It's wet out, therefore iPad

It's Monday again and it's raining again. However, the weekend afforded some great weather, especially Sunday. When Monday brings rain after a rare taste of sunshine in what has been a record-breaking cold and wet spring, he really does live down to his image as least popular kid on the playground. The forecast does call for some more sunshine this week, in between clouds and wet.

I missed posting a couple days last week, again for early morning meetings. This week looks mostly normal, so hopefully I can get back on track. Not that the world is any poorer for the lack of a couple days of this blog, but because one year of consistent daily recordings of the commute music was the reason I started this in the first place I still feel compelled to stick to the rules and goal.

Before I get to the music, a couple of recommendations for fellow iPadians. The first is really for iPhone 4 users: Camera+. Camera+ adds several enhancements to the iPhone and gives it the potential to take professional quality photos. It means that not only is the best camera the one you have with you (as goes the old saying), but the phone you have with you really may be your best camera. The ability to do some very powerful editing of each image in a lightbox before saving them is especially powerful when you want to get just the right result.

On the iPad, Photolog and Filterstorm combine to give you, first, an excellent way to create, manage, and upload albums of photos to Facebook, Flickr, Picassa, and other popular photo sharing sites, and second a strong set of image manipulation and adjustment tools to ensure each photo is as good as you can make it.

Finally, a non-photographic app, Venus for iPad. Venus is a solid Facebook client for the iPad. I've played with all of the FB clients available, and each has it's strength (well, some have very few strengths, to be honest!) but each one fails to something well. Some don't update reliably, other won't let you comment on posts, some don't see all entries, some won't let you download pictures, some are sloooooow, etc. It's early days yet, but this one appears to be quite solid as well as very nicely interfaced. It looks like you've opened a tabbed notebook and, while scrolling up and down on what looks like a page of an opened paperbound book is a little strange to the eyes, the layout works quite well for presenting and organizing all the things one does on FB.

This morning's music was very good, though it started off a bit like cartoon hour with a couple of silly tunes. Speaking of what could be silly but is actually nicely done: how often do you get to hear Robert Palmer doing a cover of a Gershwin tune?

The full playlist:

- The Beatles: Rocky Raccoon
- Bela Fleck & The Flecktones: Flight Of The Cosmic Hippo
- Franco de Vita: Mira Más Allá (Live)
- Robert Palmer: I Got Rhythm
- Peter Doherty: Palace of Bone


- Posted via Hermes.