(This is the second part of my short series about the iPad at work.)

The first day of the conference is about to end. I’m currently in my hotel room, writing this blog post. So far the iPad has worked great as my main computer-like tool for the conference.

I’ve mostly been taking notes, which has worked out a whole lot better than I thought. I can actually type really fast on the on screen keyboard, much faster than I’d imagined. There is however a small difference between taking the notes and writing this blog post, even though they’re both mostly done in Byword. The difference is that while the blog posts is written in English, my notes are in Swedish. Surely you’d expect me to be better at Swedish than English and that is certainly the case, however the small difference that makes a big difference is the keyboard. In Sweden we have the characters ”å”, ”ä” and ”ö”. This means that a few extra keys need to be fitted on screen which in turn means all keys gets slightly smaller, and have a smaller space between them. The difference is subtle, but it does have some impact on my typing abilities.

The english keyboard

The Swedish keyboard

Apart from taking notes I’ve also been preparing a keynote for tomorrow. This, however, will be saved for another blog post.

I’ve previously written a bit about using the iPad (and before that the iPhone) as an entertainment device while on the road. This is the first post of a short series about using it for work. I’m not the first to post about this and I will certainly not be the last, but I think it’s interesting for me to actually writing down my experience with the iPad as a post-pc workhorse.

Anyway, right now I’m on a conference in Örebro where all the sound and music production educations in Sweden meet. I’ve decided to leave the computer at home and just bring the iPad for note taking, email and all other things that might be necessary. This post is also written on the iPad in the newly launched app Byword for iPad.

(This post will be updated with links to all subsequent posts in the series.)

If you showed TiVo to Steve Jobs, his head would explode¹

Last weeks episode of Hypercritical featured a truly epic rant by John Siracusa about the TiVo Premier Elite. I listened to it this morning and thought it was really great. Apart from the pure amusement of hearing someone complain so passionately that you as a listener fear that he will get a brain aneurism, it also contained a pass about the attention to details, which he did not elaborate on, but that I found really interesting and important.

Part of the rant was about the menus on the TiVo. Apparently² previously they haven’t been high definition, even though previous devices had been HD devices. In the Premier Elite version this was said to be fixed, but some lower level menus still contained standard definition graphics. This is the kind of faulty detail that most people will live with but that drives obsessive perfectionists list Siracusa insane. When asked by Dan Benjamin to guess why TiVo hadn’t bothered to fix something like this, Siracusa thought that it likely was because some number cruncher had decided that it would give enough return on investment to justify the efforts spent. It was in this context that he said the thing about Jobs’s head explode.

I think he really nailed what separates a few companies (among them Apple) from the rest; the attention to all those tiny details that in themselves will not provide enough of an improvement of the product to get sufficiently more revenue to justify the investment. It is however, in my humble opinion, this meticulous work that result in a product that ”just works” of feels so much more smother, better and is simply joyous to use. The result from all these small improvements is so much bigger than the sum of them. And, as proved by Apple, the return on investment can be tremendous in the long run if you stick to it.

The lesson I will take from this is to always sweat the details, keep pushing the good or workable to excellent. That is the only way to accomplish something truly amazing, whether it is a piece of computer hardware, a web site or a lecture.

Anyway, listened to Hypercritical #59 for some great entertainment and an important lesson and, most importantly, pay attention to the details as well as the whole in your work and you will output greater results.