I succumbed to the allure of the new and shiney a few months ago. My excuse was that my dear husband encouraged me, and now that I was back in corporate slave-Dom I needed something portable to keep me organised on the move.
So, I ordered an iPad2. I had to wait for it to arrive, but that gave me time to research all the amazing fabulous apps that I had high hopes would wave the mythical magic wand and get me organized.
I found a lot of great sites with excellent information. And I splashed out a few dollars on a magazine dedicated to iPad2 which was a great way to find out what my new toy would be able to do when it did arrive.
For starters, the clever people at makeuseof.com provide me with oodles of information in my inbox to read offline, and they feature lots of apps, particularly free ones. Then there are the clever lifehacker.com dudes who are not just iDevice aficionados but feature all sorts of great free ideas for life in general, as the name suggests. Their vodcasts (snappy new word meaning video-podcasts) are great entertainment – they taught me about using the humble bulldog clip as a cable management device!
The GTDtimes.com forums are full of wonderful discussions on productivity and that’s where some bright spark wrote the term I used as a title for this entry. I could spend hours reading about how other people do things, instead of actually doing stuff myself, but hey, it beats watching my husband channel surf in the evenings when there’s “57 channels and nothing on” (sang Bruce Springsteen once).
I initially decided to only use free apps, but having found toodledo’s website free service to be an indispensable GTD (getting things done) tool on my Windows notebook, I decided their app looked like a good value purchase to integrate with the website. It’s proven it’s worth. There are lots of others out there that integrate with toodledo though. But as a todo manager, the ability to import a whole page of straight text tasks at once (I exported Outlook data) on the website can’t be beat.
I’m proud to say I am a follower of flylady. I wanted to keep my flying household stuff separate from other to-do items so I invested in the Home Routines app. I love how it tells me how many items I’ve done. (Nobody else notices, but home routines does, lol).
I needed something to allow creation and editing of Micro$0ft word and excel documents so I sprang for DocsToGo. It’s a little odd getting used to but it does the job. Micro$0ft have a free OneNote app but from what I gather it only integrates with the 2010 version of desktop OneNote. As I have 2007 and no need to upgrade they can keep it! Boo.
I downloaded Friendly as a FaceBook interface but it keeps freezing or losing posts and comments and it has a character limit too, so I have given up and use FaceBook in safari for now.
At the time I was looking at apps it looked like Goodreader was the only PDF reader that kept in doc annotations and let you add them as well, so I sprang for that and it has not disappointed me.
So, what free apps am I using on my iPad2? The inbuilt calendar. The inbuilt notepad. The inbuilt FaceTime and Safari. Skype, Evernote, Springpad, Woolworths, Twitter, DropBox, Messenger (for Windows Live Messenger), pcalclite, readitlater, auspost, dragon (free voice to text – by the big$ dictation people!), makeuseof, WordPress, (app for the social book worm site), boxcar (as an rss aggregator), iPad tips and tricks lite, bloomberg, Iconverter, Kj to calories, trip advisor, temp convert, currency plus free, my fitness pal’s calorie counter & diet tracker, Hoyts Movie App, Napuru’s excellent relaxation apps. And that’s just the productivity and lifestyle apps.
Then there are the potential time wasters, like games, recipes, makeup Styling, photography editing … I won’t go into those, as I’m sure anyone reading this will soon be app store surfing with the best of them!
FrangipaniDreamz 