Inspired by the Microsoft Courier project, Taposé has great potential but the usability just isn't there yet.

The Microsoft Courier project was an original take on tablets but never got out of the concept video stage before Steve Ballmer decided to kill it in favor of Windows 8. Undaunted, a couple of developers from Seattle who were fans of the project hooked up with former Courier lead, J. Allard, and raised enough enough money on Kickstarter to create a Courier-like experience on the iPad. Namely, Taposé.

The promo video for Taposé was exciting. It showed a lot of what made the Courier so novel and interesting. It showed, on an iPad, a two-paned UI, and dragging and dropping content from one pane, say a webpage or maps, into the journal contained in the other pane that contained your journal. Unfortunately, the reality of the app doesn't match the aspiration of the video.

I'll preface all of this by saying the the idea behind Taposé is fabulous. The video, although a bit misleading, was fantastic. Everything about the concept of Taposé is brilliant, but the execution to date was disappointingly poor.

First of all, the tutorial that you're initially presented with, for lack of a better word, sucks. This app is jam packed with different UI elements and features, but the tutorial doesn't let you actually use any of the important ones while reading through it. Instead, you must ingest all this information without trying it out along the way. For hands-on learners like me, it was a nightmare and I finished the tutorial learning very little.

I was still positive at this point, though, thinking that, sure, the tutorial needs a little work, but I can still explore around and figure things out on my own. I quickly figured out that the tutorial was not Taposé's only flaw. The app is very sluggish and somewhat confusing to navigate around -- and this is on a brand new iPad, mind you. I don't want to think about how it performs on a first generation iPad.

Sluggishness aside, Taposé does work, sort of, and its cool feature is that it lets you have two panels -- one with your working journal, and the other with a web browser, maps, contacts, or calculator.

To open and close the left panel, simply slide the circle at the bottom of the toolbar left and right. Swiping up and down above the circle will give you the options for opening a journal, web browser, maps, contacts, or calculator in your panels. But don't you dare try swiping up and down on the circle - it'll just leave you frustrated at Taposé's lack of response.

If you have a website open in one of your panels, you can copy the image or webclip to your clipboard to add to your journal. How to paste it into your journal from your clipboard? I have no idea. Perhaps it's in that tutorial I don't remember anything from. However, you can tap the photo icon button next to the "Copy image to Clip Board" button and drag the created webclip to the toolbar which can then be dragged to your journal. Don't expect to get precise with how your webclips appear, though. Think of it as a fun guessing game -- you zoom into the webpage and see if Taposé creates the image you expected!

Maps was a little confusing to learn how to use as well.. The trick is that you don't get to zoom into (or out of) a specific area that can be shared with your journal, but you share either your current location or pinned locations. The resulting clips actually look pretty cool on the journal. Contacts look great as well. The calculator is convenient so that you don't have to open a separate calculator app to perform a calculation. Calculations can't be shared, though. You must type or handwrite the results.

Speaking of handwriting, the quality of the handwriting is nothing to brag about and could use a lot of work. Taposé does include a zoom tool to make your handwriting smaller which is great. Don't you dare make a mistake, though, because while zoomed in, there's no way to undo or erase. This reminds me about the unintuitive placement of the undo button. Despite the ample space in the top toolbar (or even above the pen cup icon in the left toolbar) for an undo button, you must actually tap the page number icon to find it. This is where you'll also find the search tool, index, sharing options, paper type, and wrist guard.

Some of the other features of Taposé include adding text or sticky notes, but don't add them in the area that the keyboard pops up over if you want to see what you're typing. That's right, you can't scroll down your journal to see the bottom of the page when the keyboard is active.

The last thing I'm going to mention is that when trying to make an interesting looking screenshot to share with you, I was using the zoom tool to handwrite notes for you to see. At some point, the zoom tool stopped working and the area I was supposed to write in just turned gray. I tried force closing the app and relaunching it, but the problem persisted.

This is about the time I gave up and closed the app for good.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention this gem I discovered (I cropped the screenshot so that you can read the popup).

Now look at the screenshot again, but pay attention to the icons at the bottom.

The Good

• Great concept

The Bad

• Sluggish
• "Tutorial" doesn't let you try things as you read through it
• Can't undo while using zoom tool
• Just confusing and unintuitive, in general

The Conclusion

Taposé has the potential of being a really awesome app, but it's nowhere near there, yet. This is not an app that's ready for a public release, so unless you like the beta-testing experience, I recommend waiting for an acceptable update before picking this one up.

Check out the video below to see the potential of Taposé and what I hope to see it become.

$2.99 - (Don't) Download Now

Two would-be Microsoft-based competitors pre-emptively bit the dust yesterday -- both Microsoft's own Courier and HP's Windows 7 Slate are no more, and it's fairly safe to say a third, Fusion Garage's JooJoo, is being kept alive on life support for now. all this follows 500,000+ opening week iPad Wi-Fi sales for Apple, and comes on the eve of the iPad Wi-Fi + 3G release.

Courier was never made manifest beyond some animated concept movies showing off a dual-screen, notebook-like device with innovative UI and finger and pen-based input. The video was promising enough to wow the tech world but at the same time set expectations incredibly high for software that didn't exist. That could have been a factor in the cancelation, along with the realities of trying to sell a device whose price-point would literally be double the iPad's. Gizmodo, who broke word of the Courier's existing, also tolled its end:

At any given time, we're looking at new ideas, investigating, testing, incubating them. It's in our DNA to develop new form factors and natural user interfaces to foster productivity and creativity. The Courier project is an example of this type of effort. It will be evaluated for use in future offerings, but we have no plans to build such a device at this time.

The HP Slate was less vapor, more ware, and was even given the Ballmer-bump during the CES 2010 keynote in an effort to show up Apple. The idea of an extra chunky Intel tablet running a desktop OS like Windows 7 probably appealed to power users, and to HP until about a minute after they bought Palm. TechCrunch has heard through sources that the Slate is no more. We're betting the timing is no coincidence and HP re-announces a much more mobile-friendly, webOS based Slate in the future.

Oh, and Engadget says the JooJoo is being updated.

[Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget]

Apple might be preparing a 10.7" multi-touch iTablet with 720p resolution, running the iPhone OS, for announcement in January and release in May/June 2010. That's just one of the rumors dropped by iLounge this morning, from a source they say was accurate about the most recent iPod nano, iPhone, and Chinese iPhone stories.

Like the iPhone and the iPod touch, iLounge's source claims both a 3G and non-3G version will be available, so users can weigh always-on connectivity vs. another monthly telco bill.

Apple is no stranger to big product announcements in January, but since exiting Macworld, they're also now free to set their own schedule. Possible delays? Odds of it receiving the official "b'okay" from Steve Jobs in its current form are said to be 80% (after it already being nixed at 7" for being "too small"). That's good, but far from certain.

Also far from certain, but certainly interesting is Microsoft's equal and opposite tablet concept -- the Courier, which focuses not on media but on journaling. Gizmodo has another video up. It reminds us of those awesome, future-filled Bill Gates keynotes from CES. Most of what Gates demoed hasn't made it to market, however. Hopefully the Courier will fare better.

People are used to phones, they're used to MP3 players, laptops, desktops, even set top boxes. A decade later, there's no indication of tablets breaking through into the mainstream, so Apple, Microsoft, and everyone else has their work cut out for them.

We'll see if the iTablet can tell a compelling enough story, and offer a feature set that sells.

While everyone is waiting on Apple to unveil their universally rumored iTablet/iPad device next year, Gizmodo has just scored the scoop on what Microsoft just might be planning to counter it -- the "Courier" tablet.

Decidedly un-Apple in it's approach, with dual booklet screens, pen and touch input, and feel that's all organized chaos, it's also strikingly different to Microsoft's previous Tablet PC efforts (which were largely tweaked versions of XP and then Vista). Here's why:

Until recently, it was a skunkworks project deep inside Microsoft, only known to the few engineers and executives working on it—Microsoft's brightest, like Entertainment & Devices tech chief and user-experience wizard J. Allard, who's spearheading the project. Currently, Courier appears to be at a stage where Microsoft is developing the user experience and showing design concepts to outside agencies.

Head on over to Gizmodo to see a video of the concept in action (not iPhone friendly, sorry). Then come back here, tell us what you like and don't like, and let us know how you think Apple's take on the tablet will differ.