All entries for Saturday 31 July 2010

recently installed iPad apps

Follow-up to iPad on a holiday from Rudo's blog

Some more info on useful apps:

[App Tracker] Free app which allows better browsing of the available apps than the Apple App Store.

[Air Sharing HD] App which allows access to many file-transfer protocols and sites, including SFTP. Hence this allows access to files which are behind proper SSL/SSH/SFTP/FTP-SSL controls. A bit cluncky when dealing with the files, but certainly allows access to files on the CSC servers.

[Periodic Table] Nice and quick summary of properties of all elements in the periodic table. Good reference.

[Dictation] Converts speech to text which can then be used (mostly copied) into other applications. Not sure this is really useful for me, my German accent is clearly a challenge for it.

[iFractal] Plots Mandelbrot and associated Julia sets. Allows "pan and zoom" to zoom into the images. Nice to show the beauty of fractals (to my 10 year old daughter).

[Molecules] PDB viewer for large protein structures. Quick and allows download of .pdb files from the Protein Databank.

[Clinometer] Does what is says on the tin, nicely and graphically: measures angles and inclinations.

[3D Sun] Download past and "current" (from today) images of the sun. Beautiful images and movies of sun flares and more. Should be a runner for our CFSA people.

[FreeFTP] converts the iPad into a Wifi FTP server for quick and easy (if on the same Wifi network) access to data.

Rudo Roemer : 31 Jul 2010 20:21 |  Tags: Ipad |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

iPad on a holiday

Follow-up to iPad, one month on from Rudo's blog

I took the iPad with me on a holiday (lovely, thanks). Loaded it up with (i) work stuff such as PDFs and (ii) in-flight entertainment such as movies, podcasts and songs and also (iii) books.

On the plane, the iPad was *much* better than any laptop. It is so small and slim that it is no problem to take out of a bag when sitting down and quickly back in after landing. During the flight, it easily fits into the seat-storage. The flight-mode setting is also easily accessible. Watching movies/podcats/etc during the flight is easy, the iPad can be held in various positions which makes the whole experience very enjoyable. Same during the airport waiting times. A bit of a problem since Wifi was not available, so the initial download of data was needed.

During the holidays, it was a great advantage to have just one iPad and not many heavy books and papers to carry. Read a 500+ pages book (Lee Smolin, "Trouble with Physics") and half a dozen scientific papers (PDFs). All worked great and was a pleasure.

No Wifi during all of the 7 days of the trip, but had downloaded enough off-line content before to be quite content.

Summary: the iPad is great for travel, particularly when you need to read manuscripts, papers and more as well as books.

Rudo Roemer : 31 Jul 2010 20:10 |  Tags: Ipad |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem