Videos I’ve done so far:

Chess:

Terrace:

Kamisado:

Some photos of the games we saw and played and the update to our own collection is shown below.

For detailed descriptions, see Suzan’s Geeklist.

Yesterday OmniFocus for iPad was released, and while I was waiting for this release I was kinda put off by it’s high price: €31,99. Considering I already bought the Mac version ($79,95) and the iPhone version (€15,99 and not really usable sync-performance-wise for the first year) this just seems a lot. In comparison: Things, which is a fairly comparable program, is only €7,99 for iPhone and €15,99 for iPad (unfortunately also not a universal app); so I could buy both mobile Things versions for less than just the iPad version of OmniFocus! The only major difference I could see is the inability of Things to sync using anything else than a local WiFi network, although they say this would be coming sometime this year.

And here’s the Thing (pun intended): I do have a license for the current version of Things, given to me by the nice people from CulturedCode because once I donated to one of the earlier GTD Mac applications iGTD. So I think now is the time to seriously try out this much appreciated program, starting with just my personal/home todo’s and possibly followed by my much much bigger list of work-related tasks.

So I set off, and while discovering the basic divisions of work used in Things called Areas of responsibility and Projects, I soon discovered that the perceived simpleness of Things in comparison to OmniFocus was a bliss – it all fell nicely into place, defining more general tasks in the Areas and grouping lists of tasks in Projects, which can go into Areas themselves. Tasks can be ordered within its container as a means of defining dependencies or maybe priorities. I didn’t even yet started using tags, but I did use the quick entry feature fairly similar to OmniFocus’ one to add a mail message directly into Things, which worked seamlessly.

Things provides you with a couple of predefined lists among which is the Next list, displaying tasks that should be done next neatly grouped by Area and Project, making it easy to choose among them. Another list is the Today list, which displays tasks marked for Today ungrouped (as set by default in the preferences) which makes it possible to order all tasks for today unrelated to their Area or Project. That is a mighty handy feature!

This is roughly how far I got using Things today, and I must say it was easy, fun and most importantly: non-distracting from the actual task-management process. It makes me trust this little application to show me what I need to see when I need it, which in my opinion is one of the most important aspects of the Getting Things Done methodology. The most obvious feature missing is indeed syncing to a mobile device over internet using e.g. MobileMe – I would miss this at work while walking around with only my iPhone, although I must say the OmniFocus experience in this regard is not perfect either (mostly due to waiting for syncs to finish, forgetting to sync before quitting the app or closing your Mac’s lid). And wait, don’t I have WiFi at work so this might not even be a problem?

Looking at my limited experience with Things so far I would say I can do anything I can do with Things with OmniFocus also. It strikes me however that I’ve been long looking for a good way to use OmniFocus corresponding with how I work, and in Things it seemed to just fit. Undoubtedly this depends on how you actually manage your tasks and the diversity or complexity of your work (I think in my work I have both high up any scale). I would say OmniFocus provides more flexibility in this matter, however the key question remains: do you actually need it?

Having gotten iPhoto (v8) myself with my new MacBook Pro, I simply start this program, and access her library from there. After copying the files to my iPhoto library (directly dragging to Aperture does show the +-cursor, but does not work) I can then import them in my Aperture library. Tedious, but it works. Most of the time.

During copying of the shared photos to my computer, I often get a message that some of the photos could not be imported due to their file type not begin recognized. After some investigation, I discovered that the photos giving this message have the file type ‘GEPJ’, which incidentally is JPEG spelled backward… Now where does that come from??

Most photos with this problem will successfully import a second time around. However, you have to redo your carefully made selection of photos to copy all over, because iPhoto forgets your selection as soon as it starts importing. There is an easier way though: in the error message of iPhoto, a path is displayed, which looks something like ‘/var/folders/Jf/Jf5z8CcW2RSzKE+1YogdOU+++TI/-Tmp-/iPhoto/DPAP/10.0.1.2/8770/1′. Yes, that’s a weird path. You can copy this path from the iPhoto dialog and paste it in the Finder in the dialog you get when pressing cmd-shift-G (Go to Folder). In this folder, you will see all photos you were trying to import, which you can then drag manually to iPhoto, or even directly to Aperture . I presume however, that all iPhoto-specific meta-data that is not embedded in the photo itself (using EXIF) will be lost this way.

The iPad looks really terrific. I could easily see one lying around here in the living room somewhere. I could find the use for some nice piece of hardware that is easy to grab and start browsing, typing, or emailing on.

Most comments I hear are about a missing camera and multitasking. The camera just seems an obvious growthpath for Apple to me and I’m not surprised it didn’t make it in the first version. Although it would have been very nice in combination with a version of iChat to go with it.

Multitasking however would be something that I would really miss on a device this size. On the iPhone I rarely really miss it – switching between apps with the speed they do while retaining their current state is something that was easy to get used to with such a small screen. Now with the bigger iPad screen, I would love to put things in parallel, from different applications and within one application. I haven’t seen the possibility of putting two sites, or to iWork documents next to each other in the demos, let alone a site in Safari and a Pages document. This is something that isn’t too hard to imagine to be very handy. Add to that some messenger or twitter application running in the background, and you got your environment really going.

If the first version of the iPad doens’t support multitasking, at least it should support the Dashboard. In my opinion this would be the ideal place for the iPad to hide common functionality like the calculator, weather app and twitter client. It is easily accessible (with a specific gesture, for example), web-based and therefor not really running two apps at once. It would be really awkward to switch to another application (or get your iPhone out of your pocket) just to do a quick calculation when e.g. typing in Pages.

Speaking of which, I couldn’t find the Weather and Calculator apps in any of the screenshots of the iPad I’ve seen. Maybe Apple is already working on a Dashboard?