Continuing the theme of ditching the laptop and using only the iPad, at least on holiday, today looking at the iPad as an amateur photographers best friend.

With its massive, bright, screen the iPad is perfect for viewing photos and coupled with the camera kit it is unbeatable. I have been able to hook up a number of cameras using both the USB and SD connectors, including getting pictures off the iPhone. The iPad has recognised them all and imported successfully. This process is painless and then using the existing photo app it is possible to view and enjoy. Unfortunately the options for managing the photos on the iPad are limited, something I hope that Apple or a third party address in future.

Once the photos are on the iPad it is useful to be able to manipulate them and I have found a few apps that allow you to do that as follows:

Flickr

In order to share my photos I use the Flickr service. They provide a free app that allows you to both view and upload photos to your account. Unfortunately at present this is only an iPhone app but I am sure this will change at some point in the future. The app works well but I couldn’t get it to upload the photos in any size other than about 640×480, even when set on maximum resolution.

Photo Layout

A simple but effective free app for creating collages. You add the photos from your library and then pinch and zoom to move, scale and rotate the pictures into the positions you want. There are buttons for moving the current picture above or below those around it or you can simply touch it to bring it to the top. A good example of what can be created is shown below:

This is the only app I paid for and only did so after reading through a few negative reviews and ignoring them! I’m glad I did as Retouch makes what can be a time consuming task simple – that is to remove areas of pictures you don’t want. See the example below where the crane has been removed. This is a simple example and could have been done with in a painting app with a suitable blue colour but Retouch makes the process easy and also worked on more challenging images too. Well worth the small price.

The last app is another free one that is more generalist. PhotoPad allows you to do operations such as scale, crop, rotate etc as well as applying filters and effects. Great for putting the finishing touches to your photos.

All in all I have been greatly impressed with the iPads photo handling capabilities. The third party apps make it easy to work with photos to get the best results. My biggest criticism would be that the camera kit should be built into the iPad. Apart from that it is perfect.

As I said in my previous post I am currently away on holiday and have only brought with me my iPad, rather than a laptop of some description. Over the next couple of posts I am going to look at the apps that I have been using for various different tasks, starting with blogging.

I have a couple of blogs and post to each on an irregular basis. When I am at home I use Windows Live Writer which, in my opinion, is the best blogging app by far and is the only reason I continue to run parallels on my Macbook.

The iPad strikes me as the perfect blogging platform with its big screen capable of working with text and pictures (which I will cover in more detail tomorrow) and therefore I was disappointed with both the choice and the quality of the blogging apps on offer.

I used three “apps” to try and find the best fit for me and these were: Blogpress, a third party iPad application which supports multiple platforms (including Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad). Wordpress’ native iPad application, which only supports Wordpress and a dedicated, web-based, mobile interface for Wordpress.

It was immediately obvious that all three suffer from the same problem – they are little more than simple text editors. You get zero control over the look and feel of the text, for example, you cannot embolden or italicise text, nor can you change the justification. This I can live with as it is not a major issue for me. What I found most frustrating though was the inability to be able to hyperlink some text or to paste in a link and have it converted. This seems a glaring omission that I hope is rectified in a future release.

Both Blogpress and Wordpress are supposed to offer facilities to insert pictures and to save drafts locally for future updates. Here Blogpress wins hands down on both points. While the picture handling is basic you do get a variety of options for where you want to upload a picture to, including Flickr, and this works faultlessly. I have never been able to get the Wordpress app to insert a picture – it always crashes.

One thing that the Wordpress app does do that Blogpress does not is allow you to see and manage comments and if you get many this may be a time saver for you but if it is blogging you are interested in then Blogpress is for you, even if it is not free.

So I am away on annual leave in beautiful Tuscany but the big question before we left was what tech to bring? In the recent past I have always taken a laptop of some description but this time I decided to go with the iPad alone. That meant also taking Apple’s camera kit in order to get my pictures off my camera in order to do anything with them.

The camera kit is interesting as the name suggests it is for connecting cameras, which it is. However, I was also able to successfully attach both a USB headset and a Mac USB keyboard, though the latter reported that it was not compatible but worked just fine. Neither of these items have made it into the kit bag to Italy but I do have my stowaway Bluetooth keyboard and an Apple iPhone headset for making skype calls.

I am still to find a suitable iPad stand that works in both orientations and is transportable so I am sticking with an old plate stand I found around the house.

Despite the iPad having ebook reading software I much prefer my Sony Reader. The reasons for this are that the experience on the Sony is so much closer to that of a book. It is also lighter and easier to hold for extended periods.

The final piece of kit (leaving aside the chargers) is my iPhone 3GS which while I won’t be using it much as a phone it will come in handy as a sat nav, electronic guide book and entertainment device.

The picture below shows the kit ready to go. In the next post I will run through the apps that I have been using while away.

Is your iPad taking forever to backup? Mine is. After several aborted attempts I finally got a full backup done taking a massive three hours and that was after I had deleted off some large apps. Three hours for a device that is less than half full.

Feeling that there had to be a solution to this once again took me to the net and I quickly discovered that I was not the only one with an issue, but nobody had an answer. There is, however, what I consider to be a workaround and that is turning off backups altogether. BackOff allows you to turn off iTunes backups which certainly speeds up the syncing process but is only any good if you also do manual backups on a regular basis (or are willing to lose the contents of your device in the event of a failure).

So for now I am doing a backup when I can and using BackOff at other times. Not terribly satisfactory but you never know there may be a solution coming from Apple. This is one they can’t resolve with a free bumper.

Picture Kominyetska.

Oh there are so many problems with iOS4 but I won’t repeat them here but my biggest problem with it (after the horrendous battery life) is the multitasking. In particular the way that now when you close down an app it goes to the background. This is fine for the most part but for some apps they continue to process (yes I know that’s what multitasking means but not in Apples universe.) An app that is sent to the background saves its state and sleeps. So i have a radio app that when you close it down it continues to play. In certain circumstances this is great but what about when you want to close it completely? It seems that you have to go into the tray, hold down the app until they “wobble” (that’s a technical term) and then close the app. What a palaver.

Apparently the official recommended way is to:

^Hold down the power until you see the slide to power off screen. Release the power button and hold down the home button until the apps quits”

I have tried this and it takes ages but it does work.

So why don’t I dump iOS4? Well I am seriously considering it and am just trying to decide if the folders functionality and wallpapers are enough to warrant sticking with it.

Or perhaps Apple will issue a fix? Nah.