I have an iPhone, iPod and for my birthday, my wife bought me an iPad. While I love toys like anyone else, I like to use them for practical reasons too. I am setting up my iPad to follow my hobbies and interests. Having done a small amount of programming, I really appreciate a well-written app. The hardest part of programming is making it simple and intuitive for everyone. That is really what makes the program or app a pleasure to use. Along with writing articles, I also write novels and love the idea of taking my iPad with me wherever I go instead of my laptop. Here are the apps which help me achieve this.

Zite – This is one of the handiest apps you can find for keeping up on your favourite subjects or research. It is so intuitive that there is not the slightest question about how it works. Zite gathers together articles in your lines of interest and presents them to you in a very easy to read manner. You can add new interests and customize the results as you see fit. This became a daily user for me. You can choose anything from motorcycles to medicine. Zite will collect the articles for you.

Mashable – Like Zite, Mashable is a news/article reader keeping you abreast of the latest updates which you can choose from a range of topics. You can comment on articles, share with Twitter and Facebook or email to a friend. I use Mashable but prefer Zite.

Dropbox – Of all the programs that give you a “universal drive” such as Google Drive, my favourite by far is Dropbox. You can consider Dropbox as a single repository that is accessible from all your computers and peripherals. Simply add the Dropbox program or app to each computer or iPad/iPod and it becomes one system. Delete, change or add files in one of your Dropboxes and it syncs and changes them all. For anyone who cannot seem to get their computers networked or home grouped, Dropbox is the answer. Also great when you are travelling as you can access home files already in Dropbox or save your files and holiday pictures for safe keeping. They will never be lost. You can get a five gig Dropbox for free.

Apple’s “Pages” – As you would expect from Apple, this app is beautifully written, robust and a pleasure to use. You can create great, image-rich documents straight from your iPad. It has an easy-start where you can pick from a host of templates. While not having the extreme capabilities of Word, it will give you all the standard formatting options you would normally use plus graphics manipulation. The app Pages works seamlessly with Dropbox. Open Dropbox on your iPad, select a document and hit the arrow on the upper right side of your iPad. You will see “Open in Pages”. Select that and your document will be imported and opened in Pages. With the document creation ability of Pages, you are coming close to laptop abilities. You can open Word documents, edit them and save them as Word, Text, RTF, Epub or PDF.

Now, you can sit on a beach, your back yard or a comfy chair and write your next article all using your iPad.