E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

My Top 5 iPad Apps of the Week – Week #5

For a good number of months, there have been plenty of really good blog posts shared out there with lots of really helpful insights and entertaining reviews of what the iPad has got to offer, not only from a pro-sumer perspective, but also from a professional one, as a powerful knowledge (Web) worker productivity tool. One of my favourite reviews was that one shared, just recently, by Jason Hiner (TechRepublic Editor in Chief) over at ZDNet under the title “The truth about iPad: It’s only good for two things“. If you haven’t read it just yet, and you are thinking about purchasing an iPad any time soon, I would encourage you all to have a look and read through it. It would be worth while your time AND the investment!

I will tell you though that the title of the blog post may well be a little bit misleading and perhaps half way through a tongue-in-cheek one as well, because, instead of developing further his thoughts on what Jason doesn’t like about the iPad itself, it turns out to be quite the opposite! Quite a nice review of what are the main key strong points of using one extensively. He comes up to conclude that the iPad is only good for two things: #1. Reading & Viewing and #2. Multi-touch Interaction.

Now, I am not going to say much more about it, other than to suggest you head over there and read through it, because his overall experience comes very close to the one I have been experiencing myself with my own iPad from day one and, like him, I doubt I would be giving up on it any time soon! Quite the contrary. Like him, it is slowly, but steadily shifting and changing, dramatically, the way I compute, not only at work (Specially, when I am travelling… No more backaches!!), but also around my own personal life. Go and read it through and you will see what I mean…

Oh, by the way, check out the couple of links he shares as well on his blog post as they are rather insightful and would provide you with plenty more background. But, specially, check out the blog post he put together on the Top 20 iPad Apps that would surely help you improve that overall user experience with some really good suggestions. I am currently going through some of his Top Picks… Once again, I tell you, it will be worth it, if you would want to find over there plenty more golden nuggets to check out and investigate further.

So, after pointing folks to those articles put together by Jason, you may be wondering what I am missing the most out of the iPad’s current user experience at the moment, right? Well, something that, apparently, is coming up pretty soon and which I know is keeping a bunch of us drooling all over the place: multitasking, as announced and mentioned all over the place, coming on the iOS 4.2 upgrade, as Engadget blogged about already not long ago, and which is already in a stable beta, although I decided not to get my hands on it and wait for the GA release. Just a few more weeks, it seems …

Why am I so keen about the multitasking capabilities coming along to the iPad? Well, as most of you folks out there know already, I am not too crazy about multitasking myself in the first place, but I can see how this device could make use of such capabilities to enhance our very own productivity and make us a bit more efficient as we keep interacting with a couple of iPad apps at the same time, so I’m looking forward to see how that would work out eventually. Engadget’s article contains a link to a short video clip you can have a look into to find out why most of us are starting to be even more excited…

And with that excitement, I am now moving along to share with you folks My Top 5 iPad Apps of the Week for Week #5, which, I am sure, is what you have been waiting for since you have started reading this blog post, right? Not to worry, here we go! Again the same guidelines as before: 4 of my favourite iPad apps and a 5th one, which is the iPad game of the week. Very short descriptions about each and everyone of them with their corresponding links, so you can have a look into each and everyone of them right away, and a single one liner, or two, describing why I think each of those apps is worth it. Thus without much further ado, here we go:

• Simplenote: While I do realise that this iPad app may sound a bit too simplistic it’s actually a rather nice one. A basic, simple interface to a notepad like kind of functionality where you aren’t going to be interrupted by fancy graphics, or complex menu bars, or far too many menu options. Just start a new note and start typing away! Perfect for taking a few notes on the fly! Woohoo! No fuss, no hassle, just touch once and start typing! I have found out though that, perhaps, the best experience for this application comes up if you have got the iPad Keyboard Dock and type through that interface itself. Just the same speeds as from your computer, but using the iPad carrying it out wherever you may be going… Priceless! (Yes, it is free, too!)
• Corkulous: This is one of those really curious and amazingly crafted iPad apps that would basically take you back to your school days with those cork-like bulletin boards we have all gotten so used to where we can put together our sticky notes, pins, etc. etc. Rather inspiring to see how you can get your work and to-dos organised in a very user friendly way: one we have gotten to know for decades!
  
  
• Wikihood Plus for iPad: This is one of those really nice and nifty iPad apps that would be ideal for those road warriors out there whenever they go and visit a new city, or one where they have been already a few times, but who would want to find out plenty more about the places where they are travelling to, what they can do, what kind of interesting sightings they may well have to check out, and whatever other different tips you can think of while you are on the road. Believe me, if you travel a lot, this is one of those essential apps to have. For sure!
  
  
• Fotopedia Heritage: One of the main reasons why I do really like the iPad, from day 1 when I bought it a couple of months ago, was because of its huge potential for helping improve, rather tremendously, already existing and new educational and learning experiences. Fotopedia Heritage is one of them. If you are into photography, as well as this planet Earth we all live in, this is one of those apps you just can’t miss! Hours and hours of really good entertainment are awaiting you. You would get to appreciate the large iPad screen share once you start playing around more with this app. No doubt!

  
  

• Scrabble for iPad: And, finally, the game of the week; one of my all time favourites; one of the first games I played (The good old Scrabble board game, I mean), when I was a youngster after having decided already that one day I would want to become an English teacher. Better practicing ground that what Scrabble can offer you couldn’t find it anywhere else probably. So when I first saw it coming to the iPad I just couldn’t help but going for it! And loving it ever since! Not only because it allows me to keep busy learning new English words day in day out, but also because it is helping me get some “additional” training to polish and improve my skills in order to try to beat all of those good folks who went ahead and decided to play a game or two with yours truly using Words with Friends, one of my all time favourite games as well, as I have mentioned on a previous blog entry! Not such a bad strategy after all, eh? hehe

Well, and that was it for me for this time around, folks! Hope you have enjoyed the various links shared throughout this blog post, as well as those Top 5 Picks on iPad apps I’m totally digging out at the moment. There will be plenty more to come, but that would be the subject for another upcoming article or the next one from this series … Remember, if you would want to get the Daily #iPad App you would just need to syndicate the following Twitter feed: #elsuapps, which is the one I’m currently using. If not, stay tuned for more to come over here!

Technorati Tags: Jason Hiner, TechRepublic, ZDNet, Reviews, Insights, Reading, Viewing, Multi-touch Interaction, Engaget, Multitasking, Simplenote, Corkulous, Wikihood Plus for iPad, Fotopedia Heritage, Scrabble for iPad, #elsuapps, elsuapps, iPad, Applications, Apps, Apple, Games, Mac, Recommendations

[Podcast] This Week in Lotus 018: A World Without Email? Or Blackberries?

As things are starting to settle back in, after a couple of hiccups with WordPress plugins here and there, following the hardware upgrade debacle of my hosting provider over the course of the weekend (Thank goodness everything turned out all right eventually!), here we go, once again, getting immersed on that regular blogging schedule. And today I thought I would let you folks know about a couple of interesting podcasting episodes that I have listened to or that I have participated in, that you may want to tune into as well. Because you do still listen to podcasts every now and then, right? Yes, that’s what I thought. Me, too! They still play an important role in my day to day knowledge sharing and collaborative activities, whether discussions in real time prime above all, while watching them live, or participating as one of the guests in the various conversations.

So last week Friday, my good friend Stu McIntyre and his partner in crime, Darren Duke, kindly invited a couple of folks, and good friends as well, Bilal Jaffery and Jon Mell from the Dachis Group / Headshift, along with yours truly, to participate in their weekly podcasting show “This Week in Lotus” where we spent a bit over one hour talking about a whole bunch of various different topics, including some of my favourites hehe

Yes, that’s right, last Friday, Stu, Darren, Bilal, Jon and myself had a blast recording “This Week in Lotus 018 – A world without email? Or Blackberries?” [Link to the podcasting episode], where we talked, amongst several other things, about the recent product launch of IBM’s Northstar as well as IBM Customer Experience Suite, that I have talked about over here, a little bit about “a bad week for the opposition“ and, of course, my favourite topic as of late, living “A World Without Email“.

Like I mentioned above, the episode lasts for a bit over one hour and towards the end of the podcasting episode we had a chance to talk about the experience of giving up corporate email and, instead, rely, plenty more, on social software tools to collaborate, share your knowledge across. In short, to get the job done. Now, this particular conversation with those folks was slightly different than the one I recently participated in at TWiT net@night, since I eventually continue to build further up and add more insights on the overall experience that I may not have shared elsewhere before. More than anything else with the purpose of helping those folks out there, who may be interested, to find out some more the various reasons why I started, how I do it and what’s meant for me, and the teams and communities I hang out with, so that perhaps you may also have a good chance to give it a try for yourselves.

I am not going to expand much further on the topic, since you can go and have a look into the accompanying blog post that was put together [Link here], and check the extensive show notes that have been provided where you can get a good glimpse of what we talked about, as well as checking out plenty of the links that we mentioned during our conversations. If you go there, you will also find a brief section of Tips where each of us pointed folks into some interesting hints and tips, tools, blog posts, applications, etc. etc. Worth while a read, if you are an avid iPad user as well!

I am sure you would have a good time listening to it, just as much as we did recording the session altogether; I think you would enjoy it as well if you are also an IBM Lotus user or are interested in IBM’s Lotus products, because we also talked about them a little bit. And, while talking about this very same subject, if you didn’t have enough, or if you would want to find out, plenty more, what it is like hacking stuff together with IBM’s Lotus Connections social tools suite or how IBM is helping accelerate the adoption rate of social software, both inside and outside of the company, I would strongly encourage you all to have a look and listen to the latest podcasting episode from the fine “The Taking Notes Podcast“.

Because in “Taking Notes Episode 121: 2010.09.17 – Evangelizing Lotus Connections“, and over the course of 37 minutes, you will be able to listen to co-hosts Bruce Elgort and Julian Robichaux, interview two of my favourite IBM people, and really good friends, Sacha Chua and Luis Benitez (Yes, my twin brother!), talking away for a large chunk of time on some of the really cool, and pretty neat, things they are both involved with hacking together Lotus Connections as well as their great work as social software and Enterprise 2.0 evangelists. You can grab the episode itself from the following link and start playing it right away…

Lots of golden nuggets in there, including a lovely discussion on how microblogging helps drive business value within organisations. You gotta listen to that story to realise the true power of enterprise microblogging behind the firewall. Flattening the organisation in a matter of minutes would be rather an understatement, to say the least! But quickly go through the show notes as well and hit play to start listening to it. I am sure you will enjoy it, even more of you are a techie yourself hehe

Ok, that was it! From here onwards, I just want to take this opportunity to share a special thanks! with both Stu and Darren for inviting Bilal, Jon and myself to such an entertaining and enlightening podcasting show as This Week In Lotus. Oh, remember as well that, every week, there is a new episode to listen to! So take the dust away from your favourite .mp3 player and go ahead, subscribe to the podcast. There will always be something new to listen to… and learn, I can guarantee you that!, which is just wonderful. That’s the whole purpose behind podcasting altogether, don’t you think?

Well done, guys!

Technorati Tags: #ibmexperience, #lawwe, A World Without Email, Adoption, Business Cases, Business Value, Challenge Your Inbox, Collaboration, Communication, Communities, Connections, Conversations, Enterprise 2.0, IBM, IBM Customer Experience Suite, Innovation, KM, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, Lotus, Lotus Connections, Microblogging, Microsharing, net@night, No-Email, Northstar, Personal Knowledge Management, Personal Knowledge Sharing, PKM, PKS, Podcasting, Podcasts, Productivity, Productivity Tips, Productivity Tools, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Software, Stu McIntyre, TWiT, Web 2.0, This Week in Lotus, Darren Duke, Bilal Jaffery, Jon Mell, The Taking Notes Podcast, Bruce Elgort, Julian Robichaux, Luis Benitez, Sacha Chua, Evangelists, Hacking, Podcastings

Are You Using BlogLines? You May Need to Read This Post…

Now that my blog is up and running again, after the recent debacle I have described in this other blog post, and that regular blogging, once again, has resumed, I thought it would be a good chance as well to remind folks about an important change that will be happening very soon and which may affect some of you as well: BlogLines will shut down its doors on October 1st. Are you ready for the move? You probably should! Specially, if you are one of the 200+ folks who are subscribed to this blog’s feed. After that date you won’t be able to get updates from it anymore. Time to prepare…

That’s right! According to the statistics coming from Feedburner, it looks like there are a couple of hundred folks out there who are subscribed to http://elsua.net through BlogLines and it may be a good time to prepare the transition into other RSS Feed Readers, if you would want to continue syndicating the content from this blog. My good friend, Jack Vinson, has put together a rather helpful and insightful blog post, where he has shared some of the alternatives that folks may want to consider, whether you would be interested in online or offline feed reading. It’s a good read and I highly recommend it.

You may be wondering what my RSS feed reader recommendation may well be, right? Well, I actually use a combination of several RSS aggregators, since I decided, a long while ago, to load balance the amount of feeds I’m subscribed to, so that it wouldn’t be that overwhelming time and time again. So under Windows (I still have a T400) I am using RSS Owl, which is nicely integrated into my flow with Lotus Notes (You see? *So* much more than just email! hehe).

On my Mac, where I spent most of my days nowadays anyway, I use a variety of them: Opera, Cyndicate and Vienna for my offline feed reading and specially for those RSS feeds behind the firewall. I use Opera and Cyndicate for the immediate daily internal reads and Vienna for the good-to-read-at-some-point, but-not-really-in-a-rush-at-the-moment. Also use Vienna for researching articles published by others that I know I may need to reference at some point in time.

For my external RSS feed reading habits I am currently using NetNewsWire (Offline) and Google Reader (For which I use a couple of user interfaces through iPad apps I have described already on several blog posts). I use the latter as well with two accounts: one with the essential newsfeeds I go through every day, and another one with the general feeds I have been following over the course of the years. Both accounts serve the purpose as well of having an online backup of the feeds, which allows me then to bring them with me wherever I may well go, which is when the iPad becomes indispensable as a powerful content aggregator. Not to mention as well how often I search for relevant content within either account, which I then include as part of my blog posts over here.

So, as you can see, perhaps a little bit too complex, but it works for me. It’s the feed reading habit that I have learned to grow and treasure over the last 8 years, when I subscribed to my first blog and the rest is history. It’s a system that works for me, and don’t expect anyone else to take it up for themselves. However, one thing I have learned throughout the years is to let go with that obsession of wanting to read each and everyone of them all and reach “inbox zero“ on my feed readers day in day out. Well, that’s no longer happening. Somehow, by immersing rather heavily inside my social networks I have learned to trust them over time quite a bit and a good chunk of my feed reading habits is already pre-filtered by them. They keep finding the really good stuff I am interested in, and, most importantly, they keep sharing it across! Probably just as much as I do with them (I would hope). So instead of focusing on striking another “inbox zero”, I just focus on the content that matters to me and the rest I just let it go. Yes, once again, that river of news and the continuous flow of the Social Web…

Ok, hope you may find all of that information useful and helpful, but enough with that diversion, don’t you think? hehe … Like I was saying at the beginning, BlogLines is about to shut down in the next few days and you may need to start looking for another strategy to get your RSS feeds elsewhere, if you are still using it. The one for this blog is over here, so if you would want to move it across to your new RSS feed reader that would be the URL address you would need to use…

Hope to see you on the other side, after BlogLines is there no more!, to keep up with the conversations… Oh, and a good bunch of folks out there are also subscribed to the blog via email with the wonderful service of FeedBlitz. That is, indeed, another option; remember email going back to its roots? A messaging and notification system of sorts? Exactly! So here you have got the URL address you can use to subscribe to the blog through email.

Thanks again for sticking around and hope the transition on October 1st, or sooner!, goes smooth for those of you who are still using BlogLines. Good luck!

Technorati Tags: BlogLines, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, iPad, KM, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, Mac, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Productivity, Productivity Tools, RSS, RSS Feed Readers, RSS Feeds, Social Capital, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Software, Feedburner, Jack Vinson, RSS Owl, Cyndicate, Vienna, NetNewsWire, Google Reader, GReader, Opera, Sunsets, FeedBlitz, Subscription, Aggregators, Productivity Tips, Syndication