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Question 340 of 365: Do we hate paper?

Published on December 7, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Blog.

The yin: I can now print from my iPhone.

The yang: Google Books is ready to serve up more free ebooks than I could ever hope to read in my lifetime.

I printed something that wasn’t a contract to be signed for the first time in months. I did it as a lark. I wanted to see if I could print from my iPhone. Now that I have that working, I was trying to figure out under which situation I would actually do such a thing. I no longer have to print board passes. I meet primarily online. I edit collaboratively as much as possible. The unprofessionally printed page is losing almost all context in my life. But, this is no big surprise. I knew that the printer was waining as a resource for my working life for years. And yet, I am finding myself energized by my zeal for getting rid of it. I find myself more and more excited about “going paperless.”

Instead of drawing diagrams on napkins, I get out my iPad and make them hyperlined mind maps. Instead of writing out things on sticky notes or even on the back of my hand, I jot myself a quick email or I just speak into my phone and have it transcribed. It is almost ridiculous just how little I want to do with paper.

I still have yet to read an entire book on a digital device.

I still have yet to find a way of actually taking notes on top of text in a way that makes sense as much as using a pen and literally writing in the margins.

I still can’t get over the smell of a bookstore or the feeling of feeling the amount of pages I have left as I try not to look at the clock because I know it is way to late to stay up reading.

I have yet to have a transcendent reading experience in a digital format.

But, I can no longer feel good about printing or writing things out longhand. I no longer can see the notebooks that I used to be so proud of as things that will outlive me. With the sheer amount of information out there, it makes me entirely afraid that no one will ever have the time to go back through the things I have scrawled on paper and make sense of them (least of all me).

Perhaps that is it.

Maybe in the age of permanence and ever-presence, I am so fearful that by putting myself on paper, I am setting myself up to be forgotten. If I don’t take digital notes, they don’t really exist. If I don’t tweet what is going on, it never happened.

I feel like paper is like the Neverland of text. It makes you forget what is real. It lets you transport yourself away from the realities and distractions of all of our digital existence. It is beautiful and unique, but it is fleeting.

Perhaps we are coming to the point in the story of text in which we have to grow up. We can escape from time to time, but printing from the iPhone isn’t going to bring back our joyous moments of forgetting responsibility and working on characters that will never see the light of day.

Paper is precious, and I hate it for that.

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Question 272 of 365: What are we not paying for?

Published on September 29, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Blog.

In thinking about budgets in tight times, it may be easiest to think about all of the things that we are paying for and then see exactly what it is that we can cut back on. It makes sense that we wouldn’t spend much time at all agonizing over what we do not pay for, but I am finding myself feeling entitled to everything that I am not paying for. I am finding myself reliant on the free things that are simply the fabric of my everyday existence. And it makes me think about just how many systems I have surrounding me that support my way of life. Even with all of my overpowering responsibilities, I know that the things that really open up possibilities are the ones that I don’t have to pay a monthly fee for. And as I consider what to cut out, I must also think about what is essential.

Things that are free that I could never live without:

  1. WordPress blogging software- This has become a part of my habit of thought and reflection. Everything that is a seed of an idea is run through this piece of free and rapidly expanding software. It sometimes makes me wonder what I used to call publishing and what I used to call brainstorming. How was it that I was able to focus my attention on a single document that sat on my hard drive?
  2. Google Documents- Sure, this may not always be free and there are other services that are like it, I am finding that there is no reason to go anywhere else for my collaborative needs. I share links to edit documents on a daily basis (having almost completely forgone inviting individuals via e-mail address at this point). When I am connected to Docs, I literally have a record of nearly every collaborative project I have undertaken in the last 4 years. It says something about what I value to be able to literally replay the revision history of my life.
  3. Libox – I have listened to more music in the last few months than I have for the past 3 years combined. The simple sharing of music with my friends is a beautiful thing. The fact that it is a better looking (and much lighter) player than iTunes makes it so much more essential. I need to hear what other people are listening to and not just the radio stations that they frequent. I want to hear the actual music that is shaping their lives because if I let it, it will shape mine too.
  4. Free Wifi – The internet is in the air and I expect the air to be free. I understand that bandwidth costs something for someone, but I can’t at this point imagine going into a public place like a library, coffee shop or school and expect to pay for access to my communication system. Just as we have free access to the public radio frequencies and tv frequencies, I am starting to believe in free access to the wifi frequencies too.
  5. The Jabber Protocol and Adium – I started using AIM in 1997, but I fell out of love with Instant Messaging until quite recently. I now feel much more connected to everyone I care about because there is a single protocol and program that allows me to stay in touch. While I like twitter and facebook for staying connected and I enjoyed Skype for a time for video calls, I am finding that much of the meaningful conversations of my daily life are happening as a series of rapid messages. Adium connects me to my gmail contacts and their Jabber server as well as the Facebook chat that seems to be a favorite of many folks who spend a lot of their networking time in there. The fact that this is all open protocols and open sourced means that I will never have to give it up, even if my network moves on like they did from AIM.
  6. Search – I don’t really care that it is Google that is running my search now. I must say that I have all but stopped categorizing or folding things away in any of the services I use. Search is so good now that it almost seems unnecessary. As long as it has taken for me to figure this out, it has taken me almost no time at all to drop services that don’t enable absolute search ease. I can’t handle milling about in a repository (or even in iTunes) trying to find what I am looking for. If it isn’t right there, I no longer see the value in looking further (with a few notable exceptions like important benefits information in legacy systems). Search algorithms I am dependent on and they are freely available to all, and hopefully always will be.
  7. Zemanta – Along with search, I have come to rely on  the power of suggestion. Zemanta recommends images, links and ideas based upon whatever I am writing in an e-mail or in a blog post. This is the killer addition to my brain which is looking constantly to connect to other things that are out there. Making these connections is now a great part of my life and whenever I have something to help me in the process, I feel the support of a network even if it is just a semantic analysis of the things I am already writing.

Things I pay for that I could live without:

  1. DirecTV service – I have really enjoyed my time using their DVR, but I really only record shows on about a dozen networks. Much of this content is now on Netflix and local stations which provide HD content free of charge.
  2. Home Phone Service – I know that many people have forgone this luxury, but the bundling of services has really kept this one in the mix for me. It makes other things cheaper and it is always nice to call someone back on a “landlane” when all else fails. Cell phones and VOIP have all but killed this one off.
  3. All of my hardware – I could give up my cell phone, my ipad, my ipod touch, my laptop, and my netbook. While none of these things have a subscription cost associated with them, none of those individual pieces of technology hold my most important information or workflows. I now have a copy of my entire workflow syncing between browsers, cloud-based folders, and housed on a series of easily copied usb sticks. I don’t have to worry about anything getting lost. So long as I have a single device that connects to the internet, I can respond to e-mail, edit documents, and generally be productive.

If I ever had to pay for the things on the first list, I would. I wouldn’t be too happy about it, but they are too important to let go fallow in my life.

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Question 268 of 365: Can we take everything with us?

Published on September 25, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Blog.
Micro SD
Image by bigcityal via Flickr

We have preferences and we have workflows. We know where things are in our offices and on our devices. We don’t have to relearn every keystroke on a daily basis. We establish comfort zones all around us so that we can rise above the minutiae and pursue the big productive work at hand. We even lug around large laptops or set up elaborate work environments just so that we don’t have to change too much from day to day.

Even as I argue for a device independence and syncing every service to one another, I notice that I am leaving a lot of the customization that I treasure behind. I am starting to begrudge putting in my wifi credentials on each new device I decide to use. Even though I have access to all of my files in Google Docs and Dropbox, access still differs a bit depending on the browsers and versions I have to work with. I have decided that I hate upgrading software almost as much as I hate having to bring a certain laptop with me in order to access all of my individual preferences. It just seems so antiquated and uncivilized to feel like a foreigner even as I access the same gmail account on different computers.

There may be hope, however. Yesterday, I decided to give load up Ubuntu Linux on a micro-SD card. This tiny little card holds an entire operating system, all of the programs I will need to run on it, and every preference I could possibly have. Currently, I am running it on a Netbook that I was given for a test drive. But, I popped the card into a USB stick and loaded it up on my Mac, my wife’s Dell and any other machine (save my iPad, I suppose) that I could throw it’s way.

It is nothing short of a revelation.

I am looking at the same desktop on this machine that I look at on any machine that I turn to. The desktop is the same. The programs are the same. Even the saved credentials are the same. I am literally packing my entire computer into a square centimeter of silicon. How did I not recognize this as the logical extension of syncing everything together? How was it that I missed the idea of bringing my consistency of experience to everything I use?

The word that Ubuntu uses for a USB stick based install that can save preferences is persistence. I think that describes what I am doing pretty well. I am using a persistent system. It persists as a part of me, even as I add to it and change my workflows to meet the operating system that is so tight and compact that it can fit into a single Gigabyte. I can now take everything with me that I need to get down to business. Everything.

(For those who would like to know more about this setup. Here is what I have done:

  1. I made the Ubuntu instance out of the Universal USB Installer. (I used the Netbook Remix of Ubuntu because I knew it would work on pretty much any machine)
  2. I installed Google Chrome with the Browser sync (for any computer I use that isn’t running this Ubuntu instance).
  3. I’m using Google Documents to edit all documents.
  4. I installed Dropbox to sync all files to every computer (I do not sync directly to the USB stick, but rather to the hard drive of whatever computer I am running).

While this really isn’t a long list of things that I had to do, I think that each one adds a bit to being able to take everything with me.)

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Question 244 of 365: Why do users revolt?

Published on September 1, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Blog.
Image representing Digg as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

Over the past week, something strange has been happening on Digg. Ever since they changed over to a new format for the website and a different submission process, an absolute torrent of users have decided that this site no longer has their best interests in mind. Whether it is the removal of the bury button (the ability to demote stories that are not relevant or interesting) or in the total site redesign, users have given more than an earful to the makers of Digg, including spamming the site with articles from competing news aggregators. They want it to go back to the way it was before, or at least to fix the glaring errors that are starring them in the face every time they use the site.

In the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t matter. A single web portal changed its platform and a few users (mostly hipster geeks) aren’t happy about it. It isn’t a tragedy or a massive privacy breach. It isn’t a power grab or a diabolical plan for torture. The website changed. That’s it. It is a blip on the timeline of the web, but it may be a symptom of a much larger problem. User revolts are becoming more common and more pronounced.

Facebook‘s privacy changes prompted congressional letters, a number of different startups to be created, and huge numbers of users to up and quit. Google‘s inclusion of Buzz into gmail without any notice prompted huge shifts in our understanding of what a company can do with a product that we have all come to rely on for our daily workflow. Even something like Microsoft‘s use of the .docx standard for all current generation word programs has been a slow burning user revolt that has many saving files in open formats or uploading them to Google Docs for fear of not being able to open them on other’s computers.

This may just be the fear of change that is the same in every generation, but I feel as though there is something different going on here. Users are revolting based upon the idea that their requirements for a service are no longer being met. This type of change is akin to an employees benefits being changed via a form letter, with no recourse whatsoever. One day, a switch gets thrown and the services we have come to expect have changed because the company responsible has other motives.

Users revolt because their trust has been compromised. They revolt over not knowing what the future holds and believing that the direction and progress is all wrong. Fear of change is warranted when the process for change is secret. Companies have every right to introduce new features and to try and advance into new markets, but their interests should still be to collaborate with users (all users) to find out what their needs are. Too many companies are advocating for fictional needs rather than focusing on the core pain that their software or service actually eases.

Facebook made up the need that people have for publishing all demographic information in a public (or easily monitized) way. Google made up the need that people have for having a social network in their e-mail (while I like this idea very much… it isn’t one that I hear a lot of people clamoring for). Microsoft made up the need that people have for proprietary document formats. All three of them did this because they saw a future opportunity based upon those fictional needs. Facebook could target better ads, Google could get more of the social graph information, and Microsoft could hold on to formatting standards. These are real opportunities, but they don’t necessarily lead to happier users. Because each of these needs are fictionalized, the cost benefit analysis that these companies are doing is severely flawed. The cost of the change is much higher for each user and the benefits are much lower for the company because the users revolt.

I understand that the vast majority of the services where users revolt are free. This may lead companies to believe that they can change anything they want to without repercussions from users. In essence, we should all just be glad to have the service at all. I would make the case that we have a social contract with Google and Facebook even if we don’t have a signature and a payment plan in place. This social contract includes the idea that major changes made to the service should be vetted. It includes working with users to establish needs rather than making them up. It also includes transparency. The process of creating something new should be an open one, and that is how revolts are stopped before they start. By making everyone a part of the new version, you will create buy-in and ownership and you may even find the elusive needs that are both beneficial to users and lucrative for the company.

Otherwise, we will continue to see more user revolts, more splintering of user groups, and more distrust of really great pieces of technology. I also like the idea of an undo button somewhere in the top left corner of everything, just in case.

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Question 238 of 365: Why is everything a phone?

Published on August 26, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Blog.

I just got the message today that I am now able to call domestic phone numbers from gmail. In one fell swoop, Google has become my default phone service. I can use my computer to call any cell phone or land line for free over the web. It essentially has taken all long distance service out the equation and has made me question the needs for skype, home phones, and even cell phone providers that don’t use VOIP. Telephone service has become data service. Minutes don’t matter and neither do phone numbers. All I need is a contact to make a connection.

And, I realize that this isn’t the first time that the ground underneath telephony has shifted. I get that Voice Over IP has been around a long time. And yet, it makes me realize that everything is a phone now. My computer, iPad, and iPod. Anything that connects to the web is a phone. Soon (with the release of the iTV in a few weeks), my TV will be a phone too.

I didn’t have a cell phone until 2003. I put it off because I thought that the expense wasn’t justified. I didn’t want to just make phone calls from more places. That wasn’t interesting to me when I could pick up any phone and have the same things as I would on a cell phone (minus the contact list). Why would I want a monthly fee to have instant access to others. And, maybe I was right to question the expense. Certainly, Google has.

They do not see the value in the phone calls themselves, but rather everything else around it. They see value in the ads in gmail. They see value in keeping us on any device connected to their networks rather than going anywhere else for our connections. We are moving to a place where phone calls essentially cost nothing. We are going to pay for data. We are going to pay by clicking on ads. And everything will continue to become more and more like what a phone was and not what a phone is today. The actual call will become such an easy portion of our communication that it will be built into every gadget and device we purchase. Phone service will cease. It will just be service.

Here is what I see as the future of our telephony:

We will be completely device independent. No matter where we are, if someone is trying to reach us via voice the things around us will ring. Refrigerators and tables will have confirm or deny buttons. And then we will have phone calls with the air around us because everything will be a microphone. It will just be too easy to accomplish. We are living in an internet of real objects, and each one will be able to connect to our Google Voice account (or whatever it becomes) because the alternative is to give up connection to some other service that is willing to do this for free. The value of communication will continue to be around the amount of data it requires to make these calls and not on how long we are on the phone. Because with our voice will will be sending files and video to one another to any screen that just happens to be around. And those bytes that we send will be where people make their money. We will pay for the privilege because we are already on the phone. We are already communicating and the cost of sharing has been completely obscured. And, sharing is what the future is all about.

And the future started today.

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Question 237 of 365: Is the username dying?

Published on August 25, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Blog.
Hackers (film)
Image via Wikipedia

I remember Hackers, the awkward mid-90′s movie, fondly.

It represented a do-it-yourself future in which those who understood computers could game everyone else. And, for the most part it got that right. It also figured out that the hacker culture was going to drive an open source understanding of information and responsibility. We are all in this (online communities and privacy issues) collectively and no one person should wield too much power online. The part that it didn’t get right (and maybe it didn’t really attempt to) was the idea that we would all need handles to protect our identities (and to be cool). As one character put it:

 I need a handle, man. I don't have an identity until I have a handle.

And with names like Crash Override, Acid Burn, Cereal Killer, and Lord Nikon how could you argue. Their handles, or usernames, seem to represent a time in which we couldn’t share things out in the open. It represented a time when social networks didn’t exist and all forums and chat were done in pseudo underground spaces that only those with access and interest could take part in. Grandmas (mostly) weren’t online posting pictures and blogging hadn’t happened yet. Usernames were the ways that we separated ourselves from “real life” because we could choose them. We didn’t have to worry about being ourselves because this was a world that rarely crossed over into people who were honest with one another about their true identities. The two spaces were separate and we liked them that way.

At the time of watching Hackers in 1995, my handle was The Atomic Angel. Seriously. I was convinced that it made me cooler and more respectable than just using my name to identify me. I used it on Bulletin Boards and in AOL chat. In short, I was awesome. And now, I look at what I use and it pales in comparison. I am Ben Wilkoff pretty much everywhere. Online and offline, I don’t have a single space that I am not completely me.

That is incredibly satisfying in some ways, but also a little terrifying. I don’t have to pretend to be someone I’m not and I don’t have to splinter my personality for every given account or service I join. But, I can’t get away from my own identity either. There is no hiding from my history and my mistakes. I have to take responsibility for all of it. I also don’t have the choice to leave and remove myself. Google remembers me.

The username is dying because of Facebook. We are who we are on there. We can pretend, but it is hard to pretend an entire life. It is hard to fake pictures and videos and a network of people that you communicate with. We always end up just reverting to ourselves. We are people, not handles, not usernames.

We aren’t there completely, but with things like Google Profiles, Facebook Connect/Platform and Open ID, we will have a single login to rule them all. We will be able to share our network and our connections with every new application built upon the single authentication device. And when that happens, we will no longer be setting up new identities for each new thing that comes along. It will all be tied to a single name, our own. It isn’t the one we chose, but it is the one that we must use in this new space where we can’t hide behind a fictional character or absurd nome de plume.

Hackers didn’t get it quite right. I have an identity without a handle. Sometimes, though, I’m not sure I want the identity I’ve got.

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Question 216 of 365: What are the right triggers?

Published on August 5, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
Tic tac toe.
Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been thinking a lot about if-then statements. Those little representations of causality that seem to crop up everywhere. If one thing happens then another will transpire. It is the easiest relationship to understand, far easier to get than the complex political or emotional relationships that populate the rest of our lives.

I first learned about them when I was learning how to program in high school. To me, they seemed like the most inelegant but simplest way of solving problems. When we were asked to develop a tic tac toe game that could play against the code of my peers, I wrote my code as a series of if-then statements, trying to figure out every possible situation and prepare what its reaction should be. As it turns out, I didn’t prepare for every situation because my code broke. I lost because other people didn’t write if-then statements, but rather elegant algorithms for strategy.

What I learned: if-then statements only work if you know all of the ifs.

More recently, I see if-then statements every day with my children. If they eat their dinner, then they can have dessert (if it’s a dessert night that is). If they hit one another, they go to time out. It isn’t as if I am trying to program them for every situation, but I am trying to ingrain the causal relationship of their actions into them. I know, though, that this relationship is made up. It is one that I am enforcing because I want them to understand the consequences of making bad choices. Those choices, however, are not really tied to the result. Healthy food does not lead to dessert for everyone. Some people don’t go to timeout for hitting; some people are rewarded for it ( like boxing or self-preservation).

What I am learning: If-then statements work best when you can control the then.

Today, I started writing some if-then statements of my own. I created a workflow that allowed me to email my computer at work and have that computer take a screenshot and email it back. All I needed were a couple of well thought out if-then statements and some really good triggers. You see, I needed that workflow to initiate all of the if-thens only once I triggered that I wanted it to happen. I needed to figure out what the first domino should be that would set off the reaction. The causal relationship only goes so far; the trigger is what makes it all happen. I needed to find a great trigger that I could do remotely and would allow me to validate that it was me supplying the request. Email was the only thing that met all of the requirements.

I will continue to learn: A good trigger is worth a hundred great if-then statements.

The greatest triggers are those that allow us to focus our attention on a single spot. They are so exacting that whole new sets of possibilities open up. They must be simple. They must be accessible. They must be choices that a child could make or a seasoned veteran of business. They must be like email or SMS, that do not require definition before implementation.

(This is why Google Wave failed. The trigger to take part was never there. There were lots of wonderful if-then statements in the middle filled with collaborative back and forth and use cases that was pretty engaging. The trigger, though, to go and spend time there was nonexistent. Without the simple push into and reason for starting a Wave, it was doomed to fail.)

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Question 209 of 365: What is the difference between a leak and a link?

Published on July 29, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
Logo used by Wikileaks
Image via Wikipedia

The wikileaks papers are exquisite. In their scope and its specificity, they are immense. I don’t fully understand all of their implications, but I know that they are not ordinary. They represent sharing on a magnitude that we have not seen for years. Or, at least that is what many mainstream media outlets would have us believe.

To me, there is a much bigger leak that is happening every day now. It is so massive in scope that it makes the wikilink papers look like a children’s book of content. The leak that I am referring to is the newly public Google Docs.

A few months ago, Google Docs decided to change the default settings for how public documents would be indexed into the Google search engine. At the time, Google was telling everyone that if they wanted to maintain anonymity for their documents, they should “unpublish” the content. What was still up in the air was how all of the public documents would be made available to anyone who cared to search for them.

I have been spending the last few days looking at public documents that include intricate notes of meetings, planning documents for major projects, and simple to do lists. It is amazing to me to seen just how many people’s ideas are indexed in their unfiltered form. The difference between a web page or a blog post and a google document is that people use documents for more intimate communication and collaborative purposes. They use them to plan things that perhaps only a few people would find important. In fact, they use them much like many of the military personnel used the wikilinks documents. The public Google Docs are the types of communication that were formerly private but now have been given searchability in a way that only Google can do.

And I think this is good. I think that much of our communication is too private. The default for collaborative notes should be public and published. The minutes for our organizations shouldn’t have to be vetted before they are posted. They should be saved every half second as they are in Google Docs.

In other words, this type of leak should continue. We should continue to tell the stories of successful collaboration and creation. We should continue to share drafts with the world, complete with comments and unedited passion. The instinct should be that we leak our communication as often as we can. I know that we aren’t trading secrets of national security, but perhaps by doing this we will be able to rise above the secrecy that has plagued organizations the world over since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Finally we will be able to harness our institutional memory and momentum and move beyond doing the same things over and over again. We will start to build upon one another and through the process of simple sharing and searching, we will all become reporters on the major story of our time: Information, when attained through learning and collaboration, is the largest power there is.

Oh, and just in case you don’t know how to search the public google docs, go to google and type site:docs.google.com and then whatever search terms make sense. You may be surprised by what you find.

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Question 206 of 365: Where is the open book?

Published on July 26, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
original title page of Jude the Obscure by Tho...
Image via Wikipedia

Every time I put my son down for bed, he sees fit to be totally uninterested without a good amount of singing of songs and reapplying blankets. In between each one of these tries at sleep during which he may or may not actually close his eyes, I head over to the bookshelf with all of my old novels on it. As my son considers sleep for the twelfth time, I open up The Great Gatsby or if I’m feeling slightly more ambitious, Plato’s Republic. I read through all of the passages that I have highlighted or notated, which is quite a bit.

Each of the stars next to a given paragraph is enough for me to jump right back in to the person that I was when I first read the book. And as my son wakes up and goes back down with severe regularity, I keep on coming back to the fact that I have absolutely no way to retrieve those moments of insight without opening up each one of those volumes and reading that exact underlining, with scribbles that only I would understand.

Every time I stumble upon something that meant a great deal to me in a book I haven’t read for years, I feel this pang of regret that I didn’t read it on a digital device with syncable notes and sharable annotations. I look at a lot of the works that I read as an english major and how many of them are in the public domain. Each one of those I could have downloaded as an ePub file and opened up on an iPad or Kindle, had they only existed.

I know the intimacy of books is desirable, but sometimes I just wish that I could export those intimate moments and savor them more regularly. I don’t want to have the parts of me that I left on those pages get left behind. I want them at my fingertips.

And I know I could use Evernote to scan in or take pictures of those notes, but I really think that misses the point. If I am only copying over the pages that mattered then, there is almost no hope that I will read the entire work again and discover new things about the author and myself. I want the whole context of these notations. I want the whole story of why I starred entire sections. I want to search through and find the threads that bind together all of my braces hanging in the margins like unfinished picture frames ready to be hung in my digital memory.

I believe that this kind of work will happen when I am not responsible for digitizing the content itself, but only the annotations. I mean that all of the books I read as a student must be available in Google Books or some other easily searchable format. Then I want q scanner that only looks in the margins and maps it to a page number and a paragraph.

It would look something like the formula that a good friend of mine wrote in high school for knowing what page number he should be on in his very different version of Jude the Obscure. The class set was larger print, but my friend’s copy was an antique. He used his graphing calculator to concoct a formula for going back and forth between his book and ours. It worked flawlessly. I want the same thing for my notes. I want a way to map the words I wrote with the ones that my famous counterparts penned. Only then will I be able to look at the little diagrams I made up in the 9th grade with anything but nostalgia and regret.

If I want my past to live into my ore went I need a way to map it to something living. All of the books on that bookshelf are dead. Without commenting and liking or metadata, those words are not going to assemble themselves into something of value. And I want to find that value again, if for no other reason than to see exacltly who I was and how all of that has changed now that I am reading exerpts wle my son sits in his room, screaming because the door is stuck on the inside.

Because, it has changed, believe me.

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25 Killer (iPad) Apps

Published on July 8, 2010, by in Uncategorized.
The brushed aluminum back of the iPad Wi-Fi
Image via Wikipedia

I have been putting this post off for a while now, but I am finally compelled to write about all of the apps that I am using  on a regular basis on my iPad. I am compelled by just how many conversations I have had about doing more than just consumption with the device. The following list of Apps are what make the iPad essential to me. They are what make it more than just a toy:

Before I go too deep, here are the apps that I have on my iPad right now (While there are a great many Jailbroken apps that I would recommend, I think that it would be somewhat counterproductive to highlight those in this blog post because the vast majority of users are never going to open up their device as I have.):

  1. Accuradio – This is the one and only radio service (other than the amazing NPR of course, which has been downloaded so many times for iPhone and iPad that it hardly needs mentioning in this list) that I have found which I do not find myself skipping through songs I have already heard or artists that I could care less about. I think it is because it is being curated by real people rather than by an algorithm. The stations vary widely, but my favorite is Future Perfect Radio.
  2. IM+ Lite – This is the best way to chat on the iPad (Multiple sessions at any given time, push notification, etc) I use Google Talk all of the time on my laptop, but this was the only reliable way to continue to do so on my iPad. And with backgrounding (either on a jailbroken iPad or in the iOS 4 which is forthcoming), you will never again miss out on a  conversation that you could have taken part in.
  3. Atomic Browser – This is one of the only apps I actually paid for (99 cents). I love the ability to choose tabs over Safari’s odd pagination system. I also love that I can change what the user agent is (this means that I make a website believe I’m running Internet Explorer or another desktop browser). This gives me the opportunity to see the desktop version of every website if I wish to do so, rather than the more limited versions of mobile sites.
  4. Air Sketch Free – Killer. This app allows me to draw on the iPad and have it display on any computer (or projector) that is on the same wifi network. This means that I can present without cords as well as I can allow everyone in a room to see the same thing that I see. Just awesome.
  5. DejaPlay – I have written about this app previously because I think that it is wonderful. It is the best way for me to view videos that my friends and colleagues are sharing on twitter and facebook. It compiles every link that is shared and puts them into an elegant video display. Rather than wasting time down the rabit hole that is YouTube, I can watch my network curate my video library in real time.
  6. GoodReader – Another pay app (also 99 cents) makes the iPad into an uploading and downloading machine. While the app was created for the purposes of viewing big documents, I pretty much exclusively use it for downloading files uploading them to other sites. Here is my favorite use case: I open up GoodReader and pull a file from my e-mail and put it up on Dropbox and then share it out with everyone I wish to. Another thing I do a lot is upload things to FTP sites and web servers that I maintain. This means that I don’t have to wait to get to my laptop to update a file. I also can get access to all of the files on my iPad from my computers without having to use a USB cord. (In fact, I haven’t synced my iPad, ever. I activated it once and that was it. I haven’t seen the need.)
  7. CloudBrowse – Although this is becoming less valuable to me as I find other interesting workarounds, this is still the only way to really get flash or Google Docs to play nicely on the iPad. Useful, if a bit crippled without a paid account.
  8. Dropbox – I have become more and more dependent upon this product to sync everything I need. Whenever I need to look at a file or send a link to someone, I just jump into the app and grab it. What else can I say… it just works.
  9. Sundry Notes – Best App. Seriously. It’s uses are incredibly far reaching. The only thing I can compare it to is Keynote, Smart Notebook, Word, and Skitch all rolled into one. From this app, I can take handwritten notes, typed notes, screenshots from any webpage, insert equations, and do voice recordings of what is going on. This app is ridiculously useful for meetings, brainstorming, presenting, and everything in-between. The export to PDF works great and you can even view your notes online if you want to sync with their service. Oh, and you can annotate PDF’s from your computer if you wanted to do that by syncing them in iTunes. Crazy awesome.
  10. Idea Sketch – A free and well laid out mind mapping software. Brainstorming in here is a pleasure. Export works great and you can even let other people edit your brainstorms if you e-mail them along.
  11. Adobe Ideas – The drawings and writing that you can do in this app are incredible compared to pretty much everything else out there. This is mostly because the app translates your jagged strokes into smooth vector graphics. My favorite part, though, is the enormous drawing area that you can zoom in and out of to draw and write in detail. I guess I would most compare it to an iPad version of the Prezi interface. Slick.
  12. Google Earth – I thought about not including this in the list because of how used it already is, but I think that if you have only used Google Earth on a laptop you are missing out on some of the best interactive learning that is available anywhere. I have spent hours just observing the differences between cities by zooming in and out on Denver and Kansas City. Feeling as though you can control the entire world is just cool.
  13. Web Projector – One more 99 cent app, here. Although I use my jailbroken capability to project anything on the iPad from the VGA cord, this is the cheapest way I have found to project anything that you can access from a webpage. It works very well and gets updated frequently.
  14. FeedlerRSS – Other than the web interface for Google Reader, this is my favorite (free) way to read the blogs I follow. It works well and lets you get through quite a number of posts in short order. My favorite thing about it is that I can actually see the blog posts in their original context, which is missing a lot of times when I just read it on Google’s site.
  15. Caster Free – I can’t tell you how cool this app is. You may just have to see it for yourself. It is a single stop for creating podcasts from multiple recordings, mixing them, processing them and then posting them to either an FTP site, a blog, or even Dropbox. I can’t believe that this one is free, actually. This is content creation at its finest on the iPad. (I know that AudioBoo and other services do this well, but you don’t own the files like you can here.)
  16. Story Kit – While this isn’t the most polished app in the list, it is one of the most interesting ways to create a book. It would work well with younger folks as well as with very simple content.
  17. Gooey – I use Google Docs to take notes quite often, or to leave myself reminders. This is a great way to add a Google Doc that is a quick note. There really aren’t a lot of features other than a pretty interface with this one, but I really like being able to save a quick note that syncs directly to Google Docs. I also like that it is free. Watch out, though, some versions of this app do crash. Good thing I only need it for a few minutes at a time.
  18. Granimator – Possibly the easiest, most creative art app. Basically, you paint with great drawings. It is meant to create backgrounds, but I think that it makes for a great backdrop for note taking or brainstorming. It also definitely gets my creative juices flowing to see someone else’s creation. Just cool.
  19. PaperDesk LT – If you just happen to have a VGA cord lying around for your iPad and are interested in projecting some drawing, text creation, or other brainstorming activities this is the perfect free app. I really like the way that you can save sessions for later to keep on projecting what you were working on even after you leave the app.
  20. Photopad – The best free image editor. All of the editing features that you would expect from a desktop editor with the ability to save right back to your Camera Roll. I can’t tell you how many screenshots I have rotated and cropped in here.
  21. uStream Viewer – Although we can’t record or stream from the iPad with the current version (although I swear you can see where the camera is supposed to go), I absolutely love being able to attend events in real time with chat. This is the only non-native iPad app in the list, but I think that it really works well in pixel doubled mode.
  22. iDraft – Adobe Ideas does pretty much everything I need from a drawing program and Sundry Notes does pretty much everything I need from a note taking application. So, what do I use iDraft for? Well, to make pretty diagrams and pdf notes with multiple pages. The simple pencil in this app makes it look like I am using a calligraphy pen, with the ability to make thin and thick marks by changing the speed of my gesture. The words I make in this app are nothing short of beautiful.
  23. JabberPad – Possibly the coolest concept for any app on the list. This app uses open protocols (including a jabber server) to create a collaborative whiteboard with any iPad on the same wifi network. Not only that, but you can chat with the other people in the same whiteboard. I can’t wait until you can contribute using your computer on the same network as well. Brilliant.
  24. Analytics (It looks like this is no longer free. I wouldn’t pay 6.99 for it, but it is pretty cool.) – While this isn’t really creating or consuming, it is really nice. This allows me to see my Google Analytics account (or at least the most important info to me) on the iPad. I love just taking a quick glance at how the different websites and blogs I maintain are doing and what I might need to change or highlight.
  25. Desktop Connect (pricey at 11.99, but worth it) – There are many free versions of VNC viewers (log into your desktop or laptop from the iPad) for the iPad, but this is the only one I have found that lets me login to a Mac from anywhere (at least for this cheap). This is because they have a desktop software called Easy Connect that actually authenticates using your Google Account. This means that not only can you see your desktop computer from your iPad no matter where you are in the world, but you can also see any of your friend’s (according to your Google Talk account) computers if they are online. They will have to give you access, but I think that the idea of actually seeing the network of your friend’s computers is stunning.

Well, that is it. That is my list of why the iPad matters right now. Again, there are some missing things that I need to Jailbreak my iPad for, but the ones I mentioned above are reason enough to buy and use an iPad and never look back. The iPad is not a device for mass consumption. It is a device like any other, completely dependent upon what you actually want to do with it. I want to create with it, so that is what I do. While not all of the apps above speak specifically to this need to create, they all inspire me to create more and better. Call me a fan boy if you must, but I believe in creating with whatever is available and it just so happens that I have an iPad.

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