There has been a trend in the last 10-20 years towards veneration of technology as a style accessory, regardless of its utility.
I believe that our technological advance has been hampered by the huge effort being put into marketing technology by trying to make desirable and profitable items rather than genuinely useful and efficient items.
When I bought a tablet, I felt a bit guilty that I was buying into this style-over-content approach to technology.
Did I really need this? Didn’t my computer already do all this stuff?
I have been very pleased with my experience of tablets, however, and mine has been genuinely useful to me in ways that a laptop or desktop would not quite capture.
One significant function of my tablet that I have used a lot is a sketching program (‘apps’ used to be called ‘programs’).
This allows me to draw directly onto the screen with a stylus or my finger, which I can’t do with my computer, and I can carry it around like a sketch pad.
It allows me to capture an idea for a painting very quickly, including the use of any colour I need, and then put it away immediately,
and either ignore it forever or use it later for a painting, or just to experiment – this is a lot harder to do with a real pad and pens or paints.
Whilst on holiday, I took my tablet with me and I could sketch whenever an idea came to me. Here are some of the results.
_t.jpg "Performance (Purple and Pink)")
