How I use My iPad: Notes, Presenting, Communication and Entertainment

Josh SmithOctober 26, 2010

Last week Chris Leckness posted a question over at GottaBeMobile, asking if he was alone in not using his iPad anymore. The resident tableteers at GottaBeMobile chimed in with Warner sharing how he is using his iPad more than ever and Sumocat fessed up to not owning an iPad and shared his love for Pen input.

Not one to be left out I wanted to share how I use my iPad on a day-to-day basis and why there’s rarely a day it doesn’t get at least a few hours of use.

How I use my iPad at Work:

Notes – With Note Taker HD, which allows me to set up a specific background that fits my notetaking style, I can take notes in meetings using the Targus Stylus. While it doesn’t match up to the inking experience on a true tablet, it’s good enough for my needs. I usually end up exporting the notes to PDF and sending to Evernote for archival purposes.
Looking smart in meetings – With fast access to data and remote systems I can look up stats on the web or in our database while the rest of the table talks about something and look great.
For an almost paperless office – part of my dayjob involves generating and sharing the results of a variety of reports. Instead of printing them out every other week I just export to a PDF stored in Dropbox which gives me anywhere access to the latest reports as well as previous versions.
Paper to Digital – Anything I receive in paper form with a life longer than a day gets scanned and shredded. So long as there isn’t anything crazy confidential they get scanned right into Evernote for easy access on any computer or my iPad.

How I Use my iPad to Teach:

Presenting – After prepping for class I will export my lecture notes to PDF, stored in DropBox, and then import them into iBooks. This allows me to have notes at my fingertips while giving a lecture. I don’t use a VGA adapter and an App as I like the ability to take the iPad anywhere in the classroom and have notes. I wish there was a WiFi solution to stream a PowerPoint to a PC/Projector and show the notes on my iPad. Any App developers out there?
Class work – Anytime we have group[work in class I can carry the solution around with me on the iPad, synced via Dropbox, as I move from group to group. Since I can zoom in and out easily I can share just a portion of the answer with a group in trouble without the need to fold a piece of paper creatively.
eTextBooks – Thanks to CourseSmart every textbook I use is available on the iPad, iPhone and in the browser. While you do need WiFi, all of my classrooms have access.
Class Prep Wherever – Thanks to Pages, CourseSmart, Evernote and NoteTaker HD I can work on class prep wherever I have WiFi.
What’s Missing – I loved inking on homework assignments with Windows 7 on my HP tx2000, something I haven’t found an easy way to do on the iPad.

How I Use my iPad for Communication and Scheduling:

Email – I have yet to hook my dayjob email into the iPad since I have Gmail hooked up for calendar and email, but when I need access I can pull up the webmail version. Gmail in the iPad browser is one of my go to methods for reading email and with Priority Inbox I can quickly flag them for easy responding later on.
Calendar – Hooked up to Gmail so that I always have my appointments with me.
Twitter – I use Osfoora HD to read tweets and highly recommend you do to. Check out our iPad app of the Week Oosfora review.

How I use my iPad for Blogging:

Feed Reading and News- To stay up to date on current news I use Reeder which syncs with Google Reader, FlipBoard and a few other apps to keep up on news in a flash.
Browsing for stories – If I need to know what’s hot I will usually send my iPad to TechMeme or hit up a few other bookmarks to see what’s going on in technology or personal finance.
Starting posts – If I need to get a post rolling I often find I can get going fast on the iPad without distractions. Normally I will compose in Pages, but sometimes I will hop right into Evernote or Mail to get the thoughts on to the screen.
Avoiding WordPress app – Even though we run on WordPress I have lost too many posts to compose right in the iPad WordPress App. Normally I’m not publishing from the iPad anyway so the other methods work fine.

How I use my iPad for Entertainment:

Video Watching – After working for a while I tend to end up watching TV in bed and while there’s a TV in the room watching it without annoying my sleeping wife can be problematic. I use the Apple case to hold the iPad in landscape mode, tuck it against the head of the bed and watch videos over Air Video, Netflix or one of the various apps like the ABC app using headphones. I may have to add PlayOn.tv to the mix as well.
Reading – My go to eBook software is Kindle since I can sync the books to my Android phone as well, but the ease of adding PDF’s to iBooks is also great! Right now I am reading a friend’s book ahead of print on PDF and have also been able to read many other great books that aren’t available as an official eBook yet. These aren’t pirated, I just happen to know a lot of authors.
Games – Gaming on the iPad isn’t on par with the console, or the DS in my opinion since it lacks buttons, but it is a bunch of fun. Right now I am wasting too much time on Angry Birds Halloween HD and a few others.
Web Browsing away from desk – If I’m not at a desk and I want to browse the web it’s on the iPad. That’s in the car, on the couch…wherever. Though I don’t stall surf, no judgement Warner.