What Apps - Part One

I've now begun my third year using an iPad at work. I have over 100 apps in my iTunes account and most of them aren't even synched to my iPad. If I ignore apps that are for kids or purely for entertainment value I still have over 70 apps of which I regularly use very few.

So what are the apps that you would find on my ipad? A good place to start would be with the dock, as that is where I keep the apps I use the most. The apps there are Calendar [apple], Settings [apple] Chrome [google] Gmail [google] and Flipboard [flipboard].



I keep Settings in the dock for switching between wifi networks and other mundane tasks. I use Calendar because I am not an appointments and scheduling freak and Calendar works fine for me. Until recently I had Calendar hooked up to my Gmail calendars but since I've gone all apple (and apple have gone all iCloud), I copied my gmail calendars into Calendar and use iCloud to keep in sync between home, work and mobile devices.

I use Chrome because I use Chrome on the desktop and think it is a better browser than Safari though I think browser choice is very much a personal one. I use the Gmail app for two reasons. One is because I think it looks and works better than the native Mail app. The other is because I use gmail mainly for personal non work related email. The native Mail app is hooked up to my work email enabling me to keep clear separation between the two.

So that leaves Flipboard about which I've written before. I liked it when I first got it and I still like. It feels like a really mature stable app and an integral part of the iPad. It's my go to app for news and I use it to aggregate different kinds of news from different sources. One of the really nice features is you can connect it to your own Twitter lists which enables you to construct your own online real-time magazines centered around your own interests. This is in addition to the curated feeds you can connect to on every conceivable topic. As of a couple of weeks ago you can even buy Levi's jeans from within Flipboard (see where this is going?).

I liked the idea of how Flipboard could be used in education. It's easy to see how curated lists can be used to push relevant content to students, and coupled with links to good blogs, medical journals etc flipboard can be a really nice interface through which to interact with content (updatable square tiles with touch as the primary interaction mode, sounds familiar, but from where?).

I think Flipboard have missed a trick though. They don't have any specific channels for use by educational institutions for pushing content to student subscribers. After they first launched their developer programme I emailed them to ask if they would be making developer tools available to educational institutions in the same way as they were to magazine/advertising partners and they said they didn't plan to do so. Pity!

Still if you post content to a blog or webpage and have an RSS feed you (and/or your students) can subscribe to the feed in Flipboard and get a reasonably good magazine like interface to your stuff. It's definitely worth a try.

In my next What Apps post I'll talk a bit about anatomy specific apps that I think are indispensable.