My hands hurt. A lot. It started when Doom came out.
Like many other young men, back in 1993, I was hooked and played almost every night. Unfortunately, I've been using computers since I was 15, and spent 9+ hours a day performing desktop publishing in my day job. Luckily, I never developed carpel tunnel -- but through constant use, wrecked my index finger and endure perpetually sore wrists and arms. These days, I still work with computers every day, and I have to be careful.
Over the last few years I've purchased various editions of the Nintendo DS. The first was the fat red brick, which is now in the hands of my 5-year-old niece.
The second was the DSi, mostly for the brighter screen. (If you have a red brick and have never seen a DSi, it's day and night.)
I actually have two of these. I wore out the left shoulder button and gave it to my oldest son, who plays Pokemon with it.
I needed to use glasses to play the DSi. After testing a DSi XL, I saw I wouldn't need glasses to play. This was important, so I went out and got one.
(If you're asking how I was able to convince my wife of the necessity of so many gadgets, we have a "don't ask don't tell" policy. I don't ask why we go to Sears every few weeks to pick up shoes, and she doesn't ask why the brown DS is better than the white DS is better than the red DS...)
Throughout, the one characteristic I grew to appreciate was the ability to point the stylus and click on something. I didn't have to move a mouse precisely and adjust position and then click; I just pointed. I grew up with a TI-99 4A, a Commodore 64, an Atari 2600, and the Mattel LED one-on-one football game. I've purchased more precision (and expensive) mice and ergonomic keyboards that I care to think about. I've tried 4 speech recognition systems over the last few years, but I can't seem to convert my inner brain thought process for writing to speech. (Besides, the output requires too much cleanup.)
Perhaps I appreciate this kind of thing more than most, but being able to point at something, instead of having to drag a mouse or use arrow keys, is a big step up.
Getting back to the iPad, Steve Jobs calls the ability to point and flick magical. Since I'm used to the DS, I'm a little less impressionable. Indeed it felt magical when I first touched the DS. I'd rather say the iPad is "useful" and even "ignorable".
The thing about the iPad (and, I really hope, about any of the new tablets coming soon), is that you forget there is an interface and you are simply interacting with: a book, a driving sim, a Web page, a kaleidoscope, whatever. When it doesn't work (you click on a link with your finger and it wasn't precise enough for the iPad's touch-sensitive screen), you break out of the dream. That's when you notice it.
Back to the pain. I went on vacation recently. I love browsing the web, especially with Stumbleupon [WARNING! Do not click that link unless you have the next 18 hours free], to discover new things. I like to say I'm an amateur on string theory and the theory of everything, and I've discovered several sites related to string theory that helps me understand it better. As a hobby, however, browsing the Web meant browsing with a mouse and keyboard. Since I have to be careful about my hand usage (insert your lewd joke here), I gave up after day 1.
I tried using speech recognition with Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Mac OS X 10.6. I liked Windows 7 the best but would need a new computer to make it work better. Since I was buying a new computer, why not an iPad?
The rest is the history you will see in this blog. And that's why, albeit undramatically, the iPad changed my life.
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