Here’s a quick list of pros and cons, followed up with my “huh…this could change everything” realization.

Pros:
- Purchases are amazingly easy and generally painless.
- instant gratification (click, purchase, download, and go)
- easy to keep apps up to date
- curated experience means good exposure to new/useful apps while (so far) keeping malware out
- App Stores – not just the Mac App store – provide economic impetus to develop for the Apple ecosystem, meaning more cool apps for Mac OS/iOS

Mixed:
- walled garden – it’s nice and pretty, but sometimes you want to break out…

Cons:
- the store is difficult to search
- for a “curated” experience, the store still has a lot of “this passed review?” kind of apps
- broadband is a necessity, particularly for larger apps

And now for the “this can change everything” realization. So most software licenses basically tie the software to a machine, device, and sometimes even by CPU. Under the App Store, once you purchase software, it is licensed to your App store user account. This means you buy software once and can use it anywhere (after logging into the App store and installing the app under your App store user account). It’s basically a floating license (I’m looking at you, Luxology Modo). This makes perfect sense to me – the machine doesn’t matter – it’s not licensing the software. The user though…they matter a lot, they’re the ones licensing the software. I eagerly await for this licensing model to become the norm because it has the potential to change everything.

Where am I going with this? Let’s talk about Adobe.

Adobe makes some pretty powerful and complex applications that help users communicate. At the end of the day, Photoshop helps people communicate their message to someone else. Same thing with InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, and even Acrobat (which has more to do with creating a wrapper to maintain the fidelity of the message when rendered). Adobe has a great history of making applications that help people create and communicate.

But somehow, Adobe is starting to move away from this history. They seem to have a disturbing (at least to me) fascination with “Enterprise” and “Development Platforms” (Live Cycle, Acrobat, and Flash). And then there’s the additional “services” they are trying to sell on top of these “platforms”. This isn’t the Adobe I’m used to and I’m sensing that a lot of creatives are like me, wondering where the old Adobe went. With all these different business focuses and the tight 18 month release schedule, the software is becoming, unfortunately, less stable, more buggy, and filled with tie-ins to services I see little value in. I think the biggest issue that Adobe faces is that it’s failing to connect to the creative individual like me. I’m sure they connect with the giant ad agencies though – I mean just look at the interactivity that InDesign CS5 can do!*

I just want an Adobe which is more focused on making my creative apps run better, faster, more efficiently, and that gets out of my way and let’s me communicate. There’s room for improvement.

*Have you ever seen the work done by somebody trying to translate their print design to web? That’s the same vibe I get from this CS5 feature.

Unrelated to this post: Thanks for spotting the spelling mistake Chris.

The name is not that great, Slate or Tablet would have been better although one could argue that these are too generic. Sorry to see no camera, and I think another USB port would have added to its functionality (more devices it could hook up to). And then there’s the rigmarole with the App store and the limited iPhone-like multitasking.

It’s a game changer despite these limitations. Why? Because the future, which the iPad has finally opened up (at least to my view), is awesome.

Imagine when auto manufacturers include docking stations for this. Instant carputer. Imagine a docking station for this in the back of a car seat’s headrest. Instant car entertainment system. And then the fact that one could just undock it and take it with them when they’re done traveling – pure awesomeness there. It’s the little digital consuming platform that everyone secretly needs.

Some may argue that it doesn’t have a very good business application and that laptops are much more flexible and powerful. And I would say, for digital creation – yes. But for digital content consumption? A laptop is overkill. In fact an iPod touch does digital media consumption much more effectively then my laptop. But web browsing and reading on an iPod touch is…well, small. And so the iPad addresses this with a larger screen. The iPad could be that perfect digital companion for the professional. Imagine an iPad (or even iPhone) application that would record and transcribe audio. Doctors, lawyers, management – even college students – could then take an iPad around and capture their meetings, lectures, or whatever it is they need to capture. Then transcribe that audio into useful digital text that could be utilized by other systems within the individual’s workflow. Now also imagine an app that used a special stylus (“the horror!!!” you say – but think of a plastic pen-like object with something that would work with the touchscreen tech). Now imagine an app that would save images of your scrawls written with this stylus. Later you could get these images OCRd into useful digital text (probably by transferring the images to a more powerful machine for OCR and then re-uploading the now-digitized text to your iPad). None of this “try and recognize my handwriting right now” approach. I think this approach to hand writing has potential and the iPad could actually make it very palatable for end-consumers to use.

Although at first glance the iPad doesn’t look like much, I’m seeing glimpses of the future and it’s freaking awesome. Now I only wonder why earlier Tablet PC’s never showed me such promise?

Verdict: Surprisingly good.