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All of us want to excel in the domains that we practice – be it photography, web development or teaching. But sometimes it hits you that these fields have become too large for us to handle.

It is not just that the domains have become too large. Now, we are expected to posses skills in many of the associated fields to be successful. It is not enough that you can focus and capture amazing pictures, but you need to be able to persuade clients to engage you for assignments, negotiate fees and also effectively manage time.

When all of these crowd your mind, you tend to forget things – some times even the crucial things. That leads to disasters which can’t be forgiven, because you knew you had to do it, you knew how to do it, yet forgot to do it.

That is how proposals are emailed to wrong clients and product upgrades are done without shuting down email servers!

But is there a remedy? Can this be solved?

“Yes,” says Atul Gawande in his book, The Checklist Manifesto. If not obvious from the book title, he recommends us to use checklists.

I stand by checklists, because I use them and I have found their effectiveness.

Because I’m convinced of the effectiveness of checklists, I have created a web-application to be a repository of checklists.

It is only the first version. But you can already create checklists and tag them. I have list of additional features to implement (like delete, modify checklists, share in social media etc.), Still you can mail me your suggestions.

Now its your time to go and create checklists, because you don’t want to make stupid mistakes.

One of the first apps that I downloaded into iPad is Nebulous Notes Lite and I love it.

Why?

Is it because it is free?

Is it because it has dropbox interface?

Is it because it has a full screen edit? (well almost)

Yes all of the above, but those aren’t the only reasons for my ‘wow’ feeling.

More than everything above, its the macro bar on top of the regular iPad keyboard that makes me tap it to capture notes.

The extra line of keys bring undo, redo, letter and word navigation and so on. It is so useful that, I think it should be a default in iPad.

Even though it’s free, Nebulous Notes Lite lets you define your own macros and rearrange these macros (by way of export and import) to suit your need.

Another one of geeky feature that I love is it’s support for Markdown tags. Now I can type blog posts in a readable format and convert to HTML when I post. This helps me concentrate on content creation rather than worry about presentation. I use TextMate on my Mac, so conversion is taken care of well by TextMate’s blogging bundle.

Ever since I bought iPad, I have been compiling my blog posts solely on Nebulous Notes Lite and I observe that, my rate of getting the post out has increased.

I am so amazed by features in the free version, I might soon buy the full version. It’s that good.

Owning a Mac was a long cherished dream of mine. Like many other dreams, it was beyond my reach. But dreams do come true.

As soon as I became an independent consultant, I bought myself a MacBook Laptop. Yes it was expensive, but that is one of few purchases that I am not sorry about.

Reasons?

Due to nature of my assignments, I had to use my laptop only on an open network. But so far, I didn’t have to worry about virus creeping to my laptop. I freely use thumb-drives for sharing files with all others Ms-Windows users without any care or concern. I do have an anti-virus installed; yet the assurance of safety in itself is a great relief.

Secondly, in these many days, I haven’t wasted an hour of downtime due to system crash, failed updates or hanging system for thousand and one reasons. Efficiency is implicitly expected out of consultants and being an IT consultant, I am glad that I never had to say, “please give me one more day since I have to re-install my computer” (though I had to hear that from many of my colleagues).

Another advantage of Mac is the pleasure of using better designed products. I can’t comment if this differentiation is brought forth by designers of applications or MacOS itself somehow mandates a pleasing UI and a well functioning design; in any case, Mac users benefit from such application ecosystem. One such feature that is ‘full screen editing’ by which you are presented a full screen canvas with minimalist tools, thus helping you to concentrate on creating the content rather than being diverted by umpteen number of tiny icons scattered all over the screen. I am not saying all Mac users are highly productive – I can’t even say that about myself, but these applications facilitate productivity and then gets out of your way.

Is it all only admiration? Of course not. I am not a Mac zealot to be blinded. There are some black-spots too in Mac.

Foremost is the lack of wide spread customer service centres, at least in India. There are only handful of service centres, (though they were extremely helpful), and then there are absolutely none in tier-2 cities.

And then there is this, common complaint that anything to do with Mac is very expensive. There is definitely a premium to be paid for all the features in Mac, be it hardware, MacOS applications or third-party applications. They are more expensive than their counterparts in Windows machines.

But these gripes are small compared to what I get out of owning a Mac.

I will continue to enjoy the pleasure of being with a Mac.

The three major factor by which iPad stands out from its competition (is there any?) are, sleek device, low price and most importantly, vast number of applications. Pick any category and you are sure to find a free, cheap and an expensive application, and mostly a good fit for your needs.

Ever since I got an iPad, I have been browsing the AppStore for free apps.

Browsing the AppStore can overwhelm you. While large number of applications is a good thing, searching through the AppStore can overwhelm you. There are just too many apps. Of course, if you care to spend time sifting through all of searches and app descriptions, you will find what you want.

But if you are ready to spend money, then you don’t have to spend that much time going through the appstore – just pick up the app you want to buy, pay and own it.

Since I had time, I decided to search for free apps.

In fact, I’m surprised that there are any free apps for iPad. Apple charges enormous amount (at least according to my standards) to be part of the developer program and without participating in it, you can’t get your app into AppStore which is the only distribution mode for iPad apps. Yes, there are free apps with ads, but not every one.

Here I present the free apps I found useful.

Top 20 Free iPad Apps

While there are hundreds of free apps, I didn’t go and try every free apps. Why? Because of how I want to use this iPad.

I framed ‘consume, create, converse’ model for learning. I am curious about various subjects and I want to learn about all of them. So I looked for apps that fit into these three broad categories.

1. AppStart: A beginners guide for iPad. It gets you started with using iPad. It also provides list of essential applications (both free and commercial) under different categories.

2. MobileRSS: I am a follower of ‘Eat like a bird’ principle advocated by Guy Kawasaki. So I read lot of blogs and Google Reader is my choice of RSS aggregator. Hence I prefer desktop & mobile clients that syncs with Google Reader. MobileRSS is an easy to use iPad app syncing with Google Reader.

3. Read It Later: Another tool for consumption of interesting ideas. As I read blogs and tweets, I collect links that would be of interest which I can read leisurely. ‘Read it Later’ client enables me to collect these links and as the name indicates, to read them later. An annoying aspect though is that you need to be connected to the Internet to save these links. It would be a welcome feature if links can be added offline too.

4. Echofon: Twitter enables me to consume, create and engage all within the same system. I learnt a lot through Twitter regarding all the topics that I’m interested in. Echofon provides a simple and easy interface to all of Twitter functionalities (lists, retweets, reply etc). I can also save links to ‘Read It Later’, if connected to Internet.

5. Evernote: Evernote is a fantastic tool for knowledge management. It has tools for collection from RSS readers, browsers and menu bar and all of it’s clients (on MAC, iPad, android) for free. These collected notes can be tagged and organised under notebooks. Since it is a free plan, there is no offline reading of these notes, which I am ok.

6. Nebulous Lite: A text editor for iPad. But it’s more than a text editor. It has support for markdown format with dropbox sync. If that isn’t enough, it also has support for macros which brings an additional row of keys to default iPad keyboard. I have found that this extra row of keys offer very useful features like undo, redo, navigating shortcuts etc. Try this app if you plan to type a lot on your iPad. In fact, I am typing this blog post in it, which will be converted into HTML on my MAC.

7. Bible: There is no other book that has inspired me as much as Bible. Now I can carry it along with me to read it anytime I want. Not just one version but many versions (I have downloaded Good News Version).

8. iBooks: Probably the only free app from Apple for iPad. This is a book reader. You can download books on variety of topics from the bookstore. I have downloaded some of the classics. Currently I am reading, “India : What can it teaches us?”

9. Toshl: A tool to track expenses. It is a iPhone only app which syncs with their web app. Since I have been already using it, I went ahead to use it in iPad too.

10. Idea Sketch: A simple tool to draw flow chart or mind map. The drawing can be saved locally or emailed.

11. Documents Free Mobile Office Suite: Mobile office suite which can handle both documents and spreadsheets along with integration to Google Docs. Google Documents can be downloaded, edited and uploaded back. Documents can also be created in the iPad and uploaded into Google Docs.

12. Dropbox: The glue. Now-a-days, I depend on dropbox for sharing files back and forth between iPad and Mac and writing notes on the iPad and syncing back to Mac.

13. WordWeb: Dictionary for iPad. It’s fairly comprehensive and has an extensive search facility too. Every now and then, I would like to refer a word and with word web, I don’t have to wait until I get a Internet connection.

14. WordPress: I host two blogs – one is this and [another] where I blog about consulting. I can post from within the iPad and also track comments. But the most useful feature is the access statistics of the blogs.

15. Times Of India: Times of India is the only Indian newspaper that has an iPad version, that too for free. I have been a subscriber of its paper version. Now I sync the iPad app in the morning and I read while traveling or whenever I get free time during the day.

16. Flipboard: A new way of consuming digital information. An interesting concept that turns blogs and twitter feeds into a digital magazine.

17. CloudReaders: A PDF reader for iPad. You can download from its bookshelf or transfer files from your mac. It has an easy mechanism to transfer files into iPad from Mac.

18. Chess: If I completed whatever I wanted to do, then I take a break and play for sometime before I get to the next task. This app is well designed.

19. Epicurious Recipes & Shopping List: Cooking can be fun and a stress reliever. Epicurious lists lots of recipes. I’m still looking for a good Indian menu in the list. Right now, I am just trying out the drinks mentioned here.

20. IM+: I use Google (gmail) as my contact manager app, so I was looking for a chat client with a support for Google protocol. IM+ supports almost all existing chat protocols and it’s easy to use too.

As days go by, I will test out other applications in each of these categories. If you have any suggestions, please let me know via comments.

As I use these applications, I will also post full review of these applications. So stay tuned.

Apple released its iPad 1 in India, just few weeks before launch of its iPad 2, leading to an assumption that Apple considers India as a dumping ground. The buzz in the social media was that, Apple is ignoring emerging markets. This meant that iPad 2 wont be available in India for a very long time.

I could have asked any of my friends in the US to buy me an iPad 2 and dispatch via someone returning to India. But too much of ‘I-want-to-help-Indian-economy’ ideology prevented me from doing it.

So I decided to buy an Android based tablet.

But there was no Android tablet available in the market. There was Samsung Tab, but it wasn’t really a tablet since it was running on Android OS meant for phones. Samsung Galaxy Tab was announced but not yet released.

So here I was in India waiting for a real tablet. Then something unexpected happened.

There is a reason Apple is the most celebrated brand now. They beat their competitors in every factor. Not only they create smooth and beautiful products, but they also devour their competition unexpectedly. One such move was their introduction of iPad in India.

Apple announced that iPad 2 will be available in India by first week of May.

Unlike the US there were no long queues in India to get an iPad. Even the shortage of iPads were attributed to shops ordering just few units.

When I went to Anything Mac for servicing my MacBook, I casually asked, if they had an iPad 2. Since I didn’t see any crowd and also the shop itself was so small, I had assumed they won’t have one. But I was wrong. They had iPads. The receptionist apologetically said they had only the wi-fi ones, which was great since I wanted only wi-fi ones.

So there I became the proud owner of iPad 2.