TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Marco Arment argues that the iPad isn’t a productivity device.

While others have focused on that point, I think this is the more important one:

I still don’t think Apple has found the sweet spot for the iPad’s usage: the ideal role it fills in personal computing. And I don’t think we, as developers or iPad owners, have found it, either. But I know that sweet spot exists, and for a computer category that has only existed for one year, we’re rushing towards it remarkably quickly.

That’s absolutely right. We’ve mostly tried transporting PC use-cases to the iPad rather than find new ones,((Although there have been a few dramatic successes. Marco’s own Instapaper was made for the iPad, and is the application I use more than any other on mine; many Omnifocus users live in Omnifocus for iPad; and Flipboard shows promise for future reading applications.

Moreover, the iPad is quite useful for niche productivity uses, such as writing fiction. The same limitations which make it cumbersome to use for other productivity uses make the iPad quite useful for writing fiction. Because you can see only one application at a time on the iPad, there is little to distract you from writing, and because it requires you to touch the screen to edit text, it forces you to continue writing rather than constantly edit what you’ve already written.)) but there is great potential for other uses. “Paintings” done completely on the iPad demonstrate this—some people are already doing incredible things with the device that are not a good fit for PCs. This is despite device limitations, such as inability to do fine drawing or shading on the iPad’s current touchscreen technology. As technology develops, the work possible will continue to improve significantly.

What I’m most excited for, though, are the non-obvious uses that will become apparent in the coming years. Perhaps the iPad could be an essential tool for writing papers—an application for it could allow you to save excerpts from ebooks you are reading (automatically generating the correct citation) or enter it using the iPad’s camera. The NFL could use it as a playbook on gameday and for quarterbacks to review footage from their last drive on how the defense responded to their plays. High school and college debaters could use it to hold their evidence, rather than toting around buckets full of index cards. Or…

There are an unending number of possible uses. The key is to think of areas where PCs were inconvenient or impossible to use because of their size and interface, but would be useful if they could be used. There are, though, hard factors limiting the iPad’s adoption. The first is weight—the iPad 2 weighs 1.3 pounds, which makes it uncomfortable to hold with one hand for extended periods of time; the second is the LCD screen, which is difficult to use outside; and the third is the on-screen keyboard which, while surprisingly usable, isn’t useful for quickly entering data with, say, one hand while walking around.

The first two are for Apple to work on, but developers can improve the third. It requires thinking about the iPad not as a computer, which is primarily how we’ve conceived of it still, but as something else—whatever function it is intended to serve. With the PC, we changed how we worked to fit its nature. That’s precisely backwards for the iPad. Because it is all software, we can change the iPad to serve how we naturally work. This means first beginning with the intended function and how people naturally achieve it, then working on a user interface for it.