No you can’t really live in your iPad, but it can contain much of the stuff that you use in your daily life and that you ordinary might keep elsewhere: calendars, address book, mail, notebooks, and so on. This stuff would be really useful to have on an iPad.
That’s what this chapter is about: projects that show you how to get your stuff into and out of your iPad, as well as a few cool things you can do with that stuff after it takes up residence on the iPad.
If you’ve been using a computer for any length of time, it probably stores a lot of information that you use regularly, such as contact lists, browser bookmarks, calendars, and notes. This information would be really useful to have on your iPad-not just have on your iPad, but also have there in such a way that you can get any changes you make on the iPad back on your computer.
Doing this information shuffle with your iPad is easy, but first, you have to make it possible. Setting things up so that your computer and iPad can exchange your information is what this simple project is for.
The art of getting your information from your computer to your iPad and back is called syncing (short for synchronizing), and it’s more than just a simple matter of copying your stuff from your computer to your iPad or from your iPad to your computer.
Syncing involves looking at two similar sets of information (such as the contacts in your address book on your computer and the contacts on your iPad), figuring out what’s different between those two sets, and sorting things so that the differences between those two sets of information are resolved. Contacts that you create on your computer go to your iPad; and contacts that you changed on one device or the other are brought into alignment.