I’ve been warming up to the idea of an Ipad, particularly of being able to carry a small library of ebooks and pdf documents around for quick referencing. Now to tempt me even further, Apple has a minisite on how an archaeological team from the University of Cincinnati is using ipads to assist in excavations in Pompeii! Looks quite neat – has anyone started to use the ipad (successfully or unsuccessfully) in the field? Being no Apple user myself, I’ve got no idea how the FMTouch, iDraw and OmniGraffle apps work.
As an archaeologist with an Ipad I find its main use to be
A) Carrying around a well stocked archaeological library in pdfs, in your backpack, for example I currently have thirty four (34) graduate thesis stored on my Ipad and about 300 different archaeological books. This is invaluable in many many cases. In addition I have numerous images and stored web pages relevant to my research
B) Note taking in the field. And then emailing those notes to offsite collaborators.
C) GISroam app. If you use GIS like I do, it’s really nice to have a portable GIS to bring into the field (with nice sat photo base) The main draw back is that to set it up, I need to be near a wireless internet source.
Of course, I’ve seen the U of Cin’s work but I wonder if they are not painting themselves into a corner. The Ipad works best as complement to a windows machine (one that has the main processing power and can run flash) to pretty much rely wholeheartedly on the Ipad seems dubious at best,
Thanks for the user info! I’ve got about a couple dozen books and hundreds of articles that I would love to have as handy reference material. The other thing that I’m really stoked about is the 10-hour battery life, which is way longer than a netbook with a 6-cell battery.
I don’t think the Cin team is relying solely on the ipad. The ad copy suggests that they upload the daily photos into one central database (probably a field laptop?) and then distribute the images to the ipads from there.
Could you use the GISroam app on 3G?
Actually the gisroam v2.0 I got can use iTunes for images now and see on their website that version 2.1 I can use iTunes/USB for both images and shapefiles loading. No need for wifi then.
Guess they are listening to us about new feature requests.