UPS finally delivered my iPad today around 2pm. My unboxing process took all of about 30 seconds. I've been using it pretty much non-stop since, almost 8 hours or so of usage.  I am writing this in bed, actually, with about 20% battery left. These are my impressions from a day of usage:

The iPad came fully charged out of the box, which was very nice. It must be synced with iTunes to get started but after that, you are ready to go.

I am actually able to type this article out on the landscape keyboard. Typing is much faster than on the iPhone and not far off my typing speed on a regular keyboard. However, I've found that the best approach is to write my drafts quickly without punctuation other than comma and period to minimize switching to the alternate keyboard. I thought I would prefer portrait mode. Turns out, I like landscape better.

I am usually laying down or reclining with the iPad so landscape is easier for me to hold. When sitting at a table, I find myself tending towards portrait probably because I prefer that for reading web pages, etc.

The App Store for iPad has a lot to be desired. Right now there is no way to search for specific types of games like on the iPhone, i.e. subcategories. Our initial educational game is buried somewhere and is only reachable by searching directly for it. In fact, only New and Noteworthy apps and What's Hot apps and Staff Favorites are even viewable.

I haven't used my iPhone all day except for about ten minutes to look up something in the iPhone app store. When I did use it, the phone felt puny. What was twelve hours ago my favorite device in the world has utterly been surpassed by the iPad. Viewing apps on the iPhone now feels like looking through a porthole, which is strange since i never felt that way before about it despite the larger screens of my desktop and laptop Mac.

I was able to make a phone call via Skype on the iPad earlier and the quality was good so one more nice use of the iPad. No SMS on this device. I wonder if it works on the 3G model. Apparently 3G models have shipped. My brother's pre-order is supposed to arrive on Thursday.

Using iPhone apps on the iPad is a bit subpar. Some of our apps scale up acceptably, some not so much. I find myself actually enjoying quite a few iPhone apps in their 2x pixel-doubled sizes simply because the app is so much larger and more readable and the teensy iPhone keyboard is blown up so much that everything is easier to type. The backspace key on the iPad is in a different place than on the iPhone. I keep hitting the shift key to backspace.

I bought or otherwise downloaded a bunch of apps for the iPad. The big splurge was Things for iPad at $19.99, primarily because I literally need that app as I practically live in it. The iPhone version is $9.99 and the Mac version is $39.99 or $49.99. The thing is, they all do exactly the same thing with zero difference other than minor look and feel differences related to the device. Price differences due to screen size or device type with no functional changes at all is not the way to price your ap

Once you get used to touching the screen for everything, using a mouse again is kind of lame. A real physical keyboard is not the same, though. I am probably going to pick up a wireless keyboard tomorrow just for mass typing on this thing. I don't think most people are aware of it but when the iPad home screen is locked it can be put into a mode that has the device act as a digital picture frame.

The really big surprise for me has been iBooks versus the Kindle app. Kindle for iPad was approved just in time and it is awesome. iBooks is nice also but their bookstore only has a handful of novels, etc. Kindle has 450,000 books available. The reading experience of Kindle books on iPad is great. So far I have purchased no iBooks books but I did buy yet another Kindle book to read on my iPad.

Mail on iPad is great. The Contacts app is weak. Maps is awesome. Watching video on iPad is fantastic. YouTube is good. Dragon Dictation is free and worth getting. Articles for iPad is the coolest way ever to read Wikipedia. The AP app and the USA Today app are awesome for news. Web browsing is really great. All of the big sites are making content for iPad. CNN is particularly good. I got Men's Fitness magazine on iPad. Very cool. Close to the printed version but with embedded video and other unique content through out. I'm really anxious to see the new Wired magazine on the iPad. Evenote for iPad is a killer app. Can't imagine not having that and the iPad version is as good or better than the Mac version. Bought Pages and Numbers but not Keynote. Haven't used them yet other than to show my mom how to sum a column of numbers, which was really intuitiv

I can see a lot of people understanding software on the iPad who don't function well in the same software on desktop computer

That's it for now. All of this was written on the iPad, landscape orientation, sitting in bed, using the WordPress app for iPad. Could just as easily have been a beach in Mexico if we weren't having a baby in another week...

=================== UPDATE: I did end up hooking up a wireless Apple keyboard to the iPad this morning. I can now feverishly type away on this thing as I would on any other computer. I did go back and edit the punctuation, etc. using this keyboard. The keyboard is pretty slick - the brightness keys work as do the volume keys and the Play/Pause button that starts iPod playback. Cut, copy, and paste keystrokes work as expected. I suspect there are other keystroke combos to be learned. Anyway, that's it.

I'm using MarsEdit to write posts for my blog ForkBender.com. ForkBender is running WordPress. I am using a plugin called WP to Twitter to tweet an excerpt of my new blog entries to Twitter. I've set up Twitter integration on Facebook so that anything that goes to Twitter should be posted as a status update on Facebook. So, in theory, when I post this, it should go live on my blog, be sent as a tweet, and then eventually change my status on Facebook. I'll believe it when I see it. UPDATE: Well, the first attempt posted a tweet to Twitter but the tweet did not get picked up on Facebook. Ugh. Debugging... UPDATE 2: It appears to be working now. I didn't change anything, it just started working. Probably a Twitter thing.

I am slowly getting back into the blogging thing. I started using MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software. It's pretty nice if you use WordPress like I do. MarsEdit is a native Mac blogging client so I don't need to go fooling around with the WordPress UI. Now the WordPress UI is really great but few web interfaces can beat a native Mac UI. So, anyway, hopefully you'll see more of me here soon.

All of my websites are in the process of migrating away from my homegrown blogging software - Exposition / Narrative / Rendition - in favor of the latest version of WordPress. The reason? Simply put, I am much more interested in blogging than the building of blogging software. I originally created Narrative because there wasn't a good blogging package for ASP.NET. Now, almost 6 years later, while I still work as a .NET architect, I spend all of my time on a Mac, which means I have access to a LAMP stack, etc. Anyway, you'll see a lot of changes here due to the conversion, the first of which is that comments are now open on all posts going forward.

I have not even been to my own website in over 6 months.  Now that I've seen it, I don't like the design anymore.  I dislike the font and everything looks a little too red, white, and blue.  I'm quite the patriotic dude but I don't feel the need to splash the national colors on my website.  Hence, I will be coming up with a new stylesheet soon.

Apparently, the comments are not working right now, either.  So I'll fix that also.

I started ForkBender.com with a first post on May 27, 2003.  The software I use to maintain this blog is called Exposition (which sits on a CMS I wrote called Narrative).  This software dates back to February, 2003.  So in the next few months, I will have had Narrative and Exposition in production for 5 years!  The software now powers almost a dozen websites and contains a couple of thousand posts and images.  I took most of last year off to move and do other things but I am working on the software again and am looking to post more often as well.  Here's to 2008!

I put a new look and feel up over the weekend. I got rid of the three-column layout in favor of a two-column layout with a top-level menu nav. There are a number of subtle "under the covers" improvements:

• The Exposition (formerly Narrative) blog engine now outputs XHTML-compliant text. Previously, the parser munged the output somewhat, causing an invalid DOCTYPE tag. Google's search bot doesn't like invalid DOCTYPE tags and so many pages were not indexed.
• There are some new auto-titling features in the CMS which allow entries like "In the Blogosphere Today" to have the publish data automatically appended to the title. You can also see that sort of thing with the workout entries in the training journal.
• If an entry is categorized, the categories are listed under the entry's title in the content page.
• The image galleries have been updated to use Lightbox 2.0. Click on a thumbnail image to see how it works!

There are a few items which still need to be updated. Comment entry is not working just yet and the search box needs to be added back to the nav. The Pagination control is still being rewritten. You may also find a broken link or missing article here and there. I'm still working on it so it should be up and running again soon.

A new version of Narrative is now in beta. This page was generated by the new CMS, built on Narrative, called Exposition. One big change you might notice is the new page naming convention, where the title of the article is transformed into the page name.

ForkBender.com now has a new search box! The Narrative CMS now has search capabilities and ForkBender.com is the beta test site. When you type in a word like "powerlifting" or "golf" in the search box at the top of the right-hand column and press ENTER or click "Search", a search results page will appear. This functionality will be changing (read: improving) a lot in the next few weeks. Let me know if you run into any issues.

I am in the middle of a site redesign this week so bear with me as pages might have the occasional funny look. Also, if you have any feedback on the new look, feel free to drop me a line. Thanks!