This is made possible by OnLive Desktop and its associated, inexpensive iPad app. The iPad allows you to open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents that you have uploaded to your OnLive account. You can also create new documents using the app. OnLive uses the 2010 versions of the Microsoft apps I’ve mentioned herein.

You can also use Windows Paint for creating/editing graphic files, and there is a sticky notes app you can use for reminders. There are also a few games you can play.

You can sign up for a 2 GB storage account for free, or you can soon choose the pro account ($9.99 per month) which gives you 50 GB of storage, priority access, and the ability to add other Windows applications. This sounds especially promising, since there are two Windows products that Apple has never matched: Access and Outlook. Being able to install those (and/or FrontPage and OneNote) would make OnLive very attractive.

I found the experience of setting up an account and uploading some files to be very easy. The iPad app is also very nice, and easy to use. I did have a bit of difficulty finding the keyboard at first (it resides in the upper left corner), but that was the only difficulty I had and it was minor.

I keep postponing getting a new phone. For one thing, even if I get another iPhone, I am not convinced that Apple has solved the battery problems with the iPhone 4S (although I am sure they soon will). And, for another, I still wonder if it’s time for me to break away from iOS and give Android a shot. I know Android has its share of technical problems, too, but maybe it’s time for a switch. After all, I am fairly pleased with the Kindle Fire, which is based on a version of the Android OS.

Anyway, it’s interesting that Woz is as positive as he is on Android. More food for thought for me.

Danny’s article mocks the supposed “open nature” of Android, calling it “clopen” (for kinda closed and kinda open).

Paris’ article hits on some of the same points, but also gives a history of Android, and highlights what a joke Google’s “don’t be evil” mantra is.

I’m glad I got a Kindle Fire before reading these articles, or I might have continued to put it off. I’ve actually been very pleased with the Kindle Fire, and it has proved to me that Android does have some appealing features. (The Fire runs an Amazon version of Android.) I definitely cannot say that I will never get an Android phone. I would like to see the issues that Danny and Paris point out addressed, but it is not a perfect world, so I may “cave” at some point. After all, I don’t like some of the games that Apple plays, either.

Here’s what the bookmarklet looks like in my Chrome browser (sandwiched in between the Gmail and another bookmarklet):

Basically, Instapaper takes a page that looks like the following

and turns into one that looks like this:

The latter is so readable on an iPad or iPhone that it makes reading a pleasure, instead of a challenge as it is with many web pages. The downside is that Instapaper gathers up only the content without any of the readers’ comments … so, when there are insightful comments, I miss out on those. Often, though, the comments add no value, so I only occasionally miss out on anything worth reading.

And, I can save a page to Instapaper from within the Safari browser on my iPad or iPhone, because the bookmarklets sync with those in my iMac’s Safari browser (I have basically the same bookmarks in Safari and Chrome).

Even better, a lot of apps have a “Save to Instapaper” feature built in. This includes two of my other favorite iPad apps: Reeder and Zite.

Reeder syncs with my Google Reader feeds, and is what I generally use to browse through my feeds. When I see an article that looks interesting, I just click a button and the link is saved to my Instapaper account. Zite, a relatively new but fantastic app, grabs headlines from several other sources, and has turned out being a marvelous supplement to my Reeder feeds. And, within Zite, when I see an article that looks interesting, I just click a button and the article is saved to Instapaper for me.

I typically save anywhere from 10 to 30 articles to Instapaper each day. When I sit down with my iPad to read those, I may delete a half-dozen of the articles without even bothering to read them … what I thought might be interesting to read no longer interests me in these cases. That’s actually a nice feature of a “Read Later” approach … you ultimately wind up reading only what really interests you, instead of things that seem appealing only for a short while.

My account with Instapaper is a premium one, for which I pay the very small of $3 per month. I can get almost all the same features for free, but I have chosen to support Instapaper because it is so valuable to me. It truly is the most useful app I have.

Instapaper has other nice features. I won’t go into all of them, as you can read about them at their site, but I like the ability to email a link to Instapaper, the ability to have the articles formatted for my Kindle, and the ability to send favorited articles to Evernote. I especially like the fact that the iPad app lets me choose a font and font-size, and to also select the width of the reading area. (Typography specialists will tell you that the optimum reading experience is one in which each line has between about 50 to 70 characters … I prefer a line width that gives me closer to 50 characters than to 70, as this makes it easier for me to speed read.)

Bottom line: if you haven’t tried this app out, I highly recommend you give it a try.

I had instead used Yojimbo, which I reviewed a few months ago. While I have a high regard for Yojimbo, their iPad app is not free, and there is no iPhone (or Android) app. Plus, the iPad app is read-only, and since I increasingly use my iPad for composition, I really wanted an app that would let me input data from my iPad. Additionally, at the time that I began looking at switching to Evernote, I did not realize that Yojimbo supported direct input from scanners, such as the popular Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Mobile Scanner . (I had seen in several “famous geek” setups at The Setup that several use a Fujitsu scanner to scan papers to PDF documents in the computers.)

Having a good “collection app” that accepts input from scanners is something that is increasingly important to me. I have, for the longest, put off converting all of my old statements (bank statements and other records), and plan to soon get a good scanner. Also, in looking through the Evernote blog, I noticed that it also takes input from the Livescribe Smartpen. Since I’ve toyed with idea of having a smartpen for a long while, it was great to find an app that would take input directly from it.

So, I searched the web for tips on converting from Yojimbo to Evernote, and found the perfect AppleScript for copying Yojimbo to Evernote. I ran the script directly from the web site, and after a few minutes it copied all of my Yojimbo items into my Evernote app on my Mac. (I only had a few hundred items to copy, and it took about 3 minutes … if you have a lot of items to convert, it could take a long while.) This data then synced with the Evernote servers, which synced with the Evernote apps on my iPad and iPhone, and I could access (and modify) my data from any of devices.

Cool. I was happy. For two days. Then, I converted my iPhone 3GS and iPad 1 to iOS 5 and found that the apps did not work on iOS 5. This is an issue that is widely complained about on Twitter, so I checked through the Evernote blog to see what their iOS5 plans were. Their plan is to wait until iOS 5 is actually released (out of the beta cycle), and I just don’t want to go without an app that long.

So, I hunted for other options, and did not really find any, but I did learn that Yojimbo takes input directly from a scanner. Then I converted back to using Yojimbo, and went ahead and bought their iPad app. It works okay (the font is a bit small), although I am still dissatisfied that it is read-only.

It is possible that I could ultimately go back to Evernote. I really don’t like switching away from apps that serve me well, though, unless there is a strong reason to do so. (As they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.) We’ll have to see how it pans out.

By the way, for those of you who have scanner (or plan to get one), just because you can scan in all of your thousands of documents, doesn’t mean you should. For example, if it is unnecessary to keep paper copies of your utility bills from 2 to 10 years ago, then it is unnecessary to keep electronic copies of them. An excellent article on which documents you should keep, and which you should toss, is this NYT article.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, including whether you recommend alternatives.

Update: In continuing to read on this, I found an interesting article on Yojimbo by Shawn Blanc, in which he discusses some data on the difference between Evernote and Yojimbo database sizes:

If I were to sync my entire Yojimbo library to my iPhone, it would be a little less than 1,000 items with a database of 86 MBs right now. Even for someone like John Gruber, who has been using Yojimbo since the beta days, it wouldn’t be a massive chore to get his Yojimbo data onto his iPhone. John’s total library is 5,500 items and 375 MBs. Not that big of a file for just about any given iPhone. A single movie easily takes up three or four times that amount of space.

(An interesting tid-bit of info: Patrick Rhone, who recently migrated his data from Evernote back to Yojimbo, went from 1,220 items and a 1.3GB library in Evernote, to 1,432 items and a 403MB library in Yojimbo. His database weighed in at one-third the size after the migration. Obviously none of his audio or video attachments were able to be transferred into Yojimbo, but that’s not the only reason the database was shored up. Evernote treats text files as HTML and uses WebKit to render notes. Patrick and I agree that, because of the way Evernote handles even basic text notes, extra size gets added due to the code which is wrapped around even the simplest of notes.)

I thought you might find that information to be interesting. Shawn also discusses the use of text files for storing bits of information. His discussion drives home the point that it is probably not smart to try to use either Yojimbo or Evernote as “everything apps.”

I have not found a way around this, other than to shut down Chrome whenever I am going to be away from the computer for a while. I only mention it because it might be happening with your Mac (or even Macbook Pro or Air) without you having realized it.

My Mac does enter a Screen-Sleep when Chrome is in use, but all it takes for it to come out of that “nap” is for me to move the mouse. If I am using Safari instead of Chrome, it will go into the full sleep mode and can only be awakened by a mouse click (movement of the mouse is not sufficient) or key press.

I noticed that mine was not entering full sleep when I walked by it one day and the little indicator light was not fading on and off like it does for full sleep : it was just staying on (dimly, but constantly on). Hence, if you are a Chrome user, you may want to check whether it is impacting your Mac’s sleep mode.

The impact of this problem is that it wastes power.

The issue has been reported to the Google Chrome team (I’ve read several of the reports), but appears to have received no attention.

There is a benefit, of sorts, in using Chrome despite this problem (and I do use it): when you bring the computer back out of what I’ll call its Nap Mode (not full sleep), if your Gmail is visible in Chrome, it will have been updated with all the new mail you’ve received since you last used the computer. You don’t have to reload the Gmail page. If you are using Safari, the Gmail has to be refreshed before it will show new mail.

(Apparently, Google has a refresh thread in Chrome that periodically cycles through tabs to refresh them, and I suspect this code is what interferes with the sleep cycle.)

BTW, I have seen some reports that this problem also applies to Windows users of Chrome. I have not confirmed that, and from what I gather, it applies to some Windows users and not all.

Anyway, something for you to check … you might be unintentionally wasting power.

I knew I’d landed a good book when its first recommendation was the Toodledo app as the “Best App for Basic To-Do Lists.” This is an app that you probably wouldn’t choose unless you had compared it against several other ToDo apps, as I have done. It’s my favorite app for managing tasks, and when I saw that the author selected it, that gave me some confidence that he had done a lot of app comparisons before making selections.

The fact that he selected OmniFocus as the “Best App for GTD-Worshipping Power Users” further confirmed to me that he had picked well. I like basic lists, but I also own OmniFocus and it is indeed the app to get if you are a true “GTD-worshipping power user.” (Mac users may already be familiar with the big brother OmniFocus for Macs.)

The book is chock-full of recommendations, selecting the best apps in the following broad categories:

• At Work
• At Leisure
• Creative Corner
• At Play
• At Home
• Out and About
• For Your Health

Weighing in at a little over 220 pages, it covers a lot of apps. I like the fact that it often gives a second “runner up” pick as well as the best of breed. In every case, it provides superb screen shots and a good discussion of what the app does.

I like the author’s criteria for selecting the best apps:

• Takes advantage of the iPad’s unique talents
• Are as beautiful as the iPad itself
• Doesn’t require a lot of instructions
• Does something better than the corresponding website
• Distinguishes themselves among the competitors

Of course I found a few instances where I thought the selected “best” app was not really the best. For example, I prefer Osfoora to Twitter’s own Twitter app, although I know a lot of folks are like the author and prefer the latter. That’s to be expected, of course.

But, happily for me I found a lot of great apps that I probably would not have found otherwise, and I am in the process of grabbing them from iTunes.

All in all, I think this is a book that most iPad owners would really appreciate having. I’ve owned gadgets for years and years, going back to the original Palms and Pocket PCs, and I know from experience that you can spend a fortune on inexpensive software. It’s nice to have a sensible guide that helps you pick the best without having to try everything out yourself.

The book is currently available in PDF form from the link provided above, and will be released in print form sometime in December 2010. It has my thumbs-up recommendation.

I was very pleased with it. It has a tagging system, so that I could save web page addresses to it and assign whatever tag(s) I wanted. Plus, I could save receipts, quotes, text files, pdf files, and pretty much anything I wanted to, again assigning them to whatever tag(s) I wanted.

I loved it, and built up hundreds of items in it within a short time. Then, an update to the Mac OS came out, and I decided to upgrade (from Tiger to Leopard). The upgrade went “kinda okay,” but there was some slowness in startup that had not been there. And there were a few other quirks. So, I blamed it on software, and stopped using Yojimbo and a half dozen other tools.

It turned out that the problems were not at all related to Yojimbo (or any other regular software product), but I had gotten out of the habit of using it. Worse, in my debugging attempts, I deleted its data. Lots of good data gone forever. Bummer … makes me wish I had been smarter at debugging and doing backups.

Anyway, I was recently reading some of the entries at The Setup (lists software and hardware used by a variety of professionals), and noticed that notables John Gruber, Khoi Vinh, and John Siracusa sang praise for Yojimbo. Vinh notes that it’s his “main note keeper and idea vault” and that he uses it for drafting posts, and Gruber noted that he has over 4,600 items in it. Gruber has even written some AppleScripts for Yojimbo, one of which I tried out (creates Yojimbo bookmark of an item selected within NetNewsWire).

So, I am back to using it, and I am delighted with how it lets me organize. One of the things it does so much better than delicious, which I have used for about 3 years, is that I can just clip some text from a website and save it without having to bookmark the entire page. For example, here is me clipping some text (highlighted in blue) from a 37signals insight: [Click to enlarge]

I just select the desired text, CTRL+Click it, select Services, select New Note in Yojimbo from the services, and then assign whatever tag(s) I want to the new note. This is something I use a lot. I’m also moving a lot of my Kindle highlighted text to Yojimbo by taking the My Clippings.txt file and going through it using this technique. Note that this works for the Instapaper files that I read on Kindle as well as for the purchased books and as well as for my subscriptions (right now that’s limited to Wall Street Journal). Again, I can tag these items anyway I want to, putting similar items together, pretty much independent of source.

Another great thing: all the stored items are searchable, and the search mechanism works great for pinpointing the item(s) I am looking for.

I do have a lot of material built up within my delicious bookmarks that I’d like to import into Yojimbo. I haven’t found a for-sure way of doing this yet, although there is this Google Groups entry with a Ruby script that looks like it might do the trick. I have not tried it yet, because I haven’t fooled with Ruby at all (I know … shame on me, eh?). I think it would be nice if the Yojimbo developers would post useful scripts on their site. I’m sure there are a lot of useful scripts for it, but finding them is not always easy.

While I haven’t tried it yet, there is also an iPad version of Yojimbo. It synchs with the desktop version, but currently provides a read-only experience. Good to see the developers get their initial version out there, though.

Yojimbo is well-maintained, as is everything developed by Bare Bones Software. It’s currently at version 3.0

In hindsight, I wish I had been using this regularly for the whole time I’ve had my iMac: I’d be a lot more organized. I’m trying to get better about really using what I buy (I’ve owned LaunchBar for a year and am only now getting around to using it regularly … something I wish I’d done much sooner).

Anyway, I wanted fellow Mac folks to be aware of this software. I clearly like it, and, as noted above, some folks who are a lot smarter than me make good use of it, too.

While I haven’t read every post, it appears that most of the interviewed pro’s primarily use Mac, although many have Windows as a secondary platform. There are plenty of Windows setup discussions, though, so Windows users should not give up too quickly in looking through the interviews.

I already have much of the software discussed by the majority of the pro’s, but I am trying out some new software based on what they use. It’s amazing how many of pro’s use basically the same things (TextMate, Launcher 5, Things or TaskPaper for task management, BBEdit, Yojimbo, etc).

Paul Stamatiou also has a very detailed writeup on what hardware and software he uses. I have a great deal of respect for Paul’s knowledge of “all things geek,” and paid close attention to his list (and am trying out a couple of new items because of it).

If you want to make sure you’re using the best software, these lists are just what you need.

Video calling is in full effect on iPod touch. Now your friends can see what you’re up to, when you’re up to it. With the tap of a button, you can wave “hi” while standing in a foreign country, get a second opinion on a pair of boots, or have your friends bear witness to the everyday pranks, bets, and dares they otherwise might have missed — new iPod touch to new iPod touch or iPhone 4 over Wi-Fi. And come face to face with even more fun.

Note: FaceTime is also available on iPhone 4. And, the apps discussed below also work on an iPhone (including models earlier than iPhone 4).

But now there are some apps that will let you do regular calls using a 2nd Generation (and up) iPod Touch or even an iPad. Yes, you heard right: even an iPad. The apps work over WiFi, which many of you have available at home and work, even if your cell phone carrier signal is too low to use there.

The first of these apps is Line2, which David Pogue discusses at length in one of his NYT articles. Here’s the company speel on it:

Line2 turns your iPod Touch* and iPad into a powerful mobile phone, no cellular carrier needed! With Line2 you get unlimited US/Canada calls over WiFi VoIP plus unlimited US/Canada texting. International long distance rates starting at $.02/min. and texts are only $.10.

Line2 also gives you powerful calling features, including 20 person conference calls, caller ID, visual voicemail, and much more for only $9.95/month all with no long-term contracts. And with Line2 when you’re traveling overseas you can make free calls back to the US and Canada wherever you have a WiFi connection.

I don’t know about you, but I’m impressed. And, of course, the app doesn’t care whether AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, TimeWarner, or whoever provides your WiFi. So, you can have an iPhone-like experience with your Touch/iPad, no matter who provides the WiFi.

Now, I will confess that I haven’t tried the app out myself: I have a first generation Touch and my iPhone signal is good enough that I don’t need to depend on WiFi (plus I don’t use texting). But, if AT&T’s signal gets any weaker in my area, I’ll be getting this app. I am home most of the time, so it would work perfect for me.

A second app that is making its debut in this arena is Pinger. Currently they have an app that lets you do free texting over WiFi, but they plan to release an app soon that will let you do calling on the Touch/iPad, with WiFi VoIP, similar to Line2.

Really impressive what you can do with an iPod Touch these days. I used my first generation Touch as a PDA for a long while, then got an iPhone and switched to using it, and now I’m using my iPad as a PDA (and it’s the best one I’ve ever had). Then I learned that you can even control your Mac/PC with a Touch or iPad or iPhone. And, now you can make and receive phone calls with a Touch or iPad. Cool.