DDI and IPAD

[hexgrid]

With tablets and ereaders on the rise, I hope Wizards will eventually reconsider its stance on the selling of PDF sourcebooks. I would love to have an ereader and a PDF of all the books than a stack of 10+ books hidden under the table when I play.

When it comes to use in-game, the Compendium is already far more useful than PDFs would be.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I am pretty sure you won't be able to run the CB or Adventure Tools, since they are developed with the .NET framework. Those are the key DDI applications, along with Compendium that makes a difference to me.

The .Net framework itself doesn't preclude web applications which are perfectly accessible on iPhone/iPad etc. Sadly, the CB is a windows application, so it can't work on iPad), I'm guessing that Adventure Tools is similar.

Just mentioned for a minor point of clarity.

Cheers

 

[Vicente]

Well, the main problem for the CB is that it uses WPF which Mono is not going to port any time soon.

 

[darjr]

Hmmm... wasn't there supposed to be some layer in .net that made it easier to make your .net app a web app? Maybe it was a web app only for windows machines.

I'm getting an ipad. There is this NASA app where you hold the thing up to the sky and it becomes this annotated window to the night, labeling stars and planets and the international freaking space station.

You can move it around the the sky so it shows you details of the sky behind it. You can zoom and dig down and find out about the objects tagged and get video and audio and history and way cool.

 

[Vicente]

You can deploy a WPF app as a Web app, but the CB needs lots of permissions a web app shouldn't have (mostly reading and writing from your hard drive), so that's going to be nearly impossible to do :S

 

[Prism]

I like the idea of the ipad but its just not flexible enough for me. At the moment I'm using maptools, and combat manager at the table and CB and MB to prep. Non of these would run on the ipad due to the requirement of java/.net and also simply because it wouldn't have the performance. I can't see any of these being easily ported to the appstore or being converted to web apps without the use of flash or silverlight. So it will be a windows tablet for me

Also, I would seriously not consider anything like this for novel reading. Reference stuff yes but I wouldn't want to look at an lcd screen for that long. E-ink is the only option at the moment I reckon

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Hmmm... wasn't there supposed to be some layer in .net that made it easier to make your .net app a web app? Maybe it was a web app only for windows machines.

I'm getting an ipad. There is this NASA app where you hold the thing up to the sky and it becomes this annotated window to the night, labeling stars and planets and the international freaking space station.

You can move it around the the sky so it shows you details of the sky behind it. You can zoom and dig down and find out about the objects tagged and get video and audio and history and way cool.

Not specifically, it is more of an architecture issue. In that you can design the application so that all the heavy lifting is done in dlls that have no UI and the UI only does UI stuff, calling out to those modules for anything else.
In a web app they reside on the server and so you cannot run the application off line.

However, as mentioned above to work as intended the CB and MB need to write to your local drives, which is something you really do not want web applications to.
The big issue here is not so much the character files but the stuff to allow the application run off-line.

 

[WizarDru]

You should note that I'm not talking about netbooks. I'm talking about tablet PC's that can do EVERYTHING the iPad can do, including the touch based interface. Hell, they can even read your hand writing and convert it into text.

They're far more versitile than the iPad and far more powerful and on top of that have been around for years. They really do render the iPad obsolete even before the iPad was ever made. The only reason the iPad is doing at all well is because Apple has a load of loyal followers, many of whom don't even know that tablet PC's exist.

Plenty of people know of Tablet PCs. The industry has been trying to sell them for years....but consumers have been rejecting them continually. Dell, Samsung, HP, OQO, Fujitus and many others haven't succeeded at selling them. Most 'tablet' pcs that are out there are regular PCs with swivel screens. True tablet PCs are few and far between. They are also EXPENSIVE. And the OS of choice has usually been a modified form of Windows, which offers only kludgy support for the touch-interface.

The cover of today's tech section in the Wall Street Journal is a glowing review of the iPad by Walter Mossberg. Mossberg has reviewed plenty of tablet pcs over the years and the answers have usually been the same: poor battery life, slow performance, clumsy OS, expensive and marginal benefit. Great for a small niche set of users, lousy for everyone else. Why pay $1200 for a Q1 when you can get a netbook with the same performance for $700 less? Reading my handwriting is all well and good, but I type a LOT faster than I write...and I type a LOT each day. The last tablet PC I had my hands on was buggy and impractical. While I'm sure they've improved over time, they offer little benefit to the average consumer.

The iPad is lacking several features that I consider deal-killers: no Flash support being a biggie, lack of USB connector another, more expensive applications and so on. However, people generally aren't seeking it out because they're mindless trendsetters (though I'm sure there is a contingent of them), but are seeking it out because it fills a need. It offers some pretty nice features, an OS that actually makes gesture-based navigation work and is expansion of an extremely popular design. The excellent no-contract deal with AT&T is nothing to ignore, either. No other tablet PC can offer that.

With support for ebooks and PDFs, the iPad would be great as a reference book at the table. And if WotC doesn't make an iphone/ipad D&D app, they're leaving money just sitting on the table. AGAIN.

I personally think the iPad is attractive but over-priced for my needs. But I think it could ultimately offer some really great gaming options down the line, if the price lowers and Apple revises the hardware as they almost certainly are apt to do next year.

 

[darjr]

Not to turn this into a technical talk, but all those files would be stored on the server or access via activex. I remember going to Microsoft for a big spiel about how awesome it would be to have .net apps that could be either desktop or web based. All you had to do was flip this little switch in the development tool and viola! A web app with nary any extra effort.

they had working demo's and everything.

I wasn't fooled then either.

It was a big waste of a perfectly good afternoon.

 

[Thanlis]

I like the idea of the ipad but its just not flexible enough for me. At the moment I'm using maptools, and combat manager at the table and CB and MB to prep. Non of these would run on the ipad due to the requirement of java/.net and also simply because it wouldn't have the performance.

Oh ye of little faith. The guy who wrote Dicenomicon has Maptool running on the iPhone, and there's a nice screenshot of it running on the iPad emulator at that link. I imagine he had to rewrite the client, since as far as I know Java doesn't run on the iPad, but apparently it's not impossible.

From all reports, the iPad is really fast for a handheld device. People seem to be assuming it's slow, which is perhaps an unwise assumption.