John Benson dot com

The iPad easily eclipses my laptop, iPhone and iPod as my favorite device. With the impending release of the second generation iPad I’m sure that the question of which apps to take a look at will be coming more and more. The iPad is an inherently personal device and everyone I know seems to use theirs just a little bit differently. Without further ado, here’s my list of apps that I recommend which I may update from time to time.

Daily Use

1. Reeder is a wonderful RSS feed reader. I don’t do a lot of “surfing” anymore as I’ve identified a few websites which I tend to enjoy reading and getting the content delivered to me is great. Reeder leverages Google Reader for management of the feeds that are coming down. This is kind of a pain when you want to add something new, but it is what it is. I put RSS feeds at a relatively high nerd level, but a little bit of work to set things up goes a long way. Here’s a great video about how RSS feeds work if you’re not familiar.
2. Instapaper is a close second and is where I head after cruising through news. You can send articles to Instapaper from Reeder, which is great. All the content that gets pulled down is available offline, making it great for the airplane.
3. Omnifocus is how I manage all my tasks. I was so excited about the release of this program on the iPad that I actually bought it from iTunes when I was on that potentially frightening network at DEFCON. I use OF on my Macs and iPhone too, but I think there’s great potential to use as a standalone tool as well.
4. The Apple Remote is where things really start blowing your mind. In it’s simplest form, you can control the music that’s coming out of your iTunes library. When you add an AirPort Express to your stereo or maybe an AppleTV1 to your home theatre you can push your entire iTunes library to any of your speakers and control it all from the iPad. This is so amazing during the summers when I’m cooking on the deck it nearly makes me speechless. We’ve come a long way since I used to plug an external drive with my music into a laptop tenuously plugged in with a wire to my stereo in law school.
5. Netflix is kind of a no brainer if you have a subscription. I manage my DVD queue with the app, and usually pick what we want to watch on TV using this instead of the AppleTV interface. I’ve been slowly moving through the Ken Burns Civil War series and Cosmos too.
6. TuneIn Radio is how I finish my day with a little Coast to Coast AM. It starts at 10:00 central time on WNIS out of Norfolk, VA.

Regular Use

1. Epicurious is a very cool cooking app. It lets you build shopping lists that you can email or print which is really handy. What I really am looking forward to is Cooks Illustrated. They have an iPhone app, but the double pixel thing just isn’t that great.
2. NPR is a great companion to Epicurious (when I’m not listening to music while I cook). I’ll bet you found that one pretty quickly.
3. FlipBoard is pretty interesting for following high volume sites which I don’t want to add to my Reeder library like reddit or Hackernews.
4. The Economist is pretty passable. As you’d expect, there aren’t too many bells and whistles but the content speaks for itself. I’m hoping for some attractive iPad only subscription pricing soon.

Honorable Mention

1. The Financial Times was my favorite newspaper app when I got the iPad this spring. Once again, the subscription price is crazy high so I removed it after my free trial ran out. One of the biggest “whoa” moments came this summer when I was up late, moved to have a beverage outside and was reading the next mornings edition of the FT on my deck.
2. TED. Speaks for itself. (no pun intended)
3. Angry Birds. I’m not providing a link because I don’t like to directly contribute to the addition of others. Same goes for Snood.
4. Wired has found a way to add value to the magazine. I normally pick up a single issue of this the night before I get on an airplane. The issues are BIG so leave plenty of time for them to load before leaving.
5. Pocket Cloud is obviously great for remote desktop and is a must if you’re connecting to VMWare View.

I prefer to use the iBooks app for reading, although the selection is much better from the Kindle app. I’m sure you’ve already noticed that all your Kindle books and content got pushed to your iPad when you install it. That kind of platform independence is where Amazon has Apple beat dead to rights. Of course I read the New York Times, although that app seems to get slower and more buggy with each update.

I really wish that I could find a good podcast manager for the iPad or the iPhone. Downloading individual episodes through the iTunes store one at a time, then flipping back to the iPod app is all kinds of clunky. First world problem.

I’ve known about GeekTool and it’s open source cousin, NerdTool since before I even switched from Windows to OS X. For some reason, I always stayed away. Perhaps it was terrible flashbacks to those desktop customization tools like StarDock which takes a professionally designed interface and lets people with no design sense remake their user interface in ways which bog down the system. So far, NerdTool has shown no signs of this nasty behavior.

I started considering using this tool after seeing that this really is the easiest way to confirm that your nightly SuperDuper! backup completed successfully. Getting this functionality takes a little bit of work (including a little work in the terminal) but it’s worth it. It’s great to grab a cup of coffee in the morning and see whether or not your overnight backup successfully completed.

Since I’d taken the plunge to start running NerdTool, I figured why not throw some other stuff together? You can be as minimal as simply printing the date and time on your desktop, get dangerously close to teetering over the edge by adding an image that changes the weather, or go overly geeky and just run top all the time.

NetworkIntel.sh

Every time I connect to a network, I’d like to know a few things that are surprisingly difficult to display all at once in just about any operating system. Confirming my IP address is an obvious and anyone who has had to troubleshoot an internet connection can tell you that the address for the router is equally important. I take it one step further and like to know who else is sitting within striking distance of my computer.

The script below is pretty self evident but the script works by running a couple basic terminal commands, grabbing content from a static and predictable web page and displaying only the information for which you’re looking. I grabbed the actual syntax from a couple of easily found websites (just look for geektool scripts and you’ll find a bunch).

This goes one step further and performs a quick nmap ping sweep and pulls out the results.

echo “Network Intel”
echo “——————————-”
myen0=ifconfig en0 | grep "inet " | grep -v 127.0.0.1 | awk '{print $2}'
if [ “$myen0” != “” ]
then
echo Hard Line : “$myen0”
else
echo “”
fi
myen1=ifconfig en1 | grep "inet " | grep -v 127.0.0.1 | awk '{print $2}'
if [ “$myen1” != “” ]
then
echo “Wireless : $myen1”
else
echo “Wireless : INACTIVE”
fi
myRouter=netstat -nr | grep '^default' | awk '{print $2}'
echo “AP :” “$myRouter”
wip=curl -s http://checkip.dyndns.org/ | sed 's/[a-zA-Z<>/ :]//g'
echo “External : $wip”
echo “——————————-”
echo “Nearby Machines”
echo “——————————-”
nmap -sP 192.168.1.1/24 | awk ‘/report/ {print $5, $6}’
echo “——————————-“


The Daily, a digital only newspaper produced by News Corp launched this week to a pretty high amount of fanfare. Since the iPad was announced close to a year ago, there has been a lot of speculation about how it can reshape the landscape of journalism and paid for content distribution. Taking away the ability for content providers to take advantage of subscriptions, the Daily does a great job of showing how not to persuade people to start paying for the news they’ve gotten for free for a long time. The downfall of The Daily isn’t technical as much as editorial. The publication has too much in common with USA Today and US Weekly than the New York Times and The Economist.

The last time I subscribed to a newspaper was in college. I took advantage of student rates for the pre-News Corp Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. There was normally a pile of copies of the Kansas City Star and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch[^post] which I’d read for some sports news and I’d always find a copy of the Economist. Once I got to law school, the landscape had started to change. I read lots fo the same content, but online. I’ve never had the inclination since then to throw down for a paper.

So after a week of The Daily (including a grey and cloudy Sunday morning) how excited am I about this? Other than my enthusiasm for deleting it at the end of next week, not at all.

The interface is slow, buggy, pixelated and kind of confusing. After tapping on the icon, you wait first for the animation (which probably ought to go away after the initial launch) and then for the loading of new content, which Gruber has measured at over a minute. Yes, it’s too long. A counterpoint is that it takes longer due to all of the rich media which is being downloaded. That’s okay if I’m downloading something that I want to be image a video heavy like a game or a digital copy of Wired, but not for something looking to supplant all other sources of news for me. This morning, I happened to be listening to the latest edition of Hypercritical until I launched The Daily. Thanks, The Daily, I did want to give priority to your startup sound over what I was listening to. Trying to keep my iPod playing while the Daily was open caused The Daily to crash. Awesome.

I don’t want to belabor the interface itself too much. Those are things which aren’t central to my disappointment in The Daily. The problem is the editorial content.

For some reason, The Daily can’t decide whether it wants to be Sports Illustrated, USA Today, or US Weekly. The articles in the News section are amazingly shallow. With all of the resources of News Corp, you’d think that they would have started pulling in pieces from around the Murdoch empire once someone sporting a reading level above the 4th grade read through the pre-release editions. The second section listed after News is Gossip. I have less than an interest in having this be part of a newspaper I’m paying for. There appears to be no dedicated business section, which makes no sense at all. None of the editorials really struck my eye, except for the one which blamed traveling Americans for polluting and ruining the beaches of Jamaica.[^jamaica] Most striking is that they couldn’t find a single well known columnist to contribute during this trial period. Arts and Life continues the trend of shallow writing, and this is where you can find things highly appealing to the educated user such as an advice column, crossword puzzle, sudoku, and a horriscope. Seriously?

Moving along we find Apps & Games, which unsurprisingly has some banal writing about iPad apps, further solidifying my distaste for the word “app.” I enjoy the idea of the “What I Love on my iPad” feature, but tapped on the screen and swiped all over only to find that a list of five apps with a 20 word description was all there was. Not exactly what I’ve come to expect from this kind of model. Finally comes Sports, which is a place where they could find some traction. I’ll be interested to see what in the world they do after the Super Bowl, considering most of the writing this week has been dedicated to nothing but.

Overall, the best news about The Daily is that it opens up subscription possibilities for better publications. The price point of $.99 a week is perfect, and I’ll happily pay that to the Times (once their app returns to stability) and the Economist.

Even though it didn’t affect places like Atlanta, DC or New York it was pretty hard to avoid noticing that a lot of the country got slammed with a big snow storm this week. Even the Chicago School District decided that it was best for everyone to stay home for a while. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but there seem to be more posts than normal this week about the benefits of not being at work or shutting out other inputs to get Work done.

Seeing that it’s been over 10 years since Chicago cancelled school reminded me of the first time that I stayed home just so I could work. It was one of those assignments that you actually start hearing about from upper classmen your first week of high school. Even then, there was nothing like a full pot of coffee and jazz before 9:00 to get things going. I noticed the same things this week.

Yesterday the Firm closed for the first time in a long long time. Everyone holed up, pulled out their lists and plowed through them. I received maybe one phone call of major substance and no more than a few emails. Not only that, those emails didn’t come until the end of the day. The timing and substance of the emails that we exchanged after about 4:30 in the afternoon tells me that people avoided bugging others for most of the day and instead took time to get some depth out of their work for the day. I know I did.

I remained snowed in today, but with the office officially open it was somewhat back to business as usual. Tomorrow everyone will be back and I’m sure the volume of interruptions will be back to normal levels. In the meantime, I think there will be lots of people who look back (in the short term at least) on the blizzard not because of the volume of snow, but how incredibly nice it was just to get some things done for once.