Posts tagged technology apple iPad

This summer has been filled with the chaos of moving. Well, not just moving but the sale of our home of nineteen years in Ohio, and a move to temporary housing for a few months while our new home in Florida is being built. We sold off our furniture and put the rest of our belongings in storage. We have rented a furnished condo and our only means of communications are our iPhones and iPads. We view it as a little experiment. I view it as a chance to see whether or not my iPad could function as my primary tech device.

Before turning off my desktop computer for the last time, I made sure to upload any and all documents I might need to my Dropbox account. Everything is now accessible from either my iPhone or iPad. 

My wife was not sure about giving up her desktop computer and we looked several times at MacBook Air laptops. In the end she went with an ipad 2 and an Apple Bluetooth keyboard. She has been happy with her choice.

Several years ago I made a conscious effort to become paperless and so I began scanning all sorts of receipts, mail, cards, etc. This was something I was, at first not sure how I would manage without a scanner and computer, but DocScan came to the rescue and does the job quite well.  

Writing with the on-screen keyboard is not as quick or easy as with a physical keyboard but, with a little practice, it really isn’t bad. Of course I can use the bluetooth keyboard we bought for my wife, but I haven’t done so that often. I purchased Pages when I bought my iPad (an original iPad which was delivered the day they first came out) and I have used it some, but I really like PlainText for most of my writing needs. Not only is it simple, but it saves automatically with my DropBox account.

I read a lot on my iPad, and I haven’t purchased a physical book in several years. In fact, as we packed to move, I took several hundred books to my local Half-Price Books store and sold them off. In addition to using the Nook and Kindle apps, I get most of my books from the library and read them using Overdrive app.

I begin my day reading the news and my favorite apps are USA Today, Huffington Post, Slate, and NPR. For local news I turn to a couple of the local news apps that I located in the iTunes App Store.

I was worried about losing all the songs I had laboriously ripped from CDs and vinyl, so prior to moving I uploaded my library to iTunes Match. Now, I can create playlists, download and play the songs, then delete them from my iPad or iPhone to conserve space. Thus far it has been working well. 

To keep myself organized I rely on on three apps: Things, NoteLife, and Everenote. Things has been my go to to-do list for several years and I have hundreds of items stored there. My only complaint is that it requires a wifi network connection to Things on a Mac in order to sync among devices. Therefore, I decided to keep my Things to do list on my iPhone, and thus the excellent Things client on my iPad will not be used until I get my iMac out of storage. I’ve long used Chronos Notes as a catch-all database for passwords, receipts, etc. The companion iDevice app, NoteLife, is an excellent app for both iPad and iPhone that, alas, also requires a Mac to sync, now that MobileMe is gone. Hopefully, iCloud integration is just around the corner. EverNote and I have had an on-and-off relationship. This summer I’ve reorganized my EverNote folders and am using it more than ever. It syncs automatically between my iPhone and iPad and i’ve even recorded voice memos with it.

Six weeks into my experiment to live on iDevices, I would have to say my wife and I are pretty happy. Writing is not really a problem, and neither is keeping myself organized, listening to music, or watching videos. There are two financial sites that don’t play well with mobile Safari, so I’ve gone to the local library when I need to access them. The pundits say the iPad is a content consumption device and I agree. However, I think it is a content creation device as well. Don’t sell it short.