1. Evernote: Its more than an iPad app, its a fantastic note management system. Almost like my second brain. Great for receipts, ideas, passwords, random info that’s important but has no place, etc.
2. Penultimate: Great hand-writing app for notes.
3. IM+: Great app for instant messaging across AOL, Yahoo, MSN, GTalk, Facebook, Skype, Twitter with Push Notifications
4. ToDo: Great daily planner that integrates with the site, www.Toodledo.com
5. 1000 Experiences: Neat travel-idea app from Lonely Planet
6. iWork Apps (Keynote/Pages/Numbers): Good apps to run/edit Powerpoint, Word Docs, and Spreadsheets. Keynote also outputs to VGA
7. ArtStudio: Nice if you like drawing
8. WebMD: Beautiful app to help you become a hypochondriac :)
9. Pulse: Beautiful RSS reader, but only as good as the RSS feeds you read. If you read mostly commercial feeds, then it isn’t as great because commercial places really limit the amount of data they’ll share in a feed
10. Wikipanion: Nice Free app for searching Wikipedia
11. Amazon: My fav place to shop and the iPad app makes the experience smooth as silk
12. Goodreader: Nice app that connects to your mail server and lots of other services for mobile file access. It can read PDF (but so can iBook) and many other file formats. I combine ‘Dropbox’ and Goodreader as my main method for reading lots of files/docs on my iPad.

And yes, I play games too - but mostly 2 player with my wife :) The most fun 2 player games (for me) are:

1. WTD: Awesome ‘Whats the Difference’ game
2. Harbor Master: Absolutely crazy when you’re playing with two people
3. Word Slam: Fun, but super intense. I start sweating when I play.
4. FriendSheep: At first I thought it was lame, but its actually hilarious when you actually play. Moreover, its physically exhausting :)
5. CheckersHD: Basic but fun. I like the fact that it enforces the ‘Force Jump’ rule
6. Air Hockey: The board is a little short, but definitely fun.

Enjoy!

Here’s a great part…

“I just want to be frank this week… you don’t have to give. 93% of you hear me ask for donations and you get the podcast week after week and you never give… and if you don’t give this time, I’m not going to pretend, nothing bad will happen. The podcast is going to be here next week, someone else will give. That is the rational, truthful fact of the situation”

And it continues with more frank, thought-provoking comments. Ultimately, they need to cover the cost of what everyone is enjoying. It even says that $5 will cover your share of the entire year…

Whether you’re a consumer of content OR a content creator, I strongly recommend you listen:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/sites/all/play_music/play_full.php?play=102

Posted via email from The Word of Holland

After HEAVY usage over the past 72 hours, here are my thoughts:

Setting up the iPad for my Trip
Since I already have an iPod Touch, it was easy for me to load up the iPad with fresh content in preparation for my trip. I loaded up a series of Video Podcasts, 3 movies (Lord of the Rings, of course), and my music. Basically, I treated it like an iPod/iPhone - so the learning curve was non-existent if you already have one of them. If you don’t, then you’ll need to get familiar with iTunes.

Quick Primer from a Veteran
The App Store has thousands of Apps, but many aren’t iPad ready yet. Following the advice of some friends (thanks Chip), combined with some personal exploration, I found a lot of great apps to get me started (all listed below). For purposes of this post, I outlined the ones that were most important on my trip.

[Most Important]

• Mail (Included with iPad): Email Program
• Evernote (Free): Personal Life Organizer
• Netflix (Free App, Requires Monthly Plan): Watch Movies Instantly Over the Internet
• IM+ ($9.99): Messenger program (AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Skype, GTalk, Facebook, Twitter, etc)
• Adobe Ideas (Free): Screen drawing
• Good Reader ($0.99): File Access Program (Dropbox, Google Docs, FTP, iDisk, etc.)
• Naturescape (Free): Background noise for sleep
• WTD (Free): Fun game that is often played in Bars to locate ‘ Whats the Difference’

[Fun to Have]

• NPR, USA Today, BBC News, ABC Video, Pandora Music, Epicurious, Wikipanion, The Weather Channel, Dragon Dictation, IMDb, WTD, Pages, Harbor Master, Virtuoso Free (Keyboard)

My first ‘Ah-ha’ Moment
Like any new kid with a toy, I took the iPad to show off everywhere on the first day. I took the afternoon off and treated my mother to the movies with the iPad in tow. She wasn’t really impressed (kept saying it was a big iPod) until we were sitting in the theater, waiting for the movie to start and I showed her the game WTD (What’s the Difference). As we waited for the movie, the iPad’s beautiful screen allowed us to play WTD and we had a blast. This experience was unique because it wouldn’t have been a fun game on my phone/iPod and it would be lame to take a laptop to the movies.

Cracking the Hard Case
My wife, much to my dismay, isn’t a gadget lover & my affairs with various devices often garner me looks ranging from sympathy to disdain :) When I told her I spent $1000 on an iPad, she was shocked. (PS: Don’t fool yourself, you’ll spend $1000 by the time you buy accessories and software for the iPad).

However, she’s already experienced her first unique ‘Ah-ha’ moment with the iPad. Each morning, she gets up and goes to the computer (downstairs) or boots up the laptop in the bedroom (it won’t properly sleep, so I know it could be a little easier). With the iPad, she can now run The Weather Channel app and instantly gets the weather, including hourly breakdowns. The Apps interface is fantastic & since it remembers our location, much better than going to a website. There’s hope she’ll finally approve.

At the Airport
So the day of the trip arrives, and I can’t bring myself to part with my laptop - so I bring it with me as a backup to the iPad. In security, I had to put the iPad in a bin with the laptop (so they could scan it) which I found interesting - they’re treating it more like a laptop than a phone.

When I get to my seat, I run into a problem - no internet. For my WiFi only iPad, this would become a common theme for me, so I highly RECOMMEND getting the 3G version if you can afford the monthly coverage. But I digress…

Luckily, Boingo has an iPhone app that is really awesome. In the past, I thought Boingo was a rip off. To use the internet for an hour before my flight, I had to pay $7.95 for an entire month? Well, they’ve solved the problem - now, I can buy a single hour for $1.99. This gives me a price point that made it awesome to use the internet for 1 hour, pay a great price, and feel good about the experience (plus, they actually give you 1 hour for free).

Needless to say, web surfing & handling email is awesome on the iPad, so I won’t bore you with the user experience details.

On the Plane
Without internet on the plane, the iPad becomes a lot less useful as a work device - especially when all of my work applications are web based. So, I switched over to entertainment mode. I watched all of my Video Podcasts and actually learned about an awesome team-building exercise called the Marshmallow Challenge (http://www.marshmallowchallenge.com) from a TED Talk. To make sure I didn’t forget to try it out in the future, I opened up Evernote and made a quick note that would Sync back with the service when I got WiFi again (thus making it available to all of my other devices in the future).

Note: I could have done all of this with my iPod Touch, but watching the Video Podcasts is better on a larger screen.

At the Hotel, First Night
I arrived the night before the conference & after settling in for the night, I turned on the hotel TV. Nothing good was showing, even on HBO. So, I opened up Netflix on my iPad and watched one of the suggested movies that I knew my wife wouldn’t watch with me at home :) As I laid in bed, I realized I was comfortably watching a full movie on a great screen without my hands (thanks to the innovative Apple Case). More important, I didn’t spend any money renting a movie from their movie service ($9.99 a movie!!!).

Trying to Sleep
No matter how nice a hotel, you can still hear people in the hallways. To solve this problem, I typically leave the TV on. Unfortunately, this leads to me waking up multiple times in the night if the TV programming becomes too loud or if the glow of the screen stirs me from sleep. After I got done watching Netflix, I noticed an App I originally had on my iPod called Naturescape. Its a background sound application that I originally got to help my 1 year old sleep (plugged into speakers via my iPod). I decided to try it out with the iPad (which has external speakers) and it was awesome - I drifted off to sleep and slept the entire night.

Conference Day, Portability
As I suspected, the size made it very easy to take into my meetings without anyone noticing - it looks just like a notepad if you have it in a case. I was surprised at how liberating it felt to not carry a laptop bag around all day. Until you use one, you can’t fully appreciate this. Also, using my iPad helped me recognize three things about myself as a laptop user:

1. Having a laptop screen ‘up’ actually makes meeting someone feel less personal since part of their profile is blocked (and its worse if you both have one up).
2. I never realized how loud people (including) myself type until you’ve been working on an iPad where typing is silent. This was very apparent in some of the breakout sessions.
3. When you own a laptop, you let it dictate where you sit. Other attendees wanted to sit near a power source & always had to have a table/flat surface. The iPad allowed me to sit anywhere and comfortably work in any position. While I know I could keep a laptop in my lap, I don’t really like how hot my MacBook makes my legs, especially when I’m already wearing a sports coat :)

Actually doing work

Email & Contacts
As the CEO of CentreSource, my computing needs revolve around communications. I’m a heavy email user & I can honestly say that ’Mail’ (default mail program on the iPad) worked great. After I got a little help (thanks Chip, again), I got the iPad to talk with our Google Apps account (similar to Exchange) and it gave me access to all of my email and contacts. Using the mail App was fast, easy, and the push notifications (alerts you about new mail without having the App open) kept me from checking my email obsessively (as I do on my laptop).

Instant Messaging, Social Networks
Next, I have to keep in touch with my staff, family, and friends. I downloaded a program called IM+ and it is the best chat program I’ve ever used - even better than the ones I’ve used on my laptop. I really appreciated having my AOL, MSN, Yahoo, GTalk, Skype, Facebook, and Twitter contacts all in one place. This ultimately made Twitterific (another App) irrelevant AND it makes me much more likely to chat with people on Facebook. Note: The App was a little buggy, so I’m hoping future versions add more stability. If they ever add Blackberry Messenger, I’ll die and go to heaven.

Screen Capture + Markup
Next, someone needed me to review some creative work for a client campaign & it quickly became difficult for me to communicate the changes I wanted made. To help the conversation, I took a sceenshot of the webpage (Press HOME+POWER at the same time) and then opened up the image in the App Adobe Ideas. I then used my finger to markup the image, followed by 2 taps to email the markup to my staff. I can’t even do that easily on my laptop.

Information Handling
I could spend forever writing the virtues of Evernote, but for this post - I’ll simply say that taking notes on Evernote via the iPad was awesome. In each conference session, I took notes in the iPad Evernote app + then immediately sent them to our group. Moreover, it was nice that Evernote was continuously sync’ing in the background (thus making it available on my other computers & phone) instantly. Specific to the iPad, there was a point where I saw an interesting logo layout & decided to draw it on my iPad for later reference via Evernote. (Very specific to my need, but shows that my ‘use cases’ were already expanding to include hand drawn notes)

For file access, I used a program called GoodReader & it gave me access to my Google Docs, all my Email Attachments, Dropbox (cloud file storage), and my local home computers. It lets you read a large number of file types & it magically integrates with my other iPad apps - thus giving you access to files across the entire iPad experience.

Battery Life
It’s one thing to hear that a device has an 11+ hour battery life, but its far more impactful to actually experience it. It was amazing to leave the room at 8am with only my iPad, use it heavily ALL day (I’m not kidding, I was using it 90% of the time), and have 30% battery left when I ended the day at 6pm. No cords, no plugs, no worries.

Writing my Review
Now that 72 hours is up, I decided to write this review and it brings me to 2 negative points:

1. Typing on the iPad is rough - it gets better/easier, but don’t fool yourself if you think you’ll be burning up the keyboard. I’m probably 50% slower typing on it with LOTS of typos :) However, I bought the optional bluetooth keyboard & if you can get past people asking you why you don’t just use a laptop, its actually a great experience to use the wireless keyboard for larger bodies of text (like this)
2. Without Internet, the device becomes a lot less valuable to a power user or business traveler (in my opinion). If you plan on using it heavily, take my advice and get the 3G model - it will make your experience so much better.

One last thing
For Business users, I was amazed that the iPad already has a Citrix App, a GoToMeeting App, Exchange Integration (from the latest iPhone OS), and a very functional office suite: Pages (word processing), Keynote (Powerpoint), and Numbers (spreadsheet).

Many of the apps on the iPad are still very buggy - I think my iPod Touch has crashed maybe once in its entire life, but I can get the iPad Apps to crash 4-5 times a day (especially Evernote & Netflix)

Hope you enjoyed :)

NLH

Sent from my iPad

Posted via email from nicholasholland’s posterous

Instead of explaining why, let me just post the message below and say for the record: I want to encourage Spammers to add more ’stories’ to their messages. Its not like I can get you to stop, so you might as well entertain me if you’re going to pollute my inbox. Plus, it makes me feel like I actually got a little ‘personal reading’ in for the day :)

—

Innebago now, and we have to make something out of her.” “You’re so
good-natured, ‘Poha,” said Sahwah.
“I wish I could like everybody the

way you do.”
Hinpoha opened
her mouth to reply, but instead uttered a prolonged “Ow-oo-oo-oo!”
They were sitting on a log when the above conversation took place,
and Hinpoha had poked her hand into the hollow end. Now she drew it
out hastily and began to
dance around, shaking her hand violently. “Oh, what is it?” cried
Sahwah. “Bees!”
shrieked Hinpoha. “Run for your life!” An angry buzz sounded from the
log and
the bees began crawling out at the end. Hinpoha fled through the
woods with Sahwah close at her heels. By the time they reached camp
Hinpoha’s hand was swelled all out of shape. It was all she could
do to repress a cry of pain. Nyoda rose
quickly when she took in the situation. “Get some moist
clay at once,” she commanded. “There is some in the woods behind the
shack.” Sahwah sped after the clay and returned with a large lump.
“Now you make mud pies until the inflammation is drawn out of your
hand,”
said Nyoda. Hinpoha dutifully sat down beside Migwan and played in
the clay. After she had rolled it around in her hand awhile it became
a beautiful consistency for modeling, so she began
making statuettes of the different girls. She had a great deal of
aptness in modeling and managed to make her figures resemble somewhat
the girls they
were supposed to represent. She became so absorbed in her new
occupation that she forgot the burning pain in her hand, and
gradually the swelling went down. Sahwah came along to see how she
was feeling and exclaimed in delight at the statuettes. Hinpoha held
up her hand
warningly, for Migwan was asleep. Sahwah promptly fell

to making hand signs of admiration.
Hinpoha laughed at her antics, and falling into
her mood, arrayed her figures in a semicircle on the ground, and
sitting cross-legged behind them, made a gesture to intimate that
they were
for sale

THE END
[Followed by a malicious attachment called Pruning.zip - SWEET]

By: Unknown
January 10, 2002

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year.

Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.

Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: Get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet. However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers.

Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has. I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor’s house that he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.

Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.

You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can’t happen very often.

Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.

PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I’ve given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can’t handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.

PPS: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case.

Now that we’ve completed the project/journey, I’m humbled and reminded of how difficult it is to actually develop and launch a ‘finished’ product that others will use on a daily basis. We do this for clients every day, but its easy to forget just how much goes into a project beyond the raw idea and development.

With gpsAssassin, I was amazed at the difficulty of small things like:

1. Setting up the LLC
2. Creating a basic infrastructure for Email, Documentation, etc.
3. Establishing an email marketing process

Notice how I didn’t say anything about ‘developing the game’… While that was amazingly difficult in itself, it was something that you EXPECTED to take time. On the other hand, I never expected customer support to take up 4+ hours per week. I never expected basic information management to take hours upon hours. It all takes soooooo much time.

So, what can I tell those that want to start a business (or even a second one). Nothing of revelation, but I can say it with more conviction:

1. Your new endeavor will take 4x as long as you initially think (and even longer if you’re not a conservative planner)
2. Double your expected budget. Then make sure you can find double that should the need arise. Expenses are everywhere…
3. Tenacity will set you free. There will be MANY dark days when you think you’ll never finish or that all the cards are stacked against you. The good news: You CAN finish! The bad news: Yes, all the cards are stacked against you - deal with it.
4. Accept the things you cannot control and work around them. This is particularly relevant if you’re building iPhone apps!

Last: Side projects have a strange tendency to become primary projects. When this happens, something else in your life will require sacrifice. In my case, the first sacrifice was my sleep, followed by family time, and capped off with a reduction in my work focus. It happens, so be ready to deal with it or you’ll need to keep your side project in its place.

PS: To all the entrepreneurs that I’ve worked with in the past 6 years… I’m sorry :) The further I got away from my ’start up’ days, the more I forgot about all the struggles of entrepreneurship. gpsAssassin gave me a chance to reconnect with my roots and it was a heaping dose of humility :)

Utilities
Firefox (http://www.mozilla.com) - Browser
Azureus (http://azureus.sourceforge.net) - BitTorrent
FileZilla (http://www.FileZilla.com) - FTP Client
CLAMWIN (http://www.clamwin.com) - Open Source Anti-Virus
TightVNC (http://www.tightvnc.com) - Remote computer control

Communication
Pidgin (http://www.pidgin.im) - Multi Chat
Thunderbird (http://www.mozillamessaging.com) - Email Suite
Wordpress (http://www.wordpress.org) - Blog Platform

Entertainment
Miro (http://www.getmiro.com) - Media Player (HD Content)
Tremulous (http://tremulous.net) - First Person Shooter Game
LinCity (http://lincity-ng.berlios.de/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) - Sim City
FlightGear (http://flightgear.org) - Flight Simulator

Graphics
Paint.net (http://www.getpaint.net) - Image Editing
GIMP (http://www.gimp.org) - Image Editing
Blender 3D (http://www.blender.org) - 3D Simulator
Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org) - Vector Graphics Editor (like Illustrator/CorelDraw)

Audio/Video
MediaCoder (http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/dl/dvdcss.html) - Media Transcoder
Handbrake (http://handbrake.fr) - DVD Backup
Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net) - Multi Track Audio Editor
VLC Media Player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/) - Super Media Player, Caster

Productivity
OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org) - Office Suite
Bluemarine (http://bluemarine.tidalwave.it) - Photo Manager

Enterprise
SugarCRM (http://www.sugarcrm.com) - Enterprise CRM
Drupal (http://www.drupal.org) - Web Publishing, Content Management
Asterisk (http://www.asterisk.org) - Open Source Phone System
Zarafa (http://zarafa.com) - Exchange Competitor

Digital Nashville asked me to speak on the subject at their next Education Series. You can see the invite on Facebook (here) or on the actual Digital Nashville site (here). I’ll go through a variety of scenarios where Open Source technologies provide a wonderful solution - ranging from work-related to fun!

Please answer the following questions to your satisfaction:

1. Why are analytics important. Give examples (beyond the obvious) of how people could use Analytics to serve a business purpose of sales, marketing, and/or operations.

2. What are three ways, beyond basic text, companies can use the Internet to enhance their sales efforts?

3. What is all the buzz about Web 2.0 and why is everyone buzzing?

4. Give three reasons why Social sites have experienced such a boom in the last 5 years.

5. Explain the significance of the terms listed below. Also, list three existing services/examples for each: - Video Sharing - Microblogging - Social Bookmarking - Blogging - RSS Aggregation - XML/RDF Feeds - Analytics (skip the importance since you answered #1) - image Sharing - Mash ups - Content Management System - PHP Framework - Grid / Scalable Computing (hint: Amazon S3/EC2)

6. What is Web 3.0 and why is it important?