But can I take it with me?

As I worked on the last few posts, I would occasionally grab my iPad2 (summertime's new toy) and either try to continue working on it, or just surf around and want to look up something that I remembered. Sometimes it worked out, sometimes it didn't. This, plus some well-placed advertisements on the websites I was visiting, made me aware that not everything works on tablet or mobile phone devices. ruh-roh

Our school, my department actually, has just gotten a classroom set of iPads to use with students. That was one reason I got my new toy, so that I could prepare lessons with it (you believe that, right?). Since my phone is 5 years old, and my son owns the iPod Touch, the iPad is the only mobile device I could check. But check I did.

In Blogger, I discovered that I could read my blogs, even watch videos and surf links with it. But posting was another story. Either the cursor or the keyboard doesn't like to show up in the post box. I found many, many frustrated questions about this in the Help forum, and the consensus was that Blogger, being a Google product, does not like to make apps for products of its rival, Apple. I don't have an Android OS phone to check this, but if it is going to work at all, my guess is that it will only work there. Another, smaller, complaint was the appearance. I have 2 blogs. The one I designed using a Blogger template shows up better (the background photo is replaced by a simple, complimentary-colored background). The blog I added a custom background image to looked awful. It was smaller and tiled in a strange way, scrolled with the page, so you saw lots of fractured images, instead of a background. Minimally functional, but pretty ugly.

For the mind-mapping software, we have 2 yeas, and 2 nays. Cacoo diagrams can be viewed on the iPad, but not edited, because editing takes Adobe Flash Player, something the iPad doesn't support. Bubbl.us cannot even be viewed, for this same reason. I'm not sure if this is a failing for them, or for the iPad. Many before me have commented that it should run Flash.

Mindmeister and Popplet both have iPad apps. Mindmeister has a free iPhone/iPod Touch app (that says it runs on iPad), and a $7.99 paid app - ouch! - one of the most expensive I've seen. Popplet has Popplet Lite (free) and a paid app for $4.99. To quote the write up in the App Store, "Popplet Lite will be free forever, but is limited to just one Popplet." They also caution that you cannot transfer a Popplet saved in the free version to your paid app. But this shouldn't be a big problem, because it is free forever. I guess it might not have some of the export options, though. Without the app, the website doesn't work because it, too, uses Flash Player.

But let's end on a happy note. Protopage comes up in Safari on the iPad just fine, with the RSS readers all working away. This is good to know, since it can still be used as a student start page whether on desktop, laptop, netbook, or iPad.

Brilliant!