Get Stuff Done. Clear. Fantastical. OmniFocus. Dropbox. DropDAV. Pulse News. GoodReader. Pearltrees. iThoughtsHD. Ambitious iOS Apps. I've been interested recently in the apps available for iOS that push the very edges of what we thought was possible on a mobile device.
Informed by my recent experience of spending a week on iOS alone, I decided to try and express what I mean by "ambitious" and to collect some examples of those kind of apps. When iOS first appeared, it was a smartphone OS. Today, with the iPad, it's much more than that. To be an "ambitious" iOS app, I think you need to be doing one or more of the following things: You push the performance boundaries of the platform. Some great examples include Real Racing 2 HD, ArtRage and Collabracam. You attempt something on a scale that's amazing for a mobile device. The canonical example is GarageBand: an 8-track recording system and playable virtual instruments, all on an iPad, for £2.99? You enable an entire task or workflow to be done on iOS alone. You make something possible that was never easily done on a Mac. The Ambitious iOS Apps Spreadsheet. Welcome.
SG Project Pro. Mind Tools. Access more than 100 concisely explained tools that make you a better boss.
Learn useful skills whenever you have a spare moment. This is a free, fun and inspirational app. The Mind Tools app brings you some of the best business skills articles from the Mind Tools website. We've made each topic into a handy, easily understood tool containing the actions you need to take to improve. It's fast and easy to use (and a ton more productive than playing another iPhone game!) How the iPad 2 Became My Favorite Computer. My iPad 2 and ZaggFolio, in the press room at IFA in Berlin, September 2011.
Can the iPad replace a PC? Ever since Apple announced its tablet nearly two years ago, the Internet has been awash in discussion of this question. Most of it has had a pretty theoretical feel and has gravitated towards conventional wisdom. A piece by Gotta Be Mobile’s Will Shanklin comes to the typical conclusions: Whether you can replace your laptop with an iPad is going to depend on what your needs are.
I respectfully disagree with Shanklin. This hasn’t been one of those experiments-for-the-sake-of-experimentation in which someone temporarily forsakes a PC for another device in order to write about the experience (like, say, this). Another iPad-Loving Writer. iPad 2 as a serious writing machine (how-to) I knew when I bought the iPad 2 a while back that it would provide a number of uses for me, but I quickly discovered it fills more important roles in my work than I believed it would.
One of those, a key for me, is as a serious system to use for a lot of the writing I do in my work. I write 3,000 words most days for all of the projects I have going on, and the iPad 2 has stepped up to handle a lot of the task quite nicely. I wrote about using the iPad 2 for writing a while back, and contantly receive questions about how I use it in this role. The best way to deal with those questions is to detail how I use the tablet as a writing machine on a daily basis. Writing as much as I do means a good keyboard is required, and the Logitech Keyboard Case (made by ZAGG) is as good as any I have tried. Harry McCracken, the writer behind Technologizer, TIME articles, and CNET contributor, has adopted the iPad 2 as his writing machine and explained why in a recent article.
See also: Siri.