Category Archives: iPad 3

Creativity, iPad 3, iPad Apps, Knowledge Functions, Personal Technology, Thinking, Writing

Why My Favorite Notebook App for iPad is ThinkBook

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Thinkbook app for iPadThinkBook was released for iPad a little over a year ago. It took the app store by storm and was highly acclaimed. Since then, updates have been few and far between for this app. Nevertheless, this app stands tall in the app store because it is the best Think book. You should be using it as your idea book on your iPad. It’s available for $1.99 right now. Crazy good deal (iTunes).

ThinkBook is a remarkable digital notebook. There are many notebook apps on the iPad and I’ll discuss them briefly to explain how they differ from ThinkBook. Then on to twelve reasons to love ThinkBook and a couple limitations that might stop you. And one wish list item…

Handwriting is something else. First, there are a large number of Notebook apps that let you handwrite on the iPad with your finger or stylus. There are a bunch of these and the best of them are probably Penultimate and Notetaker HD. I’m going to skip that discussion to say, if you can type, you’ll probably prefer typing on your iPad even on the glass to handwriting just because it isn’t as tiring and you get digitally readable text when your done. Text is a godsend. It is lightweight and repurposable in the extreme. These handwriting apps are great and I keep hoping that Notes Plus will get debugged enough after its ambitious rewrite to win the handwriting category one of these days.

Catchall Notebooks Like Evernote are Different. I use Evernote to clip things to. To save articles for reference. It’s like an electronic filing cabinet for me and accessible from Mac, Web, iPhone and iPad. Evernote provides important knowledge functions – capture, collection, storage and search, primarily. ThinkBook is more about thinking than storing. It’s where you keep your thoughts and work with them. ThinkBook has the most powerful outlining and organizing tools I’ve ever seen. Keep using Evernote, but don’t stop there.

ThinkBook App for iPadThinkBook is this magical thinker’s notebook with unique and original features found nowhere else. There are limitations to ThinkBook and I will get to those, but first I want to talk about what is original and uniquely valuable in ThinkBook. The reason you should use it if your thoughts are an important part of who you are.

Twelve Reasons to Love ThinkBook

1. It’s an Amazing Outliner. Indenting and moving notes, to do items and more is built-in at the ground floor of this product. Organizing your ideas and notes is at the root of what this product does.

2. Several Great and Unusual Note Types. In ThinkBook, a notebook is a type of note. A Page is a type of note. A Project is a type of note. A To Do is a type of note. A Question and its answers is a type of Note. And, of course, plain text notes are notes.

3. Everything is a Note. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but what it means is any note type can be inside another note type. So, I can create a Day Page (note) on a Client Page (note) in a Clients Notebook (note) on some Business Page somewhere. It’s kind of like Alice in Wonderland or something. You get to stash things where you want. And then move them somewhere else or put things inside of the smallest thing.

4. Dashboards. ThinkBook has these widgets that will show you your outstanding to do’s and unanswered questions. They are called Finders because they allow you to define criteria about notes that makes them qualify to be found. Kind of like Smart Folders in OS X. Dashboards define a scope (Everywhere, a particular notebook or page to which it applies), required Tags, the number of found items to show, etc.. Very powerful stuff.

5. Projects. One of the note types you can create. A project has a special circle icon at the left and its text appears in bold. Underneath that project goes at least 1 to do item and any number of notes. As to do items under a project get completed, the circle fills in like a piechart showing % of completion of your to do items. Brilliant!

6. Fast Search. You can still just search for what you want when you want and get it in a hurry.

7. Tagging. What would a modern notebook be without tagging, so you can cross-reference to your heart’s content. And tags are inherited which is cool when notes can be inside of notes. If you tag a page business, then the notes on that page are automatically tagged as business.

8. Gorgeous Look. Every page of your ThinkBook is beautiful. ThinkBook looks amazing on the new iPad. I love it! I also really enjoy using Vera Sans Mono which is an unusual but very cool monospaced font option. Helvetica Neue, Gill Sans, Trebuchet MS, Hoefler Text, Palatino, New Times Roman and a cool newer font called Nobile is also available. Lots of font size choice. And three themes, Sky Blue, Polar White and Black Pearl. All three themes are great and I have trouble sticking to just one for very long.

9. Delicious Feel. You will love the intuitive and uber responsive gestures:
a. Indent or Outdent by dragging left or right and then down to move a series of contiguous notes. We need this all the time when outlining.
b. Drag notes to the right into the Slider when you drag on the right side of the screen. This feels wonderful once you get the hang of it.
c. Drag the slider up and down like butter and it pops into place in between items.
d. Drag things out of the slider by dragging left.
It goes on but the main thing is it is just right on iPad.

10. Tabs. My man Emiliano thinks things through. By default you get the most recent notes you visited last across the top, but there’s more. You can define some persistent tabs and then undefine them when your priorities change. If you are working on Money issues this week, bookmark that tab so it will stick around on the left side of the tab bar. When you have your money under control, slide the tab to the right to make it a normal tab that will only stay present for a while. Let’s say you made a mistake and really needed that Money tab back. Just slide it left and it gets a nice little black star on it to show it is here for the duration.

11. Dropbox Integration. You can save backups to dropbox of specific notes, notebooks, pages, projects. Or backup your entire Thinkbook to dropbox. Or you can save the text of a note, notebook, page, project to dropbox. By saving the text, you can then edit that text from Mac/PC or iPhone. Since dropbox is accessible via web, you can access from other devices too although you may need to download the file to edit it and then put it back in dropbox when you are done. You double-tap the icon to get all sorts of options for that item.

12. The Little Visual Help System. OK, I ran out of numbers. I could keep going but I like this help system! Lots of pictures. Accessible from whereever you are by clicking the little i in the left sidebar. There are 5 little instructional videos on the Thinkbook website. There is a Thinkbook Notebook on the Home Page with a lot more detailed help.

What’s Not to Like

1. Right now ThinkBook is text only. No pictures or documents or PDFs can be put inside your ThinkBook. But this is on the front burner for the Bitolithic development team.

2. Exporting is Limited and no Fancy Printing. You can email a notebook, page, project, to do or note in modestly formatted text form reflecting outlines, to do’s and notes. And don’t worry your data is not trapped in ThinkBook. In fact, ThinkBook’s notes are all plain text and use XML which is the most universal data language on the planet. The foundation is built, but, for now, ThinkBook doesn’t directly print or export to PDF so you don’t get the formatting pizzaz that comes alive inside of ThinkBook.

3. Useable URLs. Another essential addition – is on the do list.

Big Wishlist Item

1. ThinkBook for iPhone! But I can wait. The big plus will be that always with you thing that would place your wonderful Thinkbook in your pocket.

Don’t Wait

Don’t wait for more features. What has happened in the last year is the product has been debugged, polished and made wonderful. What hasn’t happened is these 3 items above and a lot of other things on the drawing board. But, ThinkBook is telling us our wait will soon be over. If you are anything like me, you’ll want to enjoy the powers of this tool now. It is mind-bendingly good!

Blogging, eBooks, Independent Knowledge Professionals, iPad, iPad 3, iPad Apps, Knowledge Functions, Personal Technology, Reading, Writing

Writing Kit is the best Writing App for iPad Right Now

The New Writing Requires New Tools

Writing, INKNOP-style. This blog is all about tools for independent knowledge professionals. If you are an INKNOP, as my friend, Mike Van Horn, likes to call us, you are running your own business. Among other things you need to market yourself. I consider blogging and eBook writing the two best ways to do your marketing, so I blog and tweet a lot about writing tools.

The reason this makes so much sense for a knowledge professional is that you are in the know in your specialty and you can show off that knowledge, help people and gain fans, even sales by sharing some of that precious knowledge you have in your head.

Researching while Writing. Since I’m in the technology field, my knowledge is deep but the playing field, players and tools are constantly on the move. It is rare that I don’t need to do some research in order to write a decent blog post. Since the whole world seems to be changing out from under us, you too might need to do some research when you write.

Writing is Changing. That brings us to Writing Kit for iPad (and iPhone/iPod Touch). As I’ve mentioned previously, writing itself is changing. Paper is no longer the primary output. Email has been king and still dominates. PDFs get sent around. People blog, tweet and lately lots of people are writing eBooks. It’s pretty wild. Word Processors still sometimes apply and some may never give up their love affair with Microsoft Word. But we are moving on.

Online All the Time. We live in a net-connected world. We work online a lot now and Writing Kit is designed for the online writer.

Laptops in Coffee Shops. We have moved from sitting at a desk to do our writing to just sitting somewhere. First with laptops that allow you to move around the house or go down to your local coffee house to write and research online.

Now iPads and iPhones. Now there is this big surge towards even thinner, lighter, smaller devices that fit us even better. The iPad is the brand new writing tool that is starting to take hold – and replace laptops for writing and research.

Writing Kit is designed for this new world and explicitly designed for the iPad. The iPad is big compared to an iPhone but small compared to the typical laptop. You operate the iPad with your fingers which means controls need to be bigger so you don’t really have room for multiple windows like you do on a laptop.

One App, Many Apps. This lack of screen real estate on iPad gives the advantage to a single multipurpose app for writing and online research. In this single-tasking, smaller screen, apps need to have mini-apps within or temporarily handoff tasks to other apps which can politely work with them.

Writing Kit is Leading the Way. The maker of Writing Kit figured this out faster than many others and has built this awesome app for what we need in our new world. The feature set is truly killer.

Killer Features:

  • Built-in Web Browser which uses Readability
  • Built-in Search (DuckDuckGo)
  • Deep integration with Instapaper
  • A URL Queue for saving links
  • Markdown to write easy, non-distracting shorthand HTML in your documents.
  • A great Markdown cheat sheet built-in
  • A really nice scrolling extra keyboard row
  • Gesture control of the cursor and indenting.
  • Outline navigation
  • Great monospaced fonts like Anonymous Pro, Inconsolata and Droid Sans Mono.
  • Terminology integration (cool dictionary and more)
  • A giant list of Open in… Apps
  • Dropbox, Text Expander, etc. of course

True, you may not always be writing and researching. maybe you can get by with iA Writer or Byline or another less powerful tool. But I recommend you hang out in Writing Kit a lot when writing on your iPad. It is more fun to bring iPad with or without a Bluetooth keyboard when out and about. Compared to the alternative of a laptop. Writing Kit does very well with an external keyboard in case you doubted it.

One man show, Anh Quang Do. Be afraid! Be very afraid. He is an amazing developer! And he writes so you get good documentation othrow to use the app. Check out his blog here. Other larger text writing app firms will catch on – one would think. So I’m hoping some judicious hiring is in the works. I have no complaints at all with how fast the features are rolling out, though. A big new 3.0 release came out in February and I wouldn’t be surprised by a 4.0 release in May or June.

You can buy Writing Kit for iPad and iPhone/iPod touch for $4.99. A great, great deal. If you like this post, you may want to check out: Writing on the iPad: Top Dropbox Text Editors. I continue my thinking about writing in my next post: Writing on Mac, iPad, iPhone – Best Apps. There are a couple more nice writing apps to include in your toolkit.

Apple, Independent Knowledge Professionals, iPad, iPad 3, iPad Apps, Personal Technology, Reading, Writing

iPad 3 is a Wise Investment for Knowledge Professionals

Click twice to view at full resolution – This is the Home Screen of my new iPad

Updated Oct 26 2012: I just preordered an iPad mini to compliment my iPad 3. And now there is an iPad 4 which replaces the 3. Retina is awesome but I’m expecting the iPad mini arriving November 2 to be good enough for 75% of my use (it is quite a bit better than iPad 2 which isn’t half bad) and very enjoyable being half the weight and thinner than iPhone 5. You decide!

I got the iPad 3 on day one on preorder — the Verizon 64gb model. The 2048 x 1536 pixel retina display is a game changer. A booster rocket from which there is no return. Reviewers had trouble explaining their reactions but calling the retina display transformative nails it.

Based on the information I had, I decided to double-down on iPad and get the best available model. I have not regretted it for a moment.

The Retina display on iPad 3 is a Game Changer

Since the iPad IS a screen, the quadrupling of pixels adds value like no other upgrade could. It’s not a feature like a camera that you might not use. It’s a window to see through. The new screen makes content more real and immediate. You feel like you can reach through the glass.

All apps look a lot better even the ones not upgraded. And the upgrades are rolling in every day. The best, most popular apps are now optimized for this display.

Apple’s retina-ready text engine yields immediate benefits. My favorite text-heavy apps like iBooks, Reeder, iA Writer, Instapaper, Tweetbot and Terminology dazzled on day 1. The new iPhoto app, already a great pleasure in iPad 2, is a joy with photos gaining much greater clarity and color saturation.

One reason I am so happy about all this is that a better iPad means better apps immediately. And, this fuels app purchases fueling the R&D efforts of the most talented app developers.

Ever since the iPhone 4 came out and showed us what’s available with a vastly higher Rez screen, I’ve been waiting for the iPad to follow suit. Now we get a big, easy to operate screen and high resolution in one package.

Who Should Buy a new iPad?

I’m speaking to Knowledge Professionals here and serious students not yet in the work force. Everyone. If you strive to be a professional knowledge worker, then knowledge is your game and your eyes are one of your key assets. Your eyes will thank you. More important is what your level of engagement and sheer pleasure will be in your reading and operation of this device.

When it comes to knowledge, you get what you give. Something becomes interesting, when an interested mind shows up. That interest is nourished by great content and is enhanced by this incredible display — plus all the other wonders of the iPad like a clean, consistent user interface and unparalleled responsiveness to touch.

If you were only playing games and not a game designer, I might hesitate. But, you are a reader, writer, speaker, thinker, designer and possibly artist. Don’t skimp on your axe. Tools matter. This investment is a good one.

My Old iPad 1 or 2 is Working Really Well for Me

If you own an iPad 1, the increased speed and responsiveness is very noticeable. If you own an iPad 2, surely there is someone who would like it. The screen alone is enough. You are a professional or have aspirations to be. This is an investment. Re-read the previous paragraphs, go to an Apple store and bring your iPad with you for comparison purposes. Economize on something else that doesn’t have as much importance for your future. Buying a bargain-priced used iPad 2 is a half measure, but if that’s your best shot right now, go for it.

The Camera and LTE

The Camera. The much better camera should not be completely disregarded even though this update is all about the screen. If you don’t have an iPhone 4 or recent point-and-shoot camera, your iPad 3 might be the best camera you have with you. In any case, the iPad has a much longer battery life than an iPhone or other smart phone. Photography eats batteries alive, you may need the juice the iPad supplies for photography. Once taken, use the new iPhoto app to make the most of the photo in a few moments or longer if you have the time. Use the iPad to send that photo where you want it.

The LTE. It will cost you $129 to have the option to turn on cellular access when wi-fi is not available. I turned on $20 worth (1gb) of data for my first 30 days assuming I will only use LTE or 4G or 3G as a quick fix in the car or in that occasional spot when stranded without wi-fi and needing a connection. So far that’s how it is going in fact I’ve only used 100 mb or 10% in the first few days. Getting LTE in the Mill Valley Safeway parking lot while waiting for my partner to buy a grocery or 2 was a thrill. You’ll like the option to load a page fast on LTE now and then when the *free* wifi is slower than molasses.

Is iPad 3 a Knockout Blow to Competitors?

I expect unprecedented sales for iPad as a result of the retina screen alone. If you thought the masses were lining up behind iPad making it hard for other tablet-makers to compete, get ready for a big uptick. At the same time I fully expect the most hardy tablet makers like Samsung, Amazon, HTC and a few others to raise their games to try to compete. I wish Palm were still in and hope RIM keeps at it. Microsoft, with its installed base globally on PCs, has a shot with its coming Windows 8 tablet. But, it could take a while and who knows what Apple will do for an encore?