Working from various Apple devices
Right now my Apple devices make my life so much easier. In ways that I often take for granted and forget. It sort of smacked me in the face this afternoon I was sitting in my breakfast nook working.
The day started with me working on my iMac with dual external (not Mac) monitor. My spouse was still sleeping so rather than reset the audio on iMac to use my headphone not nice speakers, I kicked off some music on my iPod Touch.
Later around 2pm when the upstairs of my house became unbearably hot upstairs, I grabbed the Mac Air and iPod Touch and moved to the kitchen nook. (I refuse to use AC in April, not when I can move downstairs open up the house and save on the electric bill) Using sharing over my Airport Extreme powered network, I grabbed what needed from the iMac and/or my shared work drive. I logged into Skype on my iPod and had my weekly “phone” meeting with my boss.
Right now I’m sitting curled up writing this on the Air, listening to music on the iPod. Earlier I grabbed a backup for my husband from my 1/2 terabyte drive which is shared via the Airport Extreme and printed a recipe to a printer that I have networked using an Airport Express. Add to that the fact that VMWare gets me Windows whenever I want it. I’m pretty satisfied.
Soon we’ll have an iPad at my house and I’m curious to see how my husband (who ordered it) likes it. I’m tempted, really, but I want to know all its little warts before I shell out.
I suppose I sound like an Apple evangelist. But I have two PCs in my house too and using Bonjour they can print and share with the Macs easily. Really what people choose to buy and use is there personal choice. For me Apple products have worked really well. Stuff just works and I like that.
If I had the money, I’d totally buy an iPad and toss it on the kitchen island. It would be there to solve arguments, look up recipes, watch a video while cooking — any number of things that even unhooking the laptop from it’s external monitor, etc., seems like just too much work to do for what you want it for. In other words, the iPad’s purpose would be to truly make computing, and using the Internet, and consuming multimedia as barrier-free as possible. That’s not a small thing.
There are so many things I want to try on the iPad. I’m perturbed that one can’t edit Google Docs on it according to Griffey. This also seems to be true of the iPod touch and iPhone. I can edit Google Spreadsheets but not Docs. Weird doesn’t begin to cover it, but maybe not a deal breaker if I can get it to talk to other computers to transfer files. Great things is I can be non-committal since they’ll be one at my house which isn’t mine but I can experiment with.