The Critical Path

I bought my iPad on day zero from the apple store in Regent street, London. As a bit of an exercise in form and functionality I thought I would blog about the new device in my life and give you a quick rundown of the apps I have been using so far. All from the iPad, of course.

The keyboard

First and foremost I can’t tell you quite how impressed i am with the keyboard. It is accurate, fast and not at all difficult to use. I doubt I would tackle a large complex document, buy also doubt I would get my laptop out on a flight again. This blog entry was typed up using Notes, although I will probably download Pages later today.

ToDo

Very early days. I have been using the Toodledoo app for some time and found it’s functionality (especially the sync with outlook using chromatic dragon) spot on. On the iPad the app could clearly do with some work to make more use of the available real estate, however it is still good.

Appigo’s ToDo looks good and has some well integrated GTD functionality. It is synced with my Toodledoo account, and therefore outlook in my office. I am still struggling with some of the navigation, but judging by the reviews the product has had, and the fact that i can’t be arsed to look for instructions, feel it will turn out to be a keeper.

Twitterific

Just as I abandoned twitterific on the iPhone in favour of the Twitter app ( which i love) along came the iPad and all that extra space. It has to be said that iPhone apps just do not scale in any kind of satisfying way and will always be a poor relation to the iPad designs. Twitter on the iPad just wasn’t working for me, and as twitterific comes as a free download i thought it was worth a shot (i tried a tweet deck install but just couldn’t get it to run). So far, so good. It does what it says on the tin, and i couldn’t ask for more than that.

Eyewitness

This is an amazing free offering from the Guardian newspaper. An awesome picture each day together with some tips to improve your photography. The image viewing experience on the iPad is just fantastic, and this is the perfect showcase. Recommended – go and download it now.

Wired

I subscribe to the UK edition of this magazine and was excited about reviewing the digital edition. It is brilliantly put together and is an absolute pleasure to use but is it more fun than the print edition landing on my doormat . . . . . . .

Marvel

It’s been sometime since I have looked at a Marvel comic, but what a way to reconnect with them. The colours just suck you into the screen and the frame by frame scroll functionality really focuses your attention on the story.

I downloaded the free comics to review and will almost certainly add to my library over the coming weeks.

iBooks

My first foray into e-readers – (the kindle just didn’t do it for me). Lovely display and page turning experience. My children enjoyed having winnie-the-pooh read to them, especially the illustrations. In our tiny home I rarely have the pleasure of keeping books for any length of time, so this could well be a winner for me. The initial offering of books in the store was disappointing, but from memory iTunes started small. And just look at it now.

The buying experience in the store is excellent, with a really decent sample available.

Calendar, Mail, Contacts, Safari

All fantastic developments on a tried and tested theme. Brilliantly reworked for the iPad. Only one complaint – Apple, when are you going to provide a decent integrated task manager? Surely I can’t be the first to ask?

WordPress

So far, so thwarted. I thought it would be perfect if I was able to do this entire post from my iPad. I downloaded the Wordpress app, ready to go, but had a heap of problems. Firstly it only seemed to want to work if I was an admin (out came the MacBook, logged into wordpress as admin, gave myself admin privileges), then it wouldnt let me paste the text I had written in notes (ending any hope of prepairing an article on a plane for example, and posting on reaching wifi land) and finally it wouldn’t let me edit the image I was posting (I was hoping I would be able to hook into the great image editing enhancements in 2.9.2, but now way jose.

Still, pretty happy with everything else. I will work on the WP app to ensure it is not just user error, and to be fair, I could easily have logged in – I just wanted to app it!

Note: I have since tried creating posts by opening wp admin on my iPad. No luck as yet as the keyboard does not get activated (obvious i guess). Drop me a note if you have an solution.