Our office is full of iPads, but it looks as if for one new owner the honeymoon is already over. Our sales director would really like to take a Keynote presentation from his desktop to his iPad (where he has an iPad version of Keynote), but the iPad doesn’t want to make it easy for him. And the language he’s been using is terrifying.

Apple’s suggested methods for getting a file off your desktop and onto the device apparently include “mailing it to yourself”, “putting it on a website”, and using iTunes file-sharing. The first two options smack of desperation. As for the last one, if you’re the kind of person who says “I need to move this file from here to there, so naturally I’ll use my music player software”, your mind must work in a very strange way.

For a company that prides itself on design and usability, Apple has some strange blind spots. I’ve written before about the bizarre issues involved in syncing an iPod, where every application ends up inventing its own method for sharing data with the desktop. The fact that the iPad launched without a good, transparent way of moving data between the desktop and the device is odd enough, but it may even be a deliberate choice. Apple recently went after the makers of the ebook reading software Stanza and GoodReader, forcing them to change their apps so that they could no longer browse the device’s filesystem for content transferred there using a USB sync utility.

It’s still not clear why Apple insisted on the change. The official statement says that Stanza violated the developer agreement by using private APIs. Insisting that developers use only public APIs is fair enough, but Apple could easily have made the filesystem accessible through a public API. If they don’t, is it because unrestricted filesystem access might permit piracy or does Apple feel that users need to be shielded at any cost from the mind-destroying horror that is a modern hierarchical filesystem? Has Apple chosen not to simplify moving content between devices as a matter of policy, or is it because they haven’t yet found a good, user-friendly way to manage the process?

During my time at Sony, I once saw an informal demo by Jun Rekimoto, a man who probably comes up with a dozen brilliant UI solutions before breakfast every day. At one point in the demo, he showed how to transfer a file between two computers by tapping on the screen of one with a lightpen, then walking across the room and tapping on the screen of the second. Of course the file wasn’t really “in” the lightpen; the transfer took place across the network, and the business with the lightpen was largely sleight of hand. But it was also a brilliantly simple metaphor that was instantly understandable. You pick up the file here, you put it down over there.

Apple needs to get over whatever odd scruples are holding them back and make data transfer between devices work like that. You need to be able to walk up to your desktop machine with your iPad or your iPhone in hand, and move files between the two with a single, simple motion. The whole business should just work - like Jun’s demo, and like everything else on the iPad - with a simplicity and obviousness that could easily be mistaken for magic.

But in the meantime, I’m afraid you’re going to need to keep mailing files to yourself.