Quick thoughts on the iPad

as I’m writing this on my iPhone on a flight across the country for a business meeting I can’t stop thinking how nice it would be to have a ipad right now (of course I would want the 3g version). I see a lot of potential for the iPad as a third device, but have decided to no get one just yet (mostly since I’m looking to replace my MacBook Air with a new MacBook Pro).

Travel is one of the few situations where I really see great utility for the iPad. In my current case, the iPhone is just a bit too small to really consume the content I would like (read it later, instapaper, kindle, & manage personal email) as well as battery life issues., Since I’m traveling my large bulky work laptop hauling my MacBook Air as well is just too much. Sure, one could say just use your work machine. First, I think most people would like to keep their personal files off of their employers computer, and second the battery life on average laptops isn’t that great (mine is less than 2).

This is where the ipad would shine, great battery life and about the size of a tablet of paper. Additionally, I would love to get an ipad rather than spend a sizable chunk of change on a pretty well equipped 15″ MacBook pro. If only there were a slick photo management app for the iPad that would sync with Aperture on my desktop (don’t need the editing features, just want to be able to do the organization projects, flagging, rating, metadata) I wouldn’t have a need for a MacBook pro. Humm.. there’s an app idea for someone. only problem then is storage space, which is where a push to the could would be really helpful.

Read it later digest

I often find myself doing triage on online content either out of Google Reader or Twitter, and the two services I use to manage my deferred content are Instapaper and Read It Later. I primarily use instapaper for long form content and articles without many graphics (e.g. from The Atlantic). For me, Instapaper saves content for when I purposefully take time to sit down and read. On the other hand, I use Read It Later on a daily basis for all the short web content, videos I want to watch later but not send to Boxee, and things I should do while I am on another machine.

Due to the volume of content I save to Read It Later it’s often hard to find what I want to read. The article(s) I’m looking for always seem to be buried in different places in my list. A while ago I started playing with the beta version of Read It Later Digest, the developers answer for users with problems like mine. Digest is a web-based reading tool which automatically categorizes links you’ve saved into topics. From the site, you can customize your topics and read within each topic. Moreover, the site allows one to access the content without leaving the digest page in a text only version which is a huge time saver.

Digest allows me to read content in a slimmed down formant very quickly. If I want to check out what’s going on in the sailing world, I just head over to my sailing topic. If I want to read through all the posts from the NYT Deal Book blog I saved out of reader this morning I just visit that topic. Read it later digest has significantly improved my efficiency and enjoyment of reading all the links I’ve saved. I’m really excited to see how Nate, the developer, will incorporate Digest into the iPhone/iPad version.

Reducing the content I consume for more simple living

Lately through my “personal metadata experiment” I have been noticing I am spending a lot of time-consuming content that I feel I have a NEED to consume. The majority of this content is news (via google reader and email alerts), twitter, and podcasts. While I really do love consuming this content it take a lot of time out of my day, furthermore, it is a never-ending fire hose of data. As a result, I’m always left feeling like there is more data that I NEED to consume and it ends up taking time away from other tasks and interactions I would rather be doing.

So this weekend I have been going through my google reader list, newsletters, and people I am following on Twitter and unsubscribing from everything that feel I don’t NEED to read or follow. I’m going to keep a list of the feeds and people who I have unsubscribed from in case I find myself needing to add these sources back. Taking an approach of extreme cutting, and then adding back as need be. This is one step I am taking in an effort to simplify parts of my life and provide more time for productive tasks and to spend less time trying to “keep current”.

One thing that I am looking for are suggestions of highly refined, high quality, and low volume RSS feeds you enjoy consuming.

Pandora vs. Last.fm round 1

I’m late to the party, I know. These two online music providers have been around for some time, and while have known about them I’ve never really taken the time to understand them. I don’t have a large music collection managed through iTunes; I’d say it’s about average sized, and I go through phases where I would add a lot of new music for a few weeks then add nothing for weeks. So new music discovery is often sporadic, and for the last year or so I have left the task to podcasts like All Songs Considered and those compiled by some of my favorite DJ’s. I used podcasts because they are easy; iTunes manages them, downloads them, removes them, and transfers them to my iPhone seamlessly. I tend to do most of my listening while working and for some reason I could not get Pandora to play in Firefox or internet explorer while in the office. I blamed our security policies but never really spent much time trying. I also did not try last.fm as Pandora has always been explained to me as the simpler to use service of the two. I didn’t want to install their plug-in to only find out I couldn’t listen at work.

iTunes podcast sharing between computers

I listen/ watch a LOT of podcasts and mange them through iTunes on my primary mac. I find it pretty easy to keep current on the audio ones by listening to them on my iPhone while working throughout the day, but the video podcasts just seem to pile up because they require more attention and are harder to multi-task to. As a result, they rarely get watched on my iPhone, in fact I don’t even sync most of them.

So I have been looking for a workflow solution to keep current and get through the backlog of video podcasts. While I spend a good amount of time in the mornings and evenings at my primary mac I find myself using most of the screen real estate for photo processing or other tasks which doesn’t leave me with a lot of room to play the video podcasts on this machine. Moreover, unlike audio podcasts, I have found when playing a video in a separate window iTunes does not advance to the next video when the current one finishes playing. This requires a lot of back and forth between what I’m working on and iTunes.

My new camera – Canon S90

I just received my new camera, a Canon PowerShot S90, after much debate. Beginning a few months ago I started to think about a new camera. I was primarily looking for a smaller camera (as compared to my Canon 50D), something that I could cary around on a daily or near daily basis, with good image quality, and manual controls. The first question I faced was what type of camera to get. The options I considered were a point and shoot, micro four-thirds, or a specialized compact camera (basically a Sigma DP-1/2).

Unboxing of my latest toy Canon S90

Unboxing of my latest toy, Canon S90. I know I shouldn’t have, but couldn’t help myself. This means I’ll have to test I out some to see if it’s worth keeping. More posts to come.

Flickr iPhone app

I am really happy to see that Flickr.com released an iPhone app some time back. Since it’s release I’ve spent a little bit of time with it. The app is a great way to view other users pictures, and that is a plus. However, what continues to boggle my mind with this app, even in the latest release, is when you try to upload a photo from your own library the app replaces the time the photo was taken with the current date and time and will not upload the photos geolocation data (in the previous version it would always use the location you were uploading the photo from, now in the latest version you can turn that off, but it does not seem to use the embedded geolocation of the photo). So I am left wondering why on earth is Flickr’s app messing with the EXIF data of my photos? It makes absolutely no sense.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Flickr Officially Comes to the iPhone (mashable.com)
• Flickr iPhone App (marcforrest.com)

Auto capitalizing an “i” on a Mac

Since switching to a Mac as my personal PC more than a year ago I really haven’t looked back. The only thing I really miss is the auto correction, especially  of the “i”. Anyone know how to set up a Mac to auto capitalize an “I”?

365 project update – looking for daily upload tips.

Lately I’ve been pretty bad about not only posting photos from my 365 but also taking the photos. So I’m trying to think of some ways to speed up my posting and enable quicker shots, even with a hectic schedule.

I think my first goal will be to try daily posting of shots, hoping that will keep me more up-to-date.  Starting today you should be seeing a post for each day, come up (there is some backlog to get through over the next few days).

However, I do find it to be a time-consuming process to complete the work-flow of uploading photos into Aperture, processing, and then to the web.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to create a more efficient work-flow?