So with the iPad that has entered my life, I have been noticing a lot of things.  With the iPhone you are very limited on the amount of space that you have to work with, so you are often very limited choices on control and interfaces.  Expanding that out a bit, like on the iPad, it gives you a lot more room to have a more innovative interface.  So there are some things (apple remote, for example) where the smaller interface is just fine, and the larger interface has more detail, but really isn't necessary.  Even so, it's done pretty well.  I've been going through a few applications and see where the iPad can easily fit into my life.

For example, I cook, I don't like printing (ink jet printing it to expensive, and my laser printer's cartridge is almost dead and is an $80 replacement and it's not great for the environment) so I often use my iPhone (previously iPod touch) to see the recipe, so it is sitting up in a special place on the fridge.  The problem is, that there is not a lot of space, so it's hard to see ingredients verses instructions.  The iPad, allows for a much larger display, thus making it easier to see and scroll through.  So it makes it much easier to reference while cooking and moving forward and back to make sure you are not missing something.

It makes it easy to have that extra part when watching TV (IMDB, finding that reference, song, etc).  And it's not that you couldn't do these on an often cheaper laptop, but it's that it fits in well in that user space.

I think the most telling about this that first weekend it was home, Shannon used it more then I did (she's using it right now).

Shannon and I often do play games (Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne) as well, which is quite fun (even though she's been beating me more often then not)

So lets get to the magazine.  So first off, I'd like to say that Bon Appétit, Fine Cooking, Cook's Illustrated (Country, Entertaining, etc) should take note (not that any of them actually read my stuff on a regular basis).  This is clearly a value add and I'm not going to comment on the price split and business practices of the magazines vs. Apple (cause that is not my business).  So the easy way to do this would be to just take a print sample of your magazine, put it as a PDF or other ePublishing format and then just put it up there.  Now this would clearly be easy to do, and would work for the most part, but it is clearly not taking advantage of the platform.  Since I already have a paper subscription to Food & Wine, I was able to enter a simple code and gain the magazines that were available to me.

After a downloading of a few issues, I skimmed through the one that I had just finished (January, cooking the issue this week).  The organization made sense.  The added multimedia experience was an actual add to experience, and not just a waste of time.  And frankly, even the ads were better (not that America's Test Kitchen will care).  I liked that I could see the page views and sort of skim through the magazine (like I was looking for the page).  I think the best thing was the way the actual recipe were organized.  With the ingredients to the left, and the instructions in the middle and a little moveable marker to tell you "I'm right here" in the recipe.  I didn't need directions or anything and it just worked.  So to American Express Publishing iOS development team, you have my kudos (and maybe you should update your resumes and hit up the other magazines / publishing houses).