iPad Mom & Dad
Sunday, April 25, 2010 at 11:00AM I am blogging on an iPad, which is amazing.
Conveniently enough, Apple released the iPad very close to Dear Hubby's birthday in March, so I pre-ordered for delivery on Magical Saturday, when the UPS trucks carried the specially-marked boxes to the masses, in many cases under armed escort, Brinks-truck-style. (It sure beat camping out in line at the Apple Store Friday night!)
So we have one -- a big one (64 gig memory), which I insist on calling the MaxiPad, much to my husband's chagrin. (They really should have thought of that during the name branding stage. I love the thing, but the name is unfortunate.). We are trying to come up with a new family moniker for it, since there is a name for everything in our household: The desktop iMac "Big Mac"; our GPS navigation system "Lois" (subtle reference therein, involving Malcolm in the Middle and 2001: A Space Odyssey). The current family truckster is the "Big Blue Deuce" -- I don't always fully understand or remember the references and antecedents myself, but I think that was a mash-up between a NASCAR homage (although we are not fans of Kurt Busch, the driver of the Miller Lite #2 Dodge) and the Robin Williams' movie RV (the "big [green] turd").
Anyway. We're working on it.
Not only has It eased the transition to 44 for my Prince Charming, It has changed our family, technologically. Although we admittedly have plenty of -- and perhaps more than enough -- screen options in our home, the iPad is in constant demand, and it's not just the novelty of a new gadget. DH and I constantly have to fight the kids for time on the new toy.
Hubby uses the iPad in the morning, to browse the news and weather from various sources. He has been transitioning, with the iPhone, from our old-school daily and weekend Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC) to USA Today, which offers the best presentation and format -- on the iPhone -- of national news and also has a Motor Sports category (for the NASCAR news, of course).
USA Today has not made the best transition to the iPad (where the heck is the much-loved Motor Sports category?!) and there have been rumblings of moving to a paid subscription model, so we'll see...
Strong contender for news on the iPad: NPR, which Mommy now prefers. And the AJC finally has an app, which is useful for a touch of local news. Just don't expect much more than that, as our local rag seems to have fired most of their real journalists and editors to pay minimum wage interns to regurg(itate) AP News headlines, pretty much verbatim.
But I digress--
Mommy also likes the iPad as an interactive, easy-to-read, easy-to-wipe-clean source of recipes with pictures, which makes cooking easier and more fun, especially if I switch over to the ABC app in-between and use the iPad as a faux-TV in the kitchen to catch up on my shows. (Actually, who am I kidding? I don't really watch much TV and the kids appreciate that ABC app way more than I do. Now if I could cue up GLEE while I'm in the kitchen (not the new GLEE app that I am supposed to sing with, the real show), that would be awesome.
For recipes, I like:
AllRecipes Dinner Spinner
Epicurious
and the Crock-Pot iPhone app
I am also addicted to an iPhone game that is way-better on the iPad: Word Warp (kind of like Boggle). Don't even get me started. I love that game!
This is the point where I need to put the iPad down and go to "Mom's Mac" to finish this article. While the iPad is very cool and blogging shorts on it is totally do-able, this piece just became a long and I need easier document navigation and formatting tools to review, edit and publish...
(This is not even what I should be working on at the moment, but there you go.)
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