B minor

Every few weeks another person I know gets an iPad and asks me about apps for the device. I’ve already written my thoughts about the iPad as a product, but now, in anticipation of the iPad being a hot item this holiday season, I’m throwing together a list of 10 apps that I love and get a ton of mileage out of:

Productivity

Evernote – Evernote is a world-class note taking application. It is cross-platform (desktop, web, mobile, tablet), syncs over the air, supports tagging and a whole host of input formats – voice, text, photo, etc. It is my go-to place to record important information and non-task-oriented lists. There’s a reason its logo is an elephant – it is very hard to forget anything when you store it in Evernote. (free)

OmniFocus – I used to use Cultured Code’s Things for my task management/to-do lists. Unfortunately, they dragged their feet for too long on cloud sync, so I gave up and switched to OmniFocus over the summer. Couldn’t be happier. They make a great suite of products (tablet, phone, desktop) for managing your chores – and they are very heavily influenced by the GTD framework. They come in on the pricier side, but the peace of mind the product buys by freeing up mindshare for things other than remembering chores is well worth it. ($39.99)

iA Writer – This is a beautiful, distraction-eliminating, prose-writing application. If you write seriously, you must have this. ($4.99)

Social

Twitter – the web’s favorite micro-blogging platform, available in a beautiful iPad-native interface. (free)

Flipboard – Flipboard pulls the highlights from your social networks (Facebook, Twitter) and presents pictures, articles, and status messages in a compelling, digi-zine format. It’s a great way to dive deeper into the content your friends are sharing – perfect for end-of-day or Sunday morning reading and browsing. (free)

Entertainment

Netflix – The awesome of Netflix, tabletized. You can stream the same stuff you’d stream to your computer or set-top box to your iPad. The video quality is surprisingly good. Fair warning, though – Netflix can quickly turn into a black hole, sucking all your available time into it. At $7.99/month for unlimited streaming, it’s hard to remember why I ever paid for cable subscription. (free, subscription required.)

Travel

FlightTrack – If you travel even *somewhat* frequently, FlightTrack is a must-have. It has a dead-simple interface for tracking your upcoming flights, including separating the airline’s arrival/departure times from the FAA’s wheels-down/wheels-up times. You’ll have a much better sense of when you’re actually going to leave or arrive with this app. The Pro version integrates with TripIt to pull in your itineraries automagically – which is pretty awesome when you have multi-leg or recurring itineraries. (Unclear how long this lasts, though, as FlightTrack’s developer, Mobiata, was just acquired by Expedia.) ($4.99 standard) ($9.99 pro)

Communication

BeejiveIM - If you use multiple instant messaging services, this is a must-have. Even if you don’t, but are looking for a dead-simple IM client with push alerts for the iPad, this is a great find. I realized recently that IM was one of the reasons I wasn’t using my iPad as frequently, so I was pleasantly surprised to find the iPad version of this app I’ve used on my iPhone for so long. ($9.99)

Fun

StarWalk – One of those great “impress your friends” apps. A must-have if you are an outdoors person or have ever been fascinated by what lies out there in space. A should-have if you ever find yourself outside with friends at night. This app will use your location and give you a 3D rendering of the night sky, perfectly mapped to the current time. Makes identifying stars, constellations, and other nighttime phenomena a breeze. Packed with fun information about everything you might encounter in the night sky. ($4.99)

Osmos HD – The quintessential iPad game. It’s beautifully designed and skirts the line of maddeningly challenging. (You may find yourself googling how to solve certain levels.) But it’s fun and really brings the power of the iPad’s interface to bear. ($4.99)

I know I said 10, but this one’s too good not to include, so consider it a bonus:

Uzu – Trust me on this. Buy it. Your imagination will thank me, your productivity will hate me. [And remember when you use it, you have 10 fingers.] ($1.99)

If you have comments about these apps or want to add your own recos, please do so below!

This article on Bloomberg this week caught my attention for its claim: “Morgan Stanley Intern Says Teens Don’t Twitter, Prefer Events”

For those that might not know, large financial institutions publish large amounts of research as part of their product offerings (they both sell this research and use it internally to inform invesment decisions). This report, published on a topic I care about, purports (according to the article):

Teenagers spend money on game consoles, movies and music concerts while ignoring newspapers, a Morgan Stanley report said, citing Matthew Robson. Robson should know: He is a 15-year-old intern at the securities firm.

The schoolboy was asked by the bank’s European media analysts to report on what he and his peers look for in the information-entertainment industries. What they got was one of the “clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen,” the analysts said.

“Teenagers are consuming more media, but in entirely different ways and are almost certainly not prepared to pay for it,” Morgan Stanley analysts Edward Hill-Wood, Patrick Wellington and Julien Rossi said in a note, citing Robson.

Call me crazy, but I had two reactions to this:

1. duh. (on the last part. not sure I buy that “teens don’t twitter”)
2. are banks in the habit of publishing research that is anecdotally single sourced?

After posting yesterday about choosing to rent a Penske truck over a u-haul for my move next week, I was happy to see that I had a visitor to the site from a penske domain today. I hope that means somebody in their company is actually engaged in proactive customer service on the web (or at least has a google alert set up for Penske). It’s like companies that have a CSR on Twitter. You have to like that. Nobody visited my site from u-haul, even though I’ve mentioned them a few times in the last few weeks. Already I’m feeling better about my decision. Hopefully Penske comes through next week.

I’ve been spending a lot of effort lately trying to explain Twitter and/or justify my enjoyment of Twitter to people. And while it’s hard to explain “microblogging” to people who don’t quite grasp the purpose of blogging to begin with, let me just say this about Twitter:

Tonight, while I’ve been sitting here studying for next weekend’s Finance final (zzz…), I’ve been tracking the progress of 1) the NBA Finals Game 5, 2) the Tonys, and 3) the US Open (major putt by Tiger Woods no doubt) via my friends on Twitter (one of whom is actually at the Tonys). Being able to watch 3 major events, in real time, while being 100% focused on a textbook, has been pretty sweet.

And while I’m sure this doesn’t help any of those naysayers out there… this is another one of the things I find fascinatingly useful about Twitter.

It is a sad day for television, journalism, politics, and frankly, the whole country. Tim Russert died this afternoon of a heart attack at NBC’s Washington Bureau. He was 58.

We became aware of the rumors about his death internally at ABC News around 3pm. It was almost 45 minutes later before Tom Brokaw interrupted NBC and MSNBC to report the death. By then several news outlets, including the New York Times and the New York Post were reporting it. There is a gentleman’s agreement between the television networks to defer to the shop affected before reporting news about the competition. When NBC finally went on the air, so did we, updating our site, etc. The same deference was given when our own Peter Jennings passed.

On the web, it was interesting to watch Twitter and Wikipedia through this ordeal. When we first heard rumors of the news, Twitter had only a few recent tweets about Tim Russert. Within 20 minutes there were a few dozen, and by the time I got back to my desk, after NBC had confirmed the news, it was in the thousands. Wikipedia had already been updated with his date of death before the rumors had even reached ABC’s newsroom.

Thoughts and prayers to the Russert family and Tim’s colleagues at NBC.