I am in the process of getting my iPad set up as an actual tool (in order to allow me to get more things done…). Besides still being somewhere on the learning curve, I’ve found that there are some things which I can do better on the iPad. But there are a few niggling things left to master on this computer ‘appliance’. To get things done on the iPad, I needed to ensure that I had connections to all of my data (on my iPhone, my NetBook, and several sites I have ‘in the cloud’). So far, I have succeeded well enough…

To allow this sort of connectedness I have found several apps for the iPad which are worth looking at. They include (for me), tools to access bookmarks, passwords, my news, schedules and calendars, and to easily move documents and information to or from any of the rest of my computer hardware.

Here are some of the tools I am currently using:

Dropbox: this is my prime source of cloud storage, synced across my iPad, iPhone, NetBook, Web, and my old laptop. I use the free version to keep all of my documents (I have 2 gigabytes of free storage!). The iPad app works just as well as the iPhone and PC applications.

EverNote: is another source of cloud storage and syncing. I keep all kinds of things in my full version of EverNote (I can upload 500 Meg @ month!). I use my iPhone to ‘scan’ every document I receive, and I have this (once again) on all of my other computers and phone.

Instapaper: I am still using Read it later (the free version), and find that they are complimentary, in that Instapaper is great for long text passages, and Read it later is good for transient online material to review later. Instapaper is a wonderful tool to take the things I find online and render them as text (making it much less ‘busy’ to read). And since all of these pages are online (once again synced in the cloud), there is almost no reason to delete anything…ever. Between this tool, EverNote, and Gmail, I never really have to worry about ‘keeping too much stuff’.

LastPass: the iPad app isn’t that great (yet…), but since I use it on all of my other computers, I am stuck with it (as it is). While there remains more to make this a really useful implementation on the iPad, it gets the job done… LastPass is important to me in that I still have access across all of my computers, and while I would expect an upgrade i8n the iPad app sooner or later (it is basically the same thing as the iPhone app…just stretched larger…). I still find that this is easily the best tool for use with Firefox (on my NetBook).

Speaking of Firefox, while there isn’t an app or either the iPhone or iPad (yet…) there is an application(Firefox home) I use on both of them which allows me to keep track of my Firefox bookmarks, history, and even the tabs I have open (or at least the last time I had it open…). The iPad has me stuck with Safari. This is a workable browser, but I have gotten so used to Firefox-like customization… (Sigh). I have found that there are a few things which I can do to make my life with this browser somewhat usable, such as: there is an Instapaper bookmarklet (on my bookmarks bar) which allows me to select pages to enter into my Instapaper article list.

Diigo: this bookmarklet allows me to search through my Diigo bookmarks, and to bookmark whichever site I am at. Speaking of Diigo, I find that this online bookmarking tool to be akin to Delicious on steroids. I can bookmark sites, leave ‘postit-like’ notes on websites, highlight selected passages and for me, the most important: I can create subgroups of links. These subgroups are a very useful tool when collating information on specific topics. I can even generate reports of these selected links.

I access to all of the Google Apps I use (Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Buzz, Google Books, Picasa, Google Talk, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Earth, etc.). This might be a more complex topic as time goes on, in that Apple and Google are not on the best of terms these days (case in point, allegedly Steve Jobs has decided that there will never be a Picasa app for the iPad…). This means that I have a number of ‘work around’ applications I have to deal with… (Sigh).

Finally there are a couple apps which are much more iPad centric and are looking to be quite worthwhile.

Dragon Dictation (just like the iPhone app) is a reasonably good speech to text rendering app. I may even ‘write’ a post to this blog using this someday… I haven’t gotten enough experience using this app (yet) to be able to say whether the previous sentence was supposed to be meant as sardonic or not. I’ve heard (online) that it might be problematic to try to create more than a few paragraphs with this app…this might be an interesting experiment to conduct

GoodReader: This iPad app is a sort of Swiss army knife for document formats. I can open almost any file format which I could open with my PC using this free app! I also have this syncing with my DropBox and Google Docs sites. Along with DropBox and most of the Google Apps, this is a great (read: free!) application.

as you can already see, i have a lot of redundancy with regard to my access to my online storage (better safe than sorry…).

DocumentsToGo: I have found that with the iPad there is still a need to create some content (i.e. to write something every once in a while…), with this app, I can save whatever I create as a DOCX file to open natively in Microsoft Word (I can also deal with Excel and PowerPoint files in the same way!). Besides being cheaper than the Apple equivalents, it also integrates with all of my cloud storage.

Atomic Web Browser: This lite version of the Atomic Web Browser serves my needs as a backup to the Apple Safari browser which the iPad comes with. While it might not seem too important to some, having the ability to use tabs in a browser (such as with Google Chrome or Firefox) is something which I have gotten quite used to over the years. With this little browser, I can still deal with searching for information just like on a PC (i.e. something which I have near my heart…so far).

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