iPompeii & Moodboards

I thought I'd jabber an update on our iPad experiences. They're cranking out somewhere between 2 and 3 million of these things a month now, and that's going up as they launch in other countries and other stores (Target, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy soon).

iPads are being used now for all kinds of crazy things. Our two each get lots of finger pokes every day doing normal things like email, reading, and playing games, but people and companies are putting them to use in all kinds of innovative ways.

One restaurant has it's wine list, along with customer reviews of the wines and even the ordering of the wines, right on iPads they hand out to the diners. They say their wine sales have really gone up since they started that, and the customers love being able to read reviews of the wines before they choose. Brilliant!
You can rent one with special tour software at the Eiffel Tour.

The woman in the photo above is using hers to catalog and track objects found in the Pompeii dig she is on. All entries go right into the network for others to see immediately. Portable, solid, 10-hour battery life. Why not?

Here are some of our favorite uses:

- Heather plays Wonder Radio on hers in the bathroom every morning as she gets ready for work. Wonder turns iPad into a portable radio that streams 20,000 stations, including all of ours in Detroit.

- We have classic Dr Seuss and other books on them and the kids love reading them at bedtime. They're interactive and some even have mini games that relate to the story. Jack & The Beanstalk is Maddie's favorite at the moment.

- Montezuma, a sweet match-three game that has HB and I both addicted. Which is really bad when you don't have any free time.

- We both read on them. I love reading books on the big screen. The coolest thing is the dictionary so you can look up words as you read. I do that constantly.

- I also run most of my photo biz on mine. I can do everything but edit the photos and balance my books...and I'm hoping QuickBooks gets their act together and lets me do that one on the iPad too soon. I keep sample photos on it to show customers. I have my whole pricing database on it. I have Evernote and can access the entirety of my document collection for the business, all statements, checks, receipts, etc all scanned in to Evernote and searchable. My GTD software (OmniFocus) is on there, keeping me on time with my projects. All of this stuff is cloud-linked and stored online so if I ever lost the device I wouldn't lose a single piece of data. I'd just do the "remote wipe" to clear it wherever it was and move on.

- Recipes. Perfect for the kitchen. And it fits in a cookbook stand :) My favorite food app is Epicurious, but Weber has a great grilling guide.

- Food Tracking...I use My Net Diary to track everything I eat. I also use an app to track my blood pressure (which is 120/67 if you must know).

- Shopping! Amazon has a great app, which I throw money at every now and then :) I can see all my wish and gift lists, etc. Dangerous.

- When you get as many packages as we do, you need an app like Deliveries, that tracks them all and even shows you where in the country they are on the map.

- When I need to link up with The Beast (my Mac Pro) I use iTeleport or LogMeIn to access it from the iPad from anywhere. This has saved by ass a few times when I forgot some file or another, just log in and mail it to myself!

- Home Décor...this one is really cool. I have an app that stores all the colors of my home in it, and even the photos that hang on the walls. That way I can shop for new home stuff and know how it looks with out décor. Sweet.

- Moodboard. Ever hear of these? Designers use them to gather together scraps of stuff and colors to create a theme or mood for a project. I use this app for wedding album color schemes and picking out matte colors.

- Words with Friends. We don't have much time as I said, but one thing Heather and I do that is so cute is play this game (which is almost exactly like Scrabble) with each other. You can make a move and it tells the other person and they take their turn whenever they have the time. You can even send little chats along with your turn. It allows us to interact in non-realtime when we're busy, which I think is better than not interacting at all :)

Whew. There's lots more but this is a very boring post for anyone but me and I'll spare you the rest. Suffice it to say these little shiny tablets have really burrowed their way into our lives. I think that's because they play by our rules, always lying there ready to spring to life and help us do something new.