The iPad is for consumption not creation, right?

I truly don’t understand where it comes from, but a lot of people have in their heads that the iPad is only for consuming media. In TWiT 259, Leo Laporte says that the iPad is “regressive” because “it is for consuming, not for creating.” Mike Melanson wrote a piece for ReadWriteWeb called iPad SchmiPad in which he says that the iPad is for “couch sitters” and it isn’t useful for the “content creator type of user.” And Paul Thurrott says that “when you use an iPad, you’re typically not contributing to anything … you’re simply consuming” in his Understanding iPad piece (via John Gruber). Other people that have made similar statements include Dave Winer and Jeff Jarvis. It’s almost as if they were handed talking points.

This is plainly not the case. While the iPad is fantastic at consuming media, it’s also uniquely suited to foster creation in ways that a standard PC isn’t. Being able to sense the touch of every finger on both of someone’s hands lends itself to many forms of art. The additional user interface elements offered on an iPad (absent from smaller iOS devices) give it even more power for creative endeavors. The iPad is a wonderful device for all kinds of creation and this will only become more obvious in the coming months and years.

Brushes

Brushes is an amazing painting app for the iPad. Yes, it was developed for the iPhone first and some amazing work has originated there. Jorge Colombo is an artist that has created covers for The New Yorker on the iPhone!

But, the iPad can take this even further. The larger canvas of the iPad is an obvious benefit. Not so obvious is how much more fluidly someone can work with the pop-overs that are available on the iPad. It sure beats switching the entire screen between the canvas and tools as Brushes has to do on the iPhone. Another great thing about the iPad version is that you can easily hold the iPad in different positions as you paint. Holding the iPad “sideways” is just as natural as holding it the other way — and with Brushes you can turn the canvas but the tools rotate to always face the artist.

Here is some great art people have done with Brushes on the iPad.

iElectribe

I’ve always wanted a drum machine. But I could never justify paying several hundred dollars for one since I’m not a musician and I’d just be toying with it. Shortly after getting the iPad, I saw the guys from Area 5 record a demo of them making some beats on theirs with iElectribe. It was only $10 when I bought it, so it was a no brainer. It’s still a great deal at $20.

This app does almost everything I could do with a large hardware drum machine for a fraction of the price. And I don’t need to worry about finding space for it in the house! The large screen of the iPad gives enough space for all of the knobs and buttons you’d find on the hardware equivalent. And multi-touch means that you can twiddle multiple knobs at once to alter the sound. I’d like to point out that this is something you simply couldn’t do on a computer with a mouse and a keyboard.

Watch these videos showing iElectibe in action. They’re pretty amazing.

Pages

I have to mention Pages for two reasons. First, it along with Numbers and Keynote are what first signaled to me that the iPad is intended for more than just media consumption. I watched the event where Steve Jobs announced the iPad and I thought it was pretty cool. But the iPad had to be “The Future” before I was going to spend anything over a few hundred on it. And to me “The Future” meant it had to be a new way to do many of the tasks people rely on personal computers for. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote led the way and other fantastic productivity apps have followed (e.g. OmniGraffle, Things, Adobe Ideas).

The other reason I had to include Pages is because this article was written with it on my iPad.

Bebot

The best way for me to describe Bebot is to say that it transforms the iPad into a musical instrument. The entire screen becomes a surface that responds to your touch with sound. Each finger on the screen will play a different note depending on where you place it. And as far as I can tell from listening, it will play 11 different sounds from 11 different touches. This syncs up with some experimentation Matt Gemmell did with multi-touch on the iPad as well.

So, that’s how the iPad is uniquely suited to this application, but what are people doing with it? Well, Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) and his wife Mariqueen Maandig Reznor used Bebot on their latest album released under the band name How To Destroy Angels. You can hear Bebot played on “The Believers” and it sounds great. I may be cheating a little bit here, because Mariqueen actually played Bebot on an iPhone, but I’m sure she wishes she had the larger surface of the iPad at the time of the recording.

Create Different

These are but a few creative uses for the iPad, but it only takes a glance at the iPad section of the App Store to see many other ways to create with it. And the examples above show how the iPad is uniquely suited to creative endeavors. The iPad is no less creative than a PC, it’s just different. And over time it will most likely prove itself to be better suited to creation as Apple expands on the hardware line and adds new features to iOS.