iPad Aplications that makes my tablet a productivity tool

After some time I decided to post the applications I use to make my tablet a productivity tool. After all it is the apps that make the tablet and not the other way around.

I divided my apps into 4 catagories

• Productivity
• Utilities
• Social
• Entertainment

And yes productivity in my case can be enhanced by entertainment (imagine a noisy open plan office whilst trying to do some decent low level architecture analysis) Nothing better than in-ear headphones and my favourite radio station or music collection ...

Productivity:

• iThoughtsHD - it will import and export mindmaps to and from many of the most popular desktop mindmap applications and used daily by myself.
• TouchDraw - Vector drawing and diagramming with useful Libraries and great support (had some queries around connector types)
• SharePlus - Used to access content on SharePoint sites
• Quickoffice HD - office editing suite for iPad (including Office 2010)
• GoodReader - A auper-robust reader for iPad (great at PDF & Office docs with great file management & multitude of connections e.g. Dropbox, Skydrive, Google Drive, SMB servers, etc.)

Other used as well

 

• UPAD Lite - great for quick freehand notes or freehand schetching
• Evernote - The best note taking application and cross OS (from my PC to my Android phone and my iPad)
• DropBox - cloud sync for non sensitive data (I use a private cloud for sensitive data)
• OneNote - used to sync notes from Microsoft Notes (for a spesific customer in a pure Microsoft environment)
• AceProject - Keeping track of project tasks & collaborate with other teams

Most of these are used on a daily basis by myself with iThoughtsHD used for mind mapping as well as note keeping per project and assigning tasks to myself and others. GoodReader is in my mind the swiss army knive of IOS and enabled me to read most things on the iPad from local, private- or public cloud. All of them was carefully picked to enhance my productivity and still keep the data-overload era we live in catagorized and not to duplicate wherever possible.

Following posts will look into the other catagories of applications I use.

How do I access files on a NAS from my iPad

FileBrowser by stratospherix does a brilliant job of file share access for the iOS devices.

Apple lesson 2 - AirPrint

Apple support on a printer does not guarantee Airprint support
The printer has to explicitely support the AirPrint feature to enable the ipad2 to automatically detect and use the printer.

 

The Canon printer MX420 does not support Airprint, however there is a application in the App Store (Canon Easy-PhotoPrint) that allows you to easily print photos and scan via wifi.

iTunes MAC & iTunes PC not equal to iTunes iPad

So the wonderfull world of "comliant to this & that" on the spec sheet vs. reality set in again. Now this might be down to lack of product knowledge as well but so you learn.

From the little Apple experience I gained so far I could really say in a "pure" Apple eco-system everything works brilliant and as planned, but trying to add 3rd party or other service to this ecosystem seem to be problematic.

iTunes for PC & MAC have a feature for "Shared" resources



 

whereas iPad/iPhone itunes does not let you choose your itunes library. You always need to connect to your Mac/PC (remote) itunes and sync with your ipad.

So the feature called iTunes Server does not mean you can assume it can stream to all Apple type devices.

So in my instance where I enabled the iTunes server on a QNAP NAS the Workaround:

Use the QMobile application provided by QNAP to remotely play the music library on the iPad.