Day Three of the Post PC Experience

Downloading files to the iOS device

When you have to do things in a different way it can seem like it’s a difficult thing to do with a Post PC Experience. It might be something simple like downloading a file which is linked from a webpage you’re looking at. For example, I wanted to get my hands on a .csv file from a webpage. On my first attempt it didn’t seem to work. I just got a message saying that it couldn’t read that sort of file. When you get files like this or maybe you get an electronic book file you’ll often get a message at the top of the screen. The message flashes on the screen for a short amount of time and you can easily miss it. What you have to do is to tap on the screen once more and the message will briefly show again. The message will be – Which app do you want to open this in? – and it will offer you an app suitable for that type of file. I have seen this sort of message and used it a number of times to get eBooks opened up in iBooks. This time Safari offered me the application Numbers. Perfect, exactly what I was looking for! I tapped on the little button and saw the file I want is opened up and I was able to use the data within it. The data was a list of email addresses of people following the NoStylus website. What I want to do with this data is add it on to my email list. There is an option within MailChimp to add a .CSV file to a list. In the MailChimp application on my iPad I can only add one email at a time. This is not a big list of emails and I could do it one at a time manually, but I would prefer to do it by importing the whole list in one go. To get around this what I’ll do, is to go into the MailChimp website from Safari and do it from there. Hopefully I’ll be able to access the file I need which will be in my iCloud account.

Post PC experience

Downloading files in the Post PC experience

The iPad versus using a laptop or desktop computer.

iOS and the whole system of using iPad or iPhone to do your computer stuff is continually getting better. There are not many things you can’t do using your iPad or iPhone. The one thing that podcasters complain about is when they want to record somebody else they’re talking to while using Skype.They want to put it in a podcast and they can’t do that. It used to be that multitasking was a problem, but now that we have the split screen available, that’s not really something to worry about.

There are a number of things you can do with your iPad that is either easier or just more effective on that type of device. When you’re having experiences like this it’s easy to enjoy the post PC experience. Some applications are particularly good when you can touch the screen and move things around. Using the touchscreen in an application like Twisted Wave to select areas of audio to manipulate, works very well indeed. Same sort of thing if you’re using video editors like Pinnacle or iMovie.

Post PC Experience with Twisted Wave

Post PC experience

Watching TV shows on the iPad

Watching TV shows on the iPad works great. It also works well using Airplay to send the video clips and TV shows to your television. I don’t think there is an application you can use to torrent anything so you’re limited to what ever you have legally. I expect if you want to do things illegally you have to be jailbroken or to use Android. I had a year and a half using an Android phone and there’s no way I would go back to that again. Neither would I ever want to jailbreak any of my iOS devices.

Using encryption on iOS devices

It is most certainly possible to read encrypted emails on your iOS devices. Whether you have encrypted them using GPG or PGP or if you are using encryption certificates. I have both available on my iOS devices. I can receive emails in whatever email client I’m using and read them on the device. This is a bigger conversation and I will have I blog post just looking at this. It’s all part of the post-PC experience!