I know there have been millions of articles about the iPad. But you haven’t heard my perspective. So, here goes… As soon as I saw the iPad announcement I was of two minds. On the one hand I thought “Why would I want to pay $500 for a glowing screen version of the Kindle?” On the other hand, it was hard to deny a big touch screen device that gives you immediate access to all your content wherever you are is pretty interesting.

Lucky for me, the release of the iPad was relatively close to my birthday. I circled the wagons and let everyone who might be thinking about giving me a gift to give me some money to go towards an iPad. It worked so well that I don’t think that I received any other gifts besides this iPad.

In the first few days of owning any gadget, it is hard not to love it simply due to the novelty. The real test to any gadget is if you still use it on a daily basis a month or two months or a year later. So far, the iPad seems to have staying power. It is a great toy, but it is much more. It is now a part of my work day as well.

iPad as Toy

Here is the thing. We are officially in the future. Think about this. Go back just ten years. Thin TVs existed, but they were pretty expensive. Most people still had those big tube-type TVs. TiVos were around but not very prevalent. If someone handed you a thin screen that you could hold in your hand that connected to the Internet, played movies, played TV shows, played music, let you purchase and read books, you would have lost your mind. This thing is a game changer.

Now that I am using an iPad on a daily basis, it has completely changed how and why I use my laptop. My MacBook has now been relegated to content creation only. All the content consumption has been off loaded to the iPad for me. It is great. When I want to relax, I get out my iPad and browse around all the different types of content at my finger tips until I find something that seems interesting whether it is a movie, podcast, website, book, or whatever.

iPad as Tool

I don’t go to a meeting without my iPad. I have downloaded a killer app that is simply called Todo. All it does is help you create a todo list. But man, the way it does that simple job is worth the $4.99 I paid for it. I can track all my projects. I can see all the tasks that are relevant to where I am at the time. And, the user interface is beautiful. When was the last time you were passionate about a todo application?

The iPad also gives you a quick and elegant interface to manage you email and calendar. It makes the management of your life clean and simple, which for me is a good thing. It makes me a better manager of my life because it is just more fun now.

The iPad is too big to take everywhere, but because nearly everything syncs back to the cloud, I have access to all my data on my iPhone. When it is inappropriate to carry the iPad, I have the iPhone in my pocket. I hate to sound like such a fanboy, but I love it.

The Negatives

The iPad isn’t the panacea for all problems. It is not a great content creation device. I am typing this blog entry on the iPad right now and nearly all the muscles in the upper half of body are starting to hurt as I lean forward trying to type on this thing. It is not a replacement for your main computer which means it is an expensive accessory. In a world where people go to bed hungry or thirsty, there are probably better places to spend your money.

Final Thoughts

I figured that I was going to like the iPad as a toy but I am continually surprised by how useful this thing is in other areas. If you are wondering whether or not to get an iPad because it seems expensive for a toy, rest assured it is much more…

There is a neat website called www.lovemarks.com. Everyone should check it out because it brings up a very interesting aspect to brands. There are some brands that transcend other brands in that they capture the heart of their customer. Some brands that immediately come to mind are Apple computers, Zappos – an online shoe seller, Guinness, Nike, Heinz ketchup, Jeep, Twitter (ironically), Wrangler jeans. Regardless how you might feel about these brands, there are people who not only swear by them but jump to their defense because these brands have moved on from simple recognition to personal identification. The people who love those brands are not only loyal, but they tend to define themselves around that brand. There is a connection there that goes way beyond the product.

Here are ways for Twitter to strengthen love for your brand

1. Engage in conversation
I think one of the best ways to make your brand move that direction is giving customers access and a platform to engage in the conversation surrounding that product. Taking part in the conversation helps customers to gain a sense of ownership in that brand. Strive to make your brand’s Twitter presence a conversation if possible.

2. Haters aren’t necessarily a bad thing
Don’t be afraid of haters, because that opens an organic opportunity for customers who love your brand to defend it which deepens their passion for the brand.

3. Engage your brand lovers
That one sounds a little racy, but what I mean is the people who have gone to the trouble of following your brands Twitter stream are extremely engaged. Give the exclusive offers which will further cement their loyalty. Being special in the eyes of a brand that I love only furthers my love of that brand, and if I can gain access to specials that others can’t makes me feel more engaged.

4. Be careful about stereotypes of Twitter users
Twitter is becoming more and more ubiquitous. Case in point, one Sunday I decided to see what the Twitterverse had to say about NASCAR. I wrongly assumed that the NASCAR fan and the Twitter user were mutually exclusive. I was wrong. There is a huge community that actively engages in conversation around NASCAR during races on Twitter. You may will be surprised by the diversity of the Twitterverse. Your brand has an audience on Twitter.

The bottom line is that Twitter is a powerful tool that can bring both great good and great harm to brands. Good = conversation. Bad = Twitterspam. Make sure to start and maintain good conversation.

You Look Nice Today

Originally uploaded by rcarver

There is a podcast called You Look Nice Today. It is one of my favorites. It is put out by three guys who found each other through Twitter. Each found the others tweets interesting and more importantly, funny. They got in contact and decided, why not spread our mirth to a wider audience, a listening audience. The world would be a better place after all. Hey, and we all wear glasses, and we could always talk about that, though they never have.

The podcast normally consists of three lads: Merlin Mann, Scott Simpson, and Adam Lisagor. Also pictured here is Jonathan Coulton, you ought to Google him now…his music delights, and a man who we all know and have grown to love, sitting down in front is John Hodgman, but you may know him better as ‘PC’.

Apparently there is a brand-new You Look Nice Today podcast out or coming out soon that features all these fine fellows. I may not be able to sleep.

If you are of the Podcast persuasion, then get on over to iTunes and subscribe to You Look Nice Today…today. You will not be disappointed.

Today may be a banner day in finding the perfect todo list option for me and my iPhone. Enter Google Chrome. For those of you who haven’t heard, Google has released a browser called Chrome.  It is clean, fast, and has some very interesting features that are growing more and more compelling to me all the time.

Google Chrome gives you the option of creating virtual applications out of online applications.  In reality, it is pretty simple, Google Chrome will open an online app in its own window that has the forward, back, URL, and other standard browser buttons removed.  It makes online apps feel more like apps that live on your harddrive.

Here is how Chrome and Toodledo have collided to give me a more interesting and integrated todo option. Toodledo has a very clean interface for the iPhone but their standard interface leaves a little to be desired. The great thing about Toodledo’s iPhone interface is that you can access it in a standard browser on your PC or Mac.  Here is where my head exploded…

I opened the iPhone interface of Toodledo in Google Chrome and turned it into a virtual app.  The Chrome virtual apps remember how they were sized and where they were in the window when you last closed them.

Long story short, I now have a todo widget that lives on the far left part of my workspace that stays out of the way that is always synced on my iPhone.  In other words, it is possible to use chrome to create iPhone app widgets that have their own window and live on your computer.

So, unless you have been living under a rock, or you haven’t jumped on the Internets for the past 24 hours then you no doubt know about Google Chrome, Google’s brand new browser.

If you are a fan of clean, functional design that gets out of the way of the task at hand then you might have just found your new browser of choice.  It has it’s limitations, but man, does it have its strengths. I don’t have the time to do an exhaustive rundown of all it can do, and really, there have been a million stories written on the ‘nets that do that.

I just want to talk about one feature that blew my mind a little. But before that I do want to do just a little background on how Chrome came to be.  It is one of those programs that I LOVE, because it is built well after the fact, but profits from its ability to learn from what came before.

God bless the pioneers.  They have the toughest life.  It is exciting to be the first to survey a new land, but also, unfortunately, as a pioneer one has to address the inevitable questions and issues that arise.  With little experience and even less time, new ways to handle problems are devised.  Over time, people come to accept those schemas as, well, how they are done.

It is much the same for the person or team charged with creating a new genre of program. This happened with video edting software, something that I deal with on a daily basis.  When editing video was first introduced on the computer, computers were woefully underpowered to handle the task. The teams that designed the first editors were very crafty and clever in getting them to work at all.  Their craftiness and cleverness along with established workflows in the old-fashioned linear editing world established some schemas that stuck.  As computers got faster, the old way of doing video editing persisted which left silly, superfluous steps that slowed down the creative process.

Along comes Sonic Foundry who looked at the whole process of editing video and streamlined the process down to its essentials and thus speeding up the editing process immensely.  The product was called Vegas Video. The name later changed to Vegas and then Sonic Foundry’s whole line of products was purchased by Sony, but that is another story. 

The same thing has happened here with Chrome. Google had the luxury of being able to soberly assess the successes and failures of browsers as they stand today without the pesky hassle of keeping legacy features that only matter to a few.

Google Chrome from the ground up to function, and function acceptionally well on the Internet as it stands today, an Internet filled with applications. Which, brings me to the function that blew my mind a little and drove me to write this lengthy entry.

When you are using an online app such as Gmail, or Google Docs, click the button near the top right side of the Chrome window that looks like a sheet of paper.  That opens a menu where you can create an application shortcut. It is pretty simple actually.  All it does is hide all the browser buttons and makes the online app more like an app that is native to your hard drive. Not only that, it also creates a shortcut that will open that online app directly, thus eliminating the multi-step process of opening the browser, clicking in the address bar, typing an address, and then finally arriving at the online app.  Now, click one shortcut and boom…done!

Simple I know, but my mind was blown a little. Cloud computing became a little more real for me today.

Turbo = Super Fast Blogging…Maybe

WordPress has an update today that adds a new feature called Turbo. Turbo is WordPress’ brand name for its Google Gears integration. I just updated my software and noticed the new link in the top right-hand corner of my screen. When you click on Turbo, it opens a window that lets you know that you will need Google Gears in order to enable Turbo. I downloaded Gears and then enabled it.

The popup window also touted a speed increase after enabling Turbo. So far, I haven’t really noticed a speed increase, but to be fair I have only been using it for a few minutes.

Google Gears is Google’s app that allows users to take their computer offline and still be able to use their online apps. In other words, you can still get to your Gmail when you take your lappy on a plane with no wi-fi. Google Gears works in the background saving the necessary files to enable offline functionality.

Obviously, if a large portion of your page is pre-downloaded, you should see a speed boost. Again, so far… not so much, but it is still early.

Other Additions

A welcome addition to WordPress is the ability to see all the revisions that have been made to an entry. This is particularly handy if you share a blog with someone and you want to see what they have added to you entry.

Also, just under the Save and Publish buttons there is a new Word count feature that will let you know if you need to spend a little more time on your entry in order for it to get to an impressive, unreadable length that will convince your readers to skip your blog. Handy.

It is now possible to add a caption to images. This is an incredibly handy thing. Now if you have a somewhat cryptic image that needs a little explanation, you are in luck. Now you can put a caption at the bottom of the image and your readers will never be confused ever again…ever.

Another new feature of WordPress in 2.6 is a little, red speech bubble that now lives above the link to Plugins letting you know how many plugins you have installed. I have 13. Super.

It doesn’t just stop there, if you go into the plugins management area, it is now a lot easier to manage your plugins. The interface is now a lot more ajaxy and draggy and droppy which makes it much easier to manage the plugins that make your blog so special.

Since draggy and droppy is so cool, WordPress has updated its media gallery to allow drag and drop functionality allowing you to better manage the content uploaded to your blog.

And finally, keeping with the drag and drop theme I’ve got going, the Press it linklet has been updated to make quoting blogs and other websites much easier.

All in all, it isn’t quite the continental shift type of change that we saw with the release of 2.5, but this update does bring a lot of good functionality that will make your blogging a little easier.

The good news for me is that now it is a ton easier to post to my blog using my Samsung Blackjack. WordPress 2.5 has redesigned the blog entry screen so that it is much easier to get to typing posts. Before WordPress 2.5, I had to scroll past an extremely long list of Categories to get to the part of the page where you type your entry. Normally, when I log into my site I am on a full-sized computer that displays webpages correctly. On a big computer, my extraordinarily long list of Categories are hidden in a pull down menu. My phone’s browser isn’t powerful enough to display my dashboard correctly and just stacks each Category one on top of the other.

“What’s a Category?” Great question. If you look just under the title of each blog entry you will see some blue words that categorize that story. WordPress doesn’t limit how many categories I use and obediently remembers every one I have ever used. The list is crazy long.

Now, I don’t have to deal with that list when posting from my phone. Upgrade!

Now if I could just figure out how to type faster on this tiny keyboard…

– Update–

I am on my laptop now so I am kind of cheating, but I had to give a quick update about completing my entry.  After I typed up my blog entry, I clicked done which launched me back to my dashboard window.  I still had to scroll past the some 150+ categories except now it is not as bad because I am now seeing all these categories after I typed the entry.  With the blog article still fresh on my mind, I can categorize it more effectively.  So, I still have to scroll a lot, only now it is more profitable.

I just uploaded the backend of my blog to WordPress 2.5. It is a lot cleaner and makes writing posts easier by hiding a lot of the more technical stuff you don’t use often a little deeper in the site. I realize that this is a little inside baseball for most people who read this blog, but hey I can geek out a little every once in a while.

The interface is a lot cleaner and uses different shades of light blue for the different sections of the page. It is actually quite pleasant to look at. Obviously this is the first time I have used it so I can’t give a real review, but on first blush it is nice. I likes it a lot.

On another note, I am always a little scared when I upload a new version of WordPress to my server. You see, I no longer use a hosted blog service like blogger. If you use blogger, it is up to them to keep the backend working. If it screws up, you can relax knowing that there are Google engineers pulling their hair out trying to get everything fixed.

Now that I run my own blog software, if everything blows up, it is on me. To be honest it is kind of exhilarating, but it’s also scary. I have a lot of content that I have uploaded and written over the past 5 years. I would hate to lose it. Maybe I should back up more.

Cool New Features

One of the coolest new features is how this new version automates the updating of plugins.  In WordPress, you can augment the functionality of your blog by installing plugins.  I use one called Twitter Tools to post my tweets right here on my blog.  I have a ton of other plugins that I use to make it easier on me to use WordPress.  In this version of WordPress, updating out of date plugins is as simple as hitting a link on the dashboard.  Awesome.  To make it work, you have to put your FTP settings in a form that pops up the first time you click the update link.  After that it works.  Click the update link under the out of date plugin, then click the ‘Proceed’ button and boom it just works.  ROCK AND ROLL… I love it.

Bug Fixes?

There is one bug that annoys me and it hasn’t been addressed by WordPress. When you embed a video from Youtube or other video site, it works fine the first time you publish the post. If you go back to your post later and then republish, WordPress messes up the html and makes the video malfunction. I am about to test this new version of WordPress to see if it fixes that problem. I know I can’t be the only person to have experienced this problem.

—-Update—-

Hooray. It now works. The video embed bug is now dead! Hooray. Embed videos to your hearts content!!!

Hulu is officially open to the public. What does that mean? It means that you can watch all most of the shows from 2 of the 4 major television networks, Fox and NBC, and some movies from certain movie studios.

Most importantly, we have another compelling time sink to keep us from doing work while at work. Or, if you are like me and you grew up in an era when the tv was always on, here is a great way to get your noise on. I seem to work better in a noisy environment anyway.

Finally there is a way to keep your online and offline calendar in sync. This is a big deal if you are like me and have had to enter calendar items manually in two places. What a drag. Google announced today that it has released a little tool that will check your Outlook calendar and synchronize it with your Google calendar. Hip hip hooray!

UPDATE:———————-

I just downloaded the Google Caledar updating tool, and it works great! It is extremely simple. You download it and it ends up in your system tray. Once it is there you can right-click on the icon and go into the options and specify how often you want it to check for updates.

I have been waiting a long time for this. I have a smart phone that doesn’t sync to Google, but I want to use Google calendar and now I can. Thank you Google!