App, app and away

Posted: January 21, 2011 in iPad, Technology
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New to iPad? Overwhelmed by the app store? Here are some to get you started.

Given that Apple flogged some 7 million of them leading up to Christmas, it wasn’t surprising that many of my friends ended up with a shiny iPad in their stockings. What was surprising was how many of them were not Mac users but instantly fell in love with the iPad and as a result have either switched to Macs or are planning to do so.

Needless to say I’ve had calls or emails from several of them asking how to do one thing or another. Most of them, faced with the overwhelming choice of the App Store, simply want to know what are the best apps to get. Obviously what apps you like will naturally depend on your interests and lifestyle (I’m not much of a gamer for example, although I’m rather partial to FIFA 11, Brothers In Arms and Scrabble on the iPad) but here (in alphabetical order) are the apps that I find myself using most often:

Allowabank ($0.99) – As our kids are too young to have bank accounts, I use Allowabank for keeping track of their weekly allowances. You can set it up for regular weekly or monthly allowances (we automatically add “interest” to encourage them to save) and any time they spend anything, we mark it in Allowabank and they can see exactly how much they have. A useful tool for helping them understand the value of money.

Apple iBooks and Amazon Kindle (free) – I use both these book readers depending what books are available. I prefer the options and technical wizardry of iBooks (download Alice In Wonderland to see what I mean) but the Kindle has more choice and allows you to share books with other Kindle users.

Apple Remote (Free) – Essential if you have Apple TV. Easy to use and great for controlling iTunes playback to any Apple device on your wi-fi network.

Evernote (Free) – I’ve been a long time user of Evernote which allows you to quickly clip text, images, links and documents for later use. I already have it on my desktop and iPhone so extending it to the iPad and being able to have them automatically sync between each other is a no-brainer.

The Economist (Free, optional paid content) – Arguably the best publication on the iPad right now. If you’re an Economist reader, the $110 annual subscription is well worth it – plus you get access to  online content, archives and you can listen to an audio version of the whole edition. Alternatively, download the free Editors Highlights version for the week’s best stories. Like the ST you have to manually download each edition.

Epicurious (Free) – The excellent cooking website is even more useful on the iPad. We use it constantly as an interactive cookbook – you can also enter ingredients to come up with recipe suggestions and shopping lists. Well worth buying a Griffin stand for.

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This year’s model?

Posted: January 17, 2011 in iPad, media
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Interesting piece from the New York Times on how, after high initial interest, readership of iPad editions is falling as magazine publishers struggle to find the right business model for the iPad and the expected new wave of tablet devices. The per issue model is not working as users look for subscription plans that deliver publications to their device – and at a much lower price than printed newstand versions.

Read more: For Magazines, a Bitter Pill in iPad

A whiff of nostalgia

Posted: January 17, 2011 in humour, miscellany
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As an expat, one of the things I miss about England is the pubs. Even as a recovering alcoholic of some years’ standing (as opposed to being horizontally comatose somewhere) I love the craic and the bonhomie of a good local which you rarely find outside Blighty. But then I could just be being nostalgic about that peculiarly English trait of nostalgia, as the food critic AA Gill (also a born-again non-drinker) evokes so perfectly in a piece about an Oxfordshire pub in this week’s Sunday Times:

Pubs are my personal past imperfect, but they’re also redolent of the national nostalgia. Pubs are the votive archive of Englishness, with their feudal names of landed aristocracy and plodding occupations, their bosky and mawkish decoration — the fading pictures; the horse brasses; the engraved glass; the tack of defunct crafts suicidally hung from rafters; those greening photos of cricket teams and charabancs; darts trophies; the autistically blinking jukebox, with We Are the Champions and My Way; the witty mottoes; the damp beer mats and the smell of sour lees and urinal disinfectant. Pub is such a strong brand: so plainly and coarsely us. The boxed, yeasty essence of Blighty. They are the living rooms of the poor, the snugs for the lonely, the dispossessed, the nagged and cheated, and confessionals for the great, whingeing, halitosised British boor.

I spent a great deal of the first half of my life in the mud of pubs, watching the motes fall through mullioned sunlight at 11 o’clock in the morning. The silent scream of boredom and despair, the fantasies fending off the fanfare of failure. The first sour mouth of beer, redolent of armpit and vomit, the warm tabloids neatly folded to crosswords and racing at Lingfield. The shuddering regulars, laying out their spots at the bar, like an office desk, two packets of Senior Service, lighter, ashtray, cloudy spectacles, Telegraph, pen, and the haltering, dumb non sequitur conversation delivered at the optics; a web of mutual delusion and self-pity, pathetic expectations and excuses. Now, when I walk into a pub, I can still hear the phlegmy snigger, the creaking whisper: “So you’re back, are you? We’ve kept a seat for you.”

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