The Librain

My iPad arrived on Monday 16th May at around 10.00 a.m. As I am not working mornings at the moment, I couldn’t resist opening the box and having a look. Having never owned anything by Apple before, my first impression was about how lovely even the packaging is – how sad is that!

I am only used to PCs and laptops, so even working out what to do with the iPad was odd at first. But it was very easy to see how to switch on, link to my laptop and get started. I played around with it for a while, then decided to read an iBook called  “The iPad 2 Starter Guide, by the Macworld Editors (available free from the iBook Store). It helps me to read something when I have already had a go at working things out for myself. I am now a dab hand at flicking, pinching and scrolling!

The pre-installed apps are things like a basic Calendar, Contacts, Notes and Maps and I quickly worked out how to get Mail to link to my Gmail. My husband is very non-techy, but he was fascinated by how the Maps worked. As I have only got the wireless version and not the 3G, he won’t be able to use it for navigation though.

By synching with my laptop, I have copied across all of my photos and music and have also worked out how to get compatible ePUB versions of e-books across to the iPad too. There are also lots of free e-books available through iTunes or iBooks too.

Using Twitter and other networks, I asked friends and colleagues to tell me their favourite apps and I have installed a range of free ones so far. I also got a lot more today from a neat booklet which came free with the Sunday Telegraph! When I have more knowledge, I will see if I want to buy more, particularly some to go in the Productivity folder. Now that I have had the iPad for a week, I have done the typical librarian stuff and started to organise my apps into folders as I don’t want to have to scroll through loads of home screens to find them. Some of them may end up being moved into better folders later on.

I will list what I have downloaded here for now:

Folders

1. Culture: Intelligent Life from the Economist, Musee du Louvre
2. Fashion: Elle, Marie Claire
3. Food: Epicurious, Good Food
4. News: BBC News, CNN, Daily Telegraph, FeeddlerRSS, Flipboard, Pulse News, Sky News, Zite
5. Photography: ExploreFlickr, Guardian Eyewitness, Instagram, PS Express
6. Productivity: Dragon Dictation, Prezi Viewer
7. Property: Primelocation, Rightmove
8. Reference: Dictionary, Discover, IMDb, Wikipanion
9. Social Media: Facebook (not an app, just a link to the site), Hootsuite, MyPad, Taptu, Twitter, Tweetdeck
10. Sport: iCricket, iRugby, PremRugby, Sky Sports News
11. Travel: Best Western to Go!, Google Earth, RoughGuides World Lens, TripAdvisor
12. TV: 4oD Catch Up, BBC iPlayer
13. Utilities: iPF (Apple iPad Forums), Night Stand, Scan, Weather+, Wi-Fi Finder

Not in folders

1. Diigo
2. Dropbox
3. Evernote
4. Google Search
5. iBooks
6. Shazam
7. TED
8. Plus web pages I visit a lot saved on the home page (dare I admit my addiction to….. no!)

Some of these seem to work better than others, so they may have been removed before I post next time! My next post will probably take the form of looking at individual apps – particularly the ones I am using the most so far.