iPad Air & Apps

[saxhound]

I bought the new iPad Air for my better half for Xmas. It's pretty "kewl" as Pete would say, and the display is stunning. I'm fairly new to the Apple world of apps, despite carrying an iPhone 4S around for the past year and a half. I just don't do much there but e-mail and phone, although I did download ClearTune and a metronome app as well as the free flashlight app. So, a couple questions for all you techno nerds out there:

1. What are some indispensable apps for everyday use? I'm thinking things like creating and managing docs, taking notes freehand with a stylus, tracking & reminders, etc.
2. Any "must have" music apps? Keep in mind that this is my wife's machine, so I probably won't be taking it to gigs, just messing around with it when she is not using it.
3. How can I block all the annoying ads, popups and auto-plays that are on nearly every web page nowadays?

I use Firefox with Adblock Plus on my Windows machines, so I guess I am spoiled by that. It blocks 99.9% of that carp without me even knowing it. Browsing on Safari to some of my favorite web sites was a rude awakening to see how much stuff is really there and launching automatically - often with no way to stop it except to kill the browser. I did a search and found something called Adblock for Safari IOS, but there was a lot of mumbo jumbo about having to jailbreak your device to get it to install, and even then it wasn't particularly effective.

Happy New Year to all.

 

[SOTSDO]

I use Chrome for a browser, and it cleans out most of the ad stuff. Nothing is perfect, mind you.

I have a wonderful fingering chart for the bassoon, without which I would be lost. Bassoon fingerings are too complicated for this old man to remember these days.

We have moved to the "Calendar" application provided with the iPhone. THrough the iCloud, it sycronises across not only with all of our iThis and iThat stuff, as well as with our Macintosh computers. My wife obligates for a teaching job, enters it in her iPhone, and - bam! - it is listed across all devices.

It took a trip to the Apple Store to get it all working, but now that it is up, it is flawless. We can't get by without it.

Ditto with the Contacts application, both on the iStuff, and on the Macintoshes. Updating phone numbers covers everything, all at once.

I still haven't managed to make the switch to Mail from the Microsoft Outlook program. It is running in parallel, and I could just drop Outlook, but I don't have all of my mail lists prepared in Mail. Some day...

I use a program called Things on both Macintosh and iPhone. It's a combination to do list and a project tracker. You enter your tasks, it tracks them by date, and keeps you aware of what's due. Not all that sophisticated, but it does work through the cloud.

Then, to satisfy my interest in things from the Showa era of the Japanese military, there is a flight game called Sid Meyer's Pacific Skies. You can take either Imperial Navy or Imperial Army, or US Navy or US Air Air Force, and you play a long series of missions. You accumulate flying talent, and face increasingly more skilled opponents at six or seven game settings (easy to very hard). I like the game because it realistically represents real aircraft capability. Nothing like diving on a Hellcat from high altitude with a J2M Raiden (Jack) and nailing him to the wall in one pass.

 

[pete]

Well, you need Find My iPhone, at least. Does what it says on the tin. You can use it to remote-wipe the iPad, too, if it's stolen.

I pretty much use Safari for all my web browsing on the iPad (I have a 3 and my wife has an original). My reasoning is that Apple uses some "secret sauce" to make the browsing experience better and faster on Apple hardware -- hey, Safari is also very, very snappy on the new iMac I have at work, much more so than any other browser. Looks like a version of AdBlock is available for iOS. However, there's a warning:

You must be at least 17 years old to download this app. Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity.

Shut up and take my money! Er ... there's also a version of Firefox available that allegedly allows you to use most of the Firefox extensions and Flash. It's $4.99. I haven't tried it. I have tried Chrome for the iPad and it was so-so, at best.

If you're like me and use multiple computers and operating systems, I'd recommend buying XMarks, which syncs your bookmarks between browsers, and LastPass, which is a virtual password wallet. It's $20 a year for both.

I have my various Hotmail and GMail accounts configured in Mail on my iPad. I like that. My company's also got Office 365, so I can essentially use MS Office 2013 products on my iPad. Not that I will, but I can. I've also got a VPN client, a Citrix client, Microsoft Remote Desktop and a few other work-related things. All free apps. Oh: Microsoft Remote Desktop has been updated and, while it still crashes on me at least once a day, it's got a bunch of features I actually use.

I really haven't bought too many apps. I've got a computer certification test simulator and a few games (I've bought a couple of the Angry Birds saga and a few others). IIRC, I got Garage Band for free -- Google free stuff and hit the iTunes homepage often.

With the Retina Display, I have watched a few vids on my iPad through Netflix, etc., but I really prefer my home office TV.

 

[saxhound]

Not a big fan of the "don't be evil" (2004), "evil is hard to define" (2010), "oh wait a minute - we make drones now!" (2013) empire. Of course, I do work for a company that is a gold partner of the Redmond monolith, so perhaps I'm a bit biased.

I do like how easy it is to configure basic email accounts on the IOS devices. I have an O365 account at work, but haven't configured it yet. On the list of TTD, not so much for email as access to the Office apps. If I decide to get an iPad for myself I will do the OWA, VPN, Citrix RDP & Direct Access thing. That requires registering the hardware with our network admin and being subject to the "full remote wipe". Not something I want to do with my wife's machine.

I hopped on the app store last night to do some more browser research. The reviews on the Firefox app are not particularly good. It seems like Mercury Pro is the current favorite, although they all seem to have new bugs that were introduced with IOS 7. I did find this interesting article on Safari alternatives:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2409904,00.asp

The reality is that any IOS browser app sits on top of Safari - it doesn't replace it. Built in performance problems.

I'll have to check out Xmarks - that sounds handy, although some of the browser apps allow bookmark importing as well. I don't feel compelled to sync all my devices, as each one seems to have its specific uses.

Music apps are mind boggling - the sheer number and variety of them. I wish some of them worked on Windows where I do most of my arranging and editing.

 

[pete]

There are probably more music apps in the Mac world than in the PC world. Hey, most of the music apps out there were originally made for the Mac.

If you have a specific app you use for something musical, you might want to just Google the name of the app or search the App Store. There may be something that interfaces between the PC app and the iPad or vice-versa.

If you have an overwhelming need for Adobe Flash, Photon Browser tops three of the top 10 lists I looked at. $5 and highly rated. I think I might get that.