My Favourite Things.

"Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens". As Maria sang, "these are a few of my favourite things" in the world's most loved musical, it got me thinking, not a about my favourite musicals but my favourite apps. I know, gotta get a few more action movies into my library.

The iPad purchase I made last year came with a flurry of app downloads across the breadth and width of my imagination. From goofy games about fruit eating ninja bats, to every conceivable social networking tool imaginable, through to so many productivity tools downloaded, that I needed productivity tools just to manage the productivity tools. Pages of apps to show my friends how cool I was, never noticing the accumulation affect it had on my time.

Like every love affair, the ardour cools and sensibility takes over and practicality rules the short timeframe you have, to love each and every app the same. So when it came time to choose why I bought the iPad in the first place, the sad farewells given the fruit bats along with their crazy cousins, the angry birds, made way for a more intense love affair with apps that really counted and improved my work life balance, along with providing what I needed most, time. Time to really use the technology smarter and get more out of the labyrinth of information available at my finger tips.

So here goes, my favourite apps at the moment. If you love some the same already, great, and if you find some new ones to love then it was worth taking the 5 minutes to read my blog today.

From a space perspective I have embraced the cloud. Even though I have not approached the end of the available iPad space I can see the future where there will be no need to carry technology with hard drive capabilities. My two favourite clouds are "Dropbox" and "Box", both of which provide me with my own private cloud come postbox to file and retrieve countless documents and anything I think will be relevant for later use on any PC loaded with the app. "Box" even went so far as providing 50GB free until recently, to any new members. That's a lot of mail posted to your cloud.

As an avid reader of newspaper articles I am always looking for the aggregators. Why buy 50 newspapers to read a couple of articles in each when "Zite" can give you a personalised paper, filled with only those articles of interest to you, where the more you read and like, the more the app gives you, on a personalised view? If you have media sites you read but don't want to open 20 different magazines and websites, why not let "Flipboard" and "Pulse" put them together in one place for you. If none of those suggestions turns you on and you still persist in reading online pages but don't have the time, consider "Instapaper", which can save any online pages to be read at a later date offline, while you are plane bound or out of wifi range. From a thought leadership angle, consider "TED" where the world's brightest and most creative people discuss topics by invitation only. Eighteen minutes to get your point across to an audience of mental giants makes for great video watching.

From a work view I have a couple of favourites that make the list. After some serious kidding from friends reading one of my articles about going paperless, I decided to bite the bullet and use the iPad as my everyday workbook and along those lines grabbed "Mental Note" to enable me to take notes, save them, collate them and send them straight from the meetings. I also had to have the obvious office apps such as "Pages" and "Keynotes" for presentations. Having said that, the world still insists on PowerPoint and if you absolutely have to show them, then use "Slideshark" to have them emblazoned across your iPad in all their numbing glory. Never forget to load the new "Adobe" reader as the Apple, Adobe war of words calms down, PDFs and their like are now more viewable on the pad.

As a traveller there are just too many apps to consider but some of my favourites include, "Flight Tracker Pro", which can give you every updated airport board, for departures and arrivals, while telling you if your flights are on time or delayed. From a mapping view I use several including "Wundermap" and "Map Draw" which let's me draw on my maps to calculate distances and highlight destinations. Locally I use a couple of apps designed to get me around the city and home on time. "Trip View" for public transport and "Go Catch" for that elusive cab at eleven o'clock at night, always help out.

Okay so the ninja fruit bats have bitten the dust but if anything, the iPad lends itself to distraction from an entertainment angle and that would require a few articles to name all of my favourites. So till that time I hope you get one or two ideas out of the above.