somehow, during my 12 hour day chock full of classes, rehearsals, ceiling repair, and three, count ’em, three different bassoons, i wedged the Apple live event into my schedule. granted, i could only follow the liveblogs for about 15 minutes but that was just enough time to learn about Apple’s new creation, the iPad. all jokes aside about the name, i was initially impressed and excited to hear more.
well here i am at work, hearing more. no multitasking or face front camera? problems. i can live without flash, blah blah blah HTML5, you get the gist. so like many, i’m a little underwhelmed but, with the help of my twitter friends, i realized the possibilities.
dear apple,
you have no idea how many musicians/music students would buy this if it could do the following things. now granted, part of this is up to the developers (thanks for releasing the SDK) but you can help:
1) put textbooks in iBookstore! i’m about 100% positive that NONE of the texts that i’ve used in my 8+ years of college/grad school are available in iTunes U and if there were they wouldn’t be so geared towards individual fields of study. and when i say textbooks what i really mean is…
2) SCORES! what i would give to have a device like the iPad and be able to see my library of scores, to be able to carry it with me. now yes, i will always buy physical scores and mark them up (the same way with books, textbooks and parts) but to be able to catalog my entire library, play parts on the road without having to cart around my entire library…the list goes on. i would spend a ridiculous amount of money to buy scores in digitized form to use on this device.
3) pen input: one of my former professors at Appalachian State is working on a music theory program that integrates tablet use which allows professors to track not only how their students are working in real time but see their thought process in regards to analysis. well…you can’t do this without pen input. if there were some way to have a program with staff paper that you could write on, do theory & ear training exercises on, a way to write out Schenker graphs and of course save them…i think schools would invest in them wholeheartedly, along with individual students.
of course a lot of other things come with that like connection to printers via USB, etc but i believe you can do it, Apple.
i have sunk a lot of money into Apple: a Powerbook G4, MacBook, iMac, three iPods (2nd gen, Shuffle and Touch) and 2 iPhones. this is the least you can do for me…i’ll wait.
(and i’ll fangirl for life, i promise.)
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