Knitting on the iPad

As the title suggests, I’m posting this from my new iPad. I’m enjoying a lot of the features, especially iBooks, Netflix, and the ABC tv viewer. NPR’s interface is pretty, too, though I haven’t yet listened to a story. Kindle, too, has an iPad app, and right now their library is more extensive than that of iBooks. We’ll see how that goes, long-term.

The iPad was my birthday gift from Mr. Trask, justified in part because I will again spend the summer in England and it will be a lot easier to carry the iPad overseas than all the books I am reading for my class this summer — not to mention books I might want to read on the plane, or for reference, or, well, all the Jane Austen and P.G. Wodehouse I like to have around…come to think of it, this entire gift may be a reaction to my purchase of yet another copy of Persuasion while we were in Bath last summer. Hmm.

Better folks than I have reviewed the iPad already, so you don’t need to hear from me on it. I do think it offers some nifty possibilities for knitters — Knitty looks nice on it, and so do other knitting websites. I am eager to see what can be done with individual patterns — already, I can pull up a PDF pattern I bought on ravelry and prop the iPad up to knit with the pattern in front of me (my case has a wedge-style prop option with which one can stand the iPad up a lot or a little — the former is good for reading or watching video, while the latter is great for typing). I have even been able to read books on the iPad on iBooks or Kindle while knitting, which I am not able to do with a paper book. Images are particularly good-looking on it, of course, and that suggests digital publication of knitting patterns and instruction books could be more realistic soon.

The WordPress app for the iPad is nice-looking, but the limitations of photos on iPad are making it difficult for me to attach a photo to this post — and a photo of a pattern being displayed on the iPad, which would be the perfect illustration, will have to be added later via my laptop. One can add links by beginning to type in the HTML code for a link (<a href =”http…) — the app will take over and offer to help create a link.

There’s a long way to go on the iPad, but I can tell it will be helpful for me in reading, writing, blogging, and even knitting, and I hope knitting designers and publishers will hop on the bandwagon sooner rather than later.

So how’s that for a rationalization of my new toy?