used for more than a few minutes.

Touch-typing on the software keyboard is also possible in landscape mode, and only becomes better when the auto-correct feature is turned off; mis-types that result in whole words we don’t want turns out to be far more annoying than simply back-spacing and making corrections. But for slow typers, the auto-correct feature can be handy.

For anyone who wants to seriously write on the iPad, however, a hardware keyboard is a must. There are now several, foldable keyboards on the market that open to full-size, and these may be better for travel, but the small, Apple bluetooth keyboard has worked for us so far. For home users, the camera connection kit allows a USB keyboard to be used so you don’t need to worry about keyboard battery life, but this hasn’t been a huge issue for us with our bluetooth keyboard. Still, the option is there (though you couldn’t have the iPad hooked up to a wall outlet in this scenario).

Just as with web pages, one annoyance when writing is not having a quick find/replace option. Perhaps as apps start to standardize more, we’ll see something like this evolve, but keyboard shortcuts are a no-go for most writing apps, so there is a slight speed advantage for those who are used to writing on a traditional computer. (We’ve found the lack of a page up/down shortcut particularly annoying, as we now have to scroll with touch gestures which means taking our hands off the keyboard.)

These slight issues aside, we’ve welcomed the simplicity that iPad writing apps offer. We purchased Pages from the get-go, but tend to use even simpler writing apps, as we don’t regularly mark up our text.

To be fair, we’re not power spreadsheet users either, so Numbers works fine for us, as likely would most other spreadsheet apps on the AppStore. It has a slightly higher learning curve for beginners than, say, Excel, but it’s nothing a half hour of tinkering won’t solve. If anything, office apps on the iPad feel manageable, whereas Microsoft Office can often feel monumental (in a bad way) comparatively.

We mentioned earlier the simplicity of the iPad dock as a stand, and if a table or desk is around, this setup works fantastic. If anything, you can get by with much less tabletop space than you could with a notebook, since a wireless keyboard can easily sit on your lap (being more ergonomic to boot).

That said, things become a tad more complicated if you’re not sitting in a chair in front of a desk. Take, for example, a situation where you want to write a few pages in the park, under a tree. Your keyboard can sit on your lap, but how do you prop your iPad up? You can throw something together with whatever you have around you (a jacket, for example, can become a makeshift support), but the ideal situation is a case that will support the iPad at an ideal viewing angle and not shift. With a notebook, the keyboard is the stand, but with the iPad, you have to buy a case that holds the iPad accordingly. We can’t comment on whether or not the iPad keyboard dock fills this need, but we’ve seen various other cases that seem better suited for this task.

Ultimately, the iPad is an excellent all-around writing tool, and should be plenty adequate for most people’s needs, to include students and professionals. Trickier things become as the need for more robust layout options arise. Folks in the design industry, for example, will likely want very specific software products to fulfill this niche, and until such apps arrive, they will continue to rely on traditional computing solutions. (This is akin to graphics professionals still needing a machine with Photoshop, while the layman can easily get away with one of the many lightweight Photoshop-like apps in the AppStore.)

For everyone else, however, the vast array of writing apps in the AppStore, to include writing apps for hand-written notes and apps integrating audio capture, should suffice for most any need.

The blogging of the thoughts.

So general writing on the iPad works well, but what about, specifically, blogging? Considering that most of the non-professional writing we do ends up online in some form or another, we hoped that the iPad would address this need well. As it turns out, blogging via the iPad is easy once one gets a decent methodology in place.

On our MacBook, we relied heavily on Skitch for grabbing and editing graphics from the web for use in  blog posts. On the iPad, we have to manually download a web graphic, else perform a screen-capture. We then open the file in our graphics app of choice, crop, edit, and re-save. We now have a graphic that we can’t simply upload via a web form, and that’s a shame. (The default WordPress admin interface doesn’t lend itself to file uploads from the iPad, nor is the content input box for a post resizable in Mobile Safari like it is in regular Safari. So sadly, it’s a poor interface for making new posts.)

Fortunately, since we predominantly use WordPress, there’s both a WordPress app and BlogPress (both apps with trade-offs, but that are reasonable methods for generating new blog posts). That said, in most cases, we still end up writing the actual posts in one of our writing apps, and then cut’n pasting the final draft over to the WordPress or BlogPress apps. This is where we would then handle image attachments and the like. (If we don’t want to deal with images, we often paste into WordPress via Safari.)

Admittedly, it probably takes us a little extra time to blog via the iPad than it did from our MacBook, but we argue that this is mainly because the WordPress app has shown itself buggy, and BlogPress remains limited in what it does. We’d definitely like to see a more robust blogging app, even if it’s just a more stable and refined WordPress app.

The watching of the multimedia.

The iPad is positioned as an entertainment device as much as it is a productivity device, and here, we’ve found no shortage of truth. Even though we don’t rely on the built-in iPod and Videos apps as much as others might, we’ve been pleased with the variety of video options in the AppStore. Key among these are streaming apps, like Netflix and Hulu Plus, but perhaps our top choice is Air Video, which allows us to stream video content from our Mini to the iPad on a local, or remote level. This means that video not encoded for viewing in iTunes can stream to the iPad just fine, and while Netflix and Hulu have licensing restrictions that won’t let you use them when traveling overseas, Air Video lets us watch what we want, where we want. (Plex is also great if you’re running the main Plex app on a media server like we are; it handles landscape mode nicely, and we’re starting to use this app more often now, though Air Video is still out go-to.)

While we could probably find a way to automate the transferring of content from our TiVo to the Mini, when we’re traveling, we simply find an RSS feed for a particular torrent of a show we already pay for via FIOS, and let Transmission on the Mini download new episodes as they’re posted. Air Video is set up to scan the respective directory with new torrent downloads, and we’re good to go. Even if your source isn’t torrents (i.e. you can automate downloads from Usenet or some other source), Air Video can look in the directory where videos are downloaded to and present them to you from the other side of the world.

With iOS 4.2 and multitasking, we expect the iPad to only become better; being able to run Pandora audio streams in the background while we surf the web, or write, is something we look forward to, as we’re currently handling background audio by running Pandora on our iPhone and keeping the phone nearby.

That which remains missing.

The iPad has met most of our expectations in six months of use, though there remain several things we’d like to see improved in the iPad experience. Recognizing that some things simply won’t change based on Apple’s position on third-party apps, there are other things we’d like to see happen.

1. Tethering: The iPad currently requires a traditional computer in order to back up files, downloads, and handle iOS updates. This means that the iPad can never be the sole machine in one’s tool-bag, and that isn’t ideal. Right now, the iPad is a great travel companion, but if we were to go on a major trip lasting several months, we’d question whether not having any backups during that time-frame, or missing a key iOS update, is something we could live with. The iPad needs a way to back itself up via an iPad-optimized version of Time Machine, which could be run on a home network or, even better, via the internet. And, the iPad needs to be able to download and install iOS updates without being tethered to a traditional computer. Once this happens, the iPad becomes a much clearer alternative to the 11″ MacBook Air.
   
   
2. APIs: We’ve heard from several developers that the apps they want to make can’t be made, because Apple still has many private APIs that developers can’t use (but that Apple uses in its own iOS apps). This isn’t good for the development of more powerful and competitive iOS apps, especially when basic things like text markup become restricted to developers. (Sadly, this is preventing apps like Ulysses from receiving a solid port to iOS.)
   
   
   
3. Screen-sharing: We mentioned how fantastic we find iTeleport, but why isn’t there a native solution to screen-sharing via an iPad? And, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a more powerful way to stream content from a server? We’re thinking something along the lines of OnLive, only connecting a video stream between you and a Mac you already own. While iOS 4.2 will allow us to stream audio and video from one iOS device to another on an app-specific level, being able to stream a Mac desktop to an iPad would be a fantastic ability to have.

More experimenting.

We’re not done with our experiment: we don’t plan on jumping back over to a MacBook anytime soon. Rather, we’re quite pleased with how well our iPad performs, and we’re actually more likely to replace it with another iPad well before we replace it with another notebook.

For those considering a similar experiment, jumping over to the iPad is difficult in the sense that switching from the PC to the Mac is difficult: it involves changing habits and adopting new ways of doing things. But once you start getting those new methods, then the iPad isn’t an obstacle for tasks, but a natural fit for them. The iPad isn’t perfect, mind you, but it’s already a solid platform for computing, and we only see it getting better over time. There’s a reason that the feel of the iPad is being transitioned over to OS X, which will only further help to drive iPad sales.

Yes, we sometimes get frustrated with a particular task on the iPad, because the way we know to do that task on a Mac feels easier, but those moments of frustration are less and less frequent as better apps are released, and as Apple continues to develop iOS further.

When it comes to apps, we also find ourselves thinking less and less, “We wish our iPad could do what the Mac does,” and thinking more and more, “We wish everyone used an iPad.” Why? Because more iPad users means more developers on that platform, which means better apps. And frankly, those apps on the iPad would be better.

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For most web-surfers, one’s inbox is the focal point for spam, but let’s be honest: the internet itself is one giant hodge-podge of spam. The very ease of setting up accounts at most every portal and site out there makes for both convenience and interconnectivity, though it just as easily creates a spawning pool for the unsavory word-vomit that literally covers the cyberspace landscape. This is the very reason that e-mail services have incorporated spam filters, and why notable blogging suites have done same. Arguably, the lack of this feature-set is one more reason that services like Blogspot foster what is now commonly referred to as splogs.

We’ve never used Blogspot as a blogging outlet – we’ve merely experimented with its feature-set. From our understanding, we gauge that for a Google-owned service, Blogspot is rather weak in features compared to its competition, begging the question as to why so many individuals capable of using a hosted-blogging package like WordPress rely on Blogspot instead. This is particularly notable when Blogspot users decide that they cannot keep up with comment spam, which really means that they prefer to delete comments before the comments are posted, instead of afterward. Preferential aside, the real problem with comment moderation is not only that it’s slow (thereby artificially slowing community growth), but because it’s easily abused.

While comment moderation may keep spam out, it’s a tool often used to keep out differences of opinion as well. If blogs are the new journalism (or at least, the new op-ed), then it should follow that comments are ideal for fact-checking, followup, and opposing view-points. If blog authors conveniently abuse a comment moderation mechanism to silence opposing opinions, they’re effectively clumping these view-points into the same category as spam. With that mind-set, why should a commenter (who cares enough about the blog to weigh-in) ever comment again?

Comment moderation is a sinister mistress – it’s significantly subjective when employed against gray-area spam, but moreso when used against non-spam. Sinister is comment moderation’s invisibility – blog authors can simply refuse to publish comments, thereby giving the appearance that no opposing viewpoints among a readership exist. But when this does become apparent, our position is simple: either ignore the author’s inaccuracies or arguments entirely, else comment about them elsewhere. Anything else is simply exposing oneself to an unfair argument: if a blog author can selectively refuse to post a comment, especially in an ongoing discussion, then the author has the advantage of always being heard when the commenter does not.

Not only is comment moderation unfair to the audience, but it’s disrespectful to them as well. This is particularly true in the case of an ongoing discussion thread which, moderation initially appearing objective, suddenly morphs into the opposite, when a commenter is suddenly silenced. If a blog author feels she does not want to invest the time in continuing an argument, she could just as easily bow out of the discussion herself. Silencing the opposition, especially without noting such publicly, is simply poor etiquette, and sends the message that readers should either not comment at all, else stop reading the blog entirely, because their opinions, dare they not agree with the author, will be forcibly unheard.

To bloggers across cyberspace, we ask that comment moderation be deactivated. If no suitable anti-spam mechanism exists to fight comment spam thereafter, then you should move on to a blogging package does. In truth, if you’re capable of setting up a blog on Blogspot, then you’re capable of setting one up at WordPress; comment moderation is not an excuse for Blogspot’s lack of features – better solutions exist. If you believe this transition to be too time-consuming, then we argue that you simply don’t care enough about the quality of your blog, else don’t respect your readers enough to foster a thriving community around them.

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