Life and Times of Scott Walter

My last resume was so outdated I figure it was needing an update. Instead of having multiple pages I decided to have a single page listing only my last 4 jobs. You may view it at www.scottwalter.com.com/files/resume.pdf

I have always envisioned having a paperless office. I sure get tired of insurance policies, bank statements, investment statements, receipts piling up. Then I need to spend some time to file the paperwork properly. So then once its filed it just sits in the file cabinet until some day (or maybe never) its needed. After a while I have bunch of bank statements filed away which most are out dated and no long relevant. Then what do I do? Well once I have the time I’ll go thru the filing cabinet and pick out documents that are no longer needed and shred them. This is a vicious cycle that repeats itself year after year.

I have even tried over the past few years to use the scanner that comes bundled with my all-in-one HP inkjet printer. However it’s a time consuming process that seems to take forever just to scan one page. I have for once found a device that will allow me to go paperless without alot of effort. What magically device have I found? Its the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M, or for PC users its the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500.

The ScanSnap is a remarkable device. Its a duplex document scanner, meaning it can scan both sides of a piece of paper at the same time. This scanner is fast! I was able to scan my Geico insurance policy, a total of 10 pages in about 15 seconds! Yes I did say 15 seconds. When its done you get yourself a pdf version of your scanned document. The scanner has a sheet feeder that has about 50 page capacity. When scanning my Geico policy I did not have to scan each page one by one. I simply put the entire policy into the sheet feeder and pressed the scan button.

The ScanSnap can take documents as small as business cards to large as letter/legal sized documents. It even took my Sear receipt for a refrigerator which I measured was two feet long. Creating the pdf documents is nice, but how about finding information 6 months from now? Well both the Macintosh and Windows version of the scanner can use OCR (optical character recognition) software to index the pdf documents to make them searchable. On the Mac I can use the integrated spotlight search tool to search within the pdf’s that I scan. This is the bee’s knees.

I pretty much have all my documents full scanned and except for a few documents I have gotten rid of all the paperwork in my filing cabinet. I guess I will need to find something else to use the filing cabinet for.

If you would like to go paperless I strongly suggest you take a look at the Fujitsu ScanSnap line of scanners.

Instead of reserving the iPad at my local Apple store I opted for delivery via UPS. The iPad was delivered around 1:30 yesterday so I have now had the iPad for over 24 hours. I thought would share my experiences with the iPad. I’m not going to do a review since there about 100 interviews already available. So if need a review please google away!

Typing

First of all I’m typing this blog post on my iPad using the WordPress application. I find that typing on the iPad works best if you have the device propped up against something; right now I have the iPad propped up on my leg. Typing like this I can keep my hands on home key row and type retry darn fast. The iPad has the same predictive text entry engine as the iPhone. If you want to hold the iPad in one hand and type with the other you will probably be doing a lot of hunting and pecking.

Weight

The iPad weighs 1.5 pounds, which after you hold the ipad in a one hand can seem a little heavy. I really doubt most people will hold it with one hand for a long time, instead they will prop it up with something or hold it in two hands. It’s not uncomfortable heavy, just heavier than I was expecting.

Speed

The processor Apple put in the iPad is a speed demon. Screen effects and transitions that would be jerky on the iphone are butter smooth on the iPad. According to some early benchmarks the ipad is about twice as fast as the iPhone 3GS.

Reading

One of the majors tasks of the iPad is reading content. iBooks is the book reader that comes with the iPad. iBooks allows you to purchase books to read similar to Amazon’s Kindle. Speaking of the Kindle, there’s a Kindle reader app so that you can buy ebooks from Amazon in case that iBooks doesn’t offer a book you are interested in. The iBooks currently has a catalog of 60,000 books compared to Amazon’s 400,000. iBooks will probably catch up to Amazon pretty quickly as it brings on more publishers.

iBooks is a pretty nice app for reading a book. If you hold the iPad In portrait mode it shows you a single page, if you hold it in landscape mode it shows you two pages side by side. If you exit a book the next time you visit the book iBooks will take you to your last position in the book. iBooks allows you to highlight passages as well as search for text in a book. For a version 1.0 app iBooks is pretty full featured. The only feature missing in my opinion is a way to take notes.

I have a lot of content in the PDF format and unfortunately iBooks does not read PDF files. Luckily there are a humber of PDF readers for the iPad. I chose GoodReader which costs a buck. Its pretty full featured: sync files with your computer, remembers your last position, search the PDF, etc.

Browsing the Internet

Web surfing is going to be a major task that you will do with the iPad. When Apple says the pages scroll like butter they aren’t lying. Web surfing is a dream on the iPad. The only down side is the fact the iPad doesn’t support flash content. So a lot of websites that play videos won’t be accessible from the iPad. Instead of supporting flash Apple has decided to support the upcoming HTML5 video format. Some major sites have started to support both HTML5 and flash such as CNN, New York Times, FoxNews, YouTube, etc.

As more and more sites support HTML5 the criticism for the lack of Flash support will decrease. Still there are websites that use flash for features other than playing videos, such as games and navigation. Those websites will not be accessible for iPad users. Hopefully over time more and more sites will abandon flash for other technologies.

Battery

All I can say is wow! The battery is rated for 10 hours, which normally means in real world experience you would get less. However reviewers of the ipad have been getting 11-12 hours, outstanding! My iPad came with about 93% battery life and I haven’t charged it yet. Currently I have 30% battery life left. I don’t know how Apple is able to manage such great battery life with the fast processor and stunning LCD screen.

In Summary

After 24 hours with the iPad I am sold on it. The only way you can take it away from me is to pry it out my hands. In my next post I will discuss some of the apps that I think are killer on the iPad.

As you can tell I really changed my website around.   With the explosion in the growth of social media we no longer have content at just one web address.   There’s facebook, flickr, twitter, etc.   Scottwalter.com will be the aggregator of my content spread throughout the web and it’s social media sites.

From time to time I will blog, but probably not on a regular basis.   With the release of the Apple iPad just a mere 4 days away expect a bunch of blog posts over the next few weeks.  In fact its my goal to blog about my experiences with Apple’s new magical device.  This way you will be able to decide for yourself if its worth the money to you.