These are the apps that make the iPad work for web workers, and the ones that set the bar for developers to strive for when creating new apps for the future of the platform. If you feel like I’ve missed any, feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.

• Instapaper Pro ($4.99) This is the app to use for grabbing pages for reading later while you still have wireless access. Heck, I have a Wi-Fi + 3G model so I’m very rarely out of network range, but I still use it because of its formatting options and cross-platform compatibility. It’s a joy, and the ability to jump from iPhone to iPad seamlessly with it makes it a must-have for business use.
• Documents to Go Premium ($11.99). A word processor, spreadsheet and presentation app is a must for work purposes. Docs to Go Premium is my choice, because I already had it on my iPhone and the universal update is free. I chose the premium version because of cloud access to services like Dropbox and Google Docs. (To learn more about the cloud, join us at Structure June 23 & 24 in San Francisco)
• Dropbox (Free) Speaking of Dropbox, grab this app if you have an account. If you don’t have one, grab this app and then create an account from within it. It’s the easiest possible way to sync up your mobile device, your desktop, and any other computers you might use on a regular basis. The iPad app makes use of the great “Open in…” feature introduced in the iPad-specific iOS 3.2, and it’s a huge time-saver.
• iUnarchive ($2.99) Another great app that integrates well with other apps on the iPad is iUnarchive. It’s a little utility that allows you to open and extract pretty much any type of archived file, from .ZIP to .RAR and beyond. It works with Safari and Mail’s “Open in…” protocol, too, so you won’t have to take a lot of extra steps to get at those files, unlike many of the other options available in the App Store.
• GoodReader for iPad (99 cents) If you’re looking for a very capable PDF reader that also supports VGA out using Apple’s adapter, this is the way to go.
• BeejiveIM for iPad ($9.99) You’re going to need an IM client for the iPad if you want to use it as your go-to mobile workstation. Beejive is the king, despite some early hiccups with landscape mode that have been worked out in the latest update. You could also try IM+, but for my money, nothing’s better than the Beejive.
• Penultimate ($2.99) Need a notebook for quick notes, mock-ups and other ideas? Penultimate will replace your moleskine and do it with style. Choose from lined, graph and blank pages, create and maintain multiple notebooks, and turn on pen mode for use with a stylus. It’s an amazing app, and a great bargain at the price.
• Square (Free) It’s now a universal app, so go ahead and grab the Twitter founder’s venture into mobile payments on iOS. Even if you can’t yet get the credit card swipe dongle, it’s a useful way to track your payments from clients on the go without having to get into a detailed spreadsheet or invoicing app.
• Reeder for iPad ($4.99) The hotly anticipated Reeder for iPad has arrived, and it blows all other RSS readers out of the water, including the Early Edition, which I reviewed favorably not too long ago. It has a beautiful interface, great caching and speed, terrific integration with other apps and services — this baby has it all. Plus it’s dead simple, since it’s just basically a shell for your Google Reader account.

Which iPad apps keep you productive?

One early contender is The Early Edition ($4.99), a reader with an innovative newspaper-like user interface that looks, at least from the screenshots, like it could be the answer to my RSS problems on the iPad platform. If staying current is as important to your work as it is to mine, you’ll know how valuable a great RSS reader is.

Is The Early Edition great? Well, true to its name, it was rushed out the door to take advantage of being one of the first available RSS reading applications on the iPad platform. That means good revenue, but it doesn’t necessarily mean great user experience. But version 1.1, the one I’ll be reviewing here, promises to rectify a lot of the early mistakes.

First, there’s no denying that the app is pretty. Gorgeous probably wouldn’t be an overstatement. In both landscape and portrait views, it shows content in an easy-to-digest, aesthetically pleasing manner. In landscape mode you have quick access to your source list, though I would appreciate a hide button to allow for a full-screen view of the newspaper in this mode.

I like the ability to organize feeds according to categories, which then puts them into what amount to sections within the newspaper. Tapping on a folder in the source menu will bring up the relevant section and all blogs contained within. By default, The Early Edition provides some pretty terrific content and category breakdowns, but you can easily take out what you don’t like or scrap the whole mess and start from scratch, too.

At any time, you can re-import the sample feeds if you find you miss them, or add sources from websites (auto-discovery is enabled, just enter the top level address) and import feeds from your Google Reader account. Note that with Google Reader, it’s import only; it won’t sync your read/unread items.

If you are in need of a quality RSS reader on the iPad, The Early Edition will do you no harm, and likely a lot of good besides. If you downloaded version 1.0 and removed the app before the 1.1 release, as a number of my colleagues did, then I guarantee reinstalling the app will be a move you don’t regret. Early Edition developer Glasshouse may have been overly eager to cash in on the iPad App Store goldrush, but they also clearly listen to, value, and most importantly, act on reader feedback.

Let us know what you think of The Early Edition in the comments.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Why the iPad is Right for the Enterprise

At first, I was doubtful. I thought perhaps Patapage was some kind of annoying overlay, not unlike those you get when you follow certain referrer links from Twitter. You know the kind; they let you vote up and down, share and retweet the page. To me, those overlays never add value  to the site; they just add visual noise and an extra step when I actually do want to share the link, since I have to close that header first.

Instead, Patapage allows you to improve elements that are probably already present on your page. You can add simple photo galleries that draw from your Flickr stream, interactive wiki elements and e-commerce listings, windows to external sites and social media sharing interfaces without actually sending users away from your site, and you can do it all without really knowing a lick of coding.

One of my favorite elements is a feedback tab and form elementl. It should help users feel like you’re listening, and also prompt ample feedback with which you can easily tailor your content.

If you’re a musician, another awesome feature is the fully customizable audio player that you can load up with your songs, without knowing the first thing about building a web page.

I was wary of Patapage, since it seemed to promise nothing more than window dressing. I couldn’t have been farther off with my assumption. It’s actually a very powerful website creation tool that provides the extra “oomph” many amateur sites are lacking at a relatively low cost. Low doesn’t mean free, though. It’ll cost $89 a year for a single site, or $390 a year for a multi-site license that covers 100 domains. It’s well worth a look if you need something to boost the (social) media aspect of your website, and don’t want to learn advanced web development or pay someone else to do it for you.

If you’re a Patapage user, let us know what you think of the service in the comments.

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It wasn’t Ballmer presenting the Office 2010, though, it was Stephen Elop, president of Redmond’s business division. I was hoping to get a chance to see what he had to say about the new versions at the launch event in New York, but it seems that interest in the launch (from the press at least) was so great that the website couldn’t deal with the demand.

Fortunately, however, I’ve already had a chance to check out the product, as Office 2010 has been available as a Technical Preview since July of last year. I’ve been impressed with the new features, and early hands-on reviews have also mostly been very positive. There are no huge changes to the main desktop products in this version of Office, unlike the radical introduction of the ribbon UI in Office 2007 (which, incidentally, Microsoft is persisting with in Office 2010, and extending to more products in the Office 2010 family). Most of the effort has gone towards productivity and ease-of-use tweaks (like Outlook’s neat new “Social Connector,” which pulls social network updates into the app), new collaborative features and stability improvements.

The big news in Office 2010 is the introduction of Office Web Apps. Office 2010 has a number of innovative online competitors now, not least of which is, of course, Google Docs. Microsoft has responded to that threat by releasing access-anywhere online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, with seamless transitioning of work from desktop to the cloud and back again. Despite perhaps coming a little late to the party, Office Web Apps is an impressive suite of products. They work cross-browser, and I particularly like the way that the web apps look and feel almost identical to the desktop versions of Office. I also really like Office’s new co-authoring features, which enable more than one person to work on a document simultaneously. Office Web Apps will be available to everyone for free, but to get the full benefit of the products, you do need to have the desktop Office 2010, too.

Despite the perceived threat of Google Docs, the greatest competitor to Office 2010 is probably previous versions of Office. Although Office 2010 is a very solid and polished upgrade, with plenty of new features and improved performance and stability, Microsoft might find it hard to convince cost-sensitive businesses that they really need to upgrade to this latest version, just as many businesses didn’t upgrade from Office 2003 when Office 2007 was launched. Will the new Office Web Apps, the productivity-boosting tweaks and other collaborative features prove to be enough to persuade them to open their wallets for the new version?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Created in 2007 by Blake Calhoun and Mike Maden, the show’s enjoyed a remarkable amount of success, with three seasons finding distribution across all platforms, including, most recently, Hulu. In addition, Calhoun beat out a talented group of experienced web series directors to win the Best Directing in a Drama award at the 2009 Streamys.

So it’s popular — let’s talk about whether or not it’s good. Sitting down with the show again for the first time since it premiered, I remained impressed by its high-quality production value. The only exception being some of the larger-scale action scenes (such as Natalie shooting at an off-screen helicopter at the end of Season 1), which felt a little awkward in execution.

In terms of the acting, I remember Raitano fondly from the campy good time known as the Pamela Anderson series V.I.P., and she’s a competent lead. Matthew Tompkins, who plays her father as a ghost and in flashbacks, is pretty over-the-top, though, taking the hillbilly stereotype to almost an alarming degree. Otherwise, though, the casting is pretty good, and I enjoyed the addition of Katy Rowe as Bunny in Season 2.

The show’s flashbacks are the writing’s major weak point, as they’re too numerous at times and just weigh down the modern-day narrative, which is actually quite interesting. The flashbacks also work too hard to drive home points that would be better made subtly; which is a shame, given that one of my favorite things about Pink is the attention it pays to one woman’s psyche, giving the character real life and depth.

That leads me to one of my least-favorite things about Pink, though, but an element which may be key to its popularity. It’s logical to assume that Pink picks up a fair number of views thanks to the way in which Raitano is objectified over the course of the series, but that same objectification simultaneously weakens the show’s power. There are numerous shots which pan lovingly over her body, and most of her interactions with anyone not related to her are given an unnecessarily sexy edge (such as the kill in this speed-dating episode). It’s an obvious compromise, but I’m just naive enough to believe that it isn’t necessary.

Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): Shattering the Fourth Wall To Find Web Audiences

But what does being featured on the front page of YouTube mean for a previously unknown show, in an organically generated list instead of a sponsored slot? After an hour or so on Saturday of watching the viewcounts climb on our own video, I reached out to a few of the folks we featured to find out what their results were.

And the answer is: If you’re devoted to viewcounts, then being featured on the front page of YouTube is AWESOME. Just some of the reporting I got back:

• By the numbers, the big winner was Project Rant, whose total views made the biggest reported jump, going from 20,233 to 232,000. The featured episode received over 160,000 views, with the other episodes getting at least an additional 1000 views. Subscriptions jumped as well, from 59 to 1022. “Homepage exposure on YouTube is pure gold – and will make a huge difference in your raw view data if you are a relatively undiscovered show on YouTube,” co-creator Luis Esteban Caffesse said.
• The first episode of The Sanctum jumped from 4,000 views to 61,000 views, and the following episodes jumped from a range of 200-300 views to 1500-2300 views.
• The episode of Ignite featured jumped from approximately 10,000 views to over 40,000 views, though with minimal change in subscription counts.
• Vicariously went from about 1,000 views to 60,000 on Saturday, and is still climbing. It also saw a subscriber bump of about 200.
• Man Vs. Thing also jumped from about 1,000 views to nearly 62,000 views, and in addition now has over a hundred subscribers. The other videos jumped in views by 100 percent.
• Downsized got a total of 48,855 new views on Saturday, and about 40,000 of those were for the featured episode. “Currently, the first episode has almost 44,000 views, and the subsequent episodes have also gone up several thousand views, so viewers are checking out the rest of the episodes,” creator Daryn Strauss said via email.
• UPDATE: Acting School Academy‘s featured episode gained 200,000 more views in the first day, and other videos received an additional 100,000 views. In addition, their subscribers increased from 675 to 2000, and those numbers continue to grow. The show is approaching one million total views across all networks. “That’s a number we can take places, get meetings with, and hopefully [use to] get funding for a second season,” director M. Ian Smith said via email.

One consistent element is that while the featured videos did very well, the other episodes didn’t have as huge of a bump. That’s because when a video finishes playing on YouTube, it doesn’t immediately offer you the opportunity to watch the next episode in the series unless you’re in playlist mode. More call-to-action is necessary in order to capitalize on a feature like this.

In addition, most of the creators mentioned a dramatic increase in commenters, many of whom represented the lowest common denominator in comments YouTube has become known for. Man Vs. Thing creator Rob Schulbaum said in an email that “Overall the series has become the target of an unexpected stream of bile and vitriolic criticism. It didn’t seem to be enough that a user express that they didn’t enjoy it, but a number suggested that I abandon my career in entertainment. I’ve also been informed that it’s totally ‘gay.’” That’s definitely something to brace yourself for, should you be so lucky.

I’d like to thank YouTube again for giving us a chance to give these shows more exposure — it was a real honor. But I’d also like to thank everyone who commented on our intro video to compliment my “tatties.” My parents and grandmother really appreciated seeing that.

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The new version, released to coincide with Macworld earlier this month, includes a number of new features that really up the ante in terms of Mac integration. It’s a significant enough release that I’m giving Postbox another go as my primary email client, since I still have an emotionally draining relationship with Apple Mail and would love to kick that habit once and for all.

Address Book

Maybe most useful among the new features, at least for those coming over from Mail, and most definitely for MobileMe subscribers, is the new Address Book app integration. By default, the new 1.1.1 release of Postbox for Mac will use your Address Book contacts instead of creating its own database. You can opt to turn this feature off if for some reason you’d rather keep things separate. Any new contacts you create from within Postbox will also create new Address Book cards for those individuals, so it works both ways.

Spotlight Search

Also important for people making the jump from Mail is complete Spotlight access to all of your Postbox-stored mail. Message bodies, header info and attachment names will all now show up as hits when searching using Spotlight (as long as it’s enabled in Postbox. You have to turn this feature on, since it’s off by default). Spotlight integration is also a two-way street, since you can now right-click on any highlighted word in any email and select “Search in Spotlight” from the contextual menu to run a search.

iCal

iCal integration is now a two-way street in this latest release, too. Meeting notifications will automatically be sent in the background, and choosing “Mail Event” from the right-click menu in iCal should open a new Postbox message, so long as you’ve set the app as your default email client. Mail.app may still open too, but if this happens, Postbox has a quick fix to ensure things work properly the next time:

• Within the Finder, right-click on the iCal icon and then select Show Package Contents.
• Navigate to the “Contents” folder, then the “Resources” folder. Right-click on the folder called “Scripts” and select “Get Info.”
• Expand the “Sharing & Permissions” box and click the Lock icon in the lower right-hand corner to unlock this setting. Change any permissions that are listed as “Read Only” to “Read & Write.”
• Restart Postbox.

iPhoto

Something I always really liked about Postbox was its easy to use, built-in content filters that would allow you to see all your images, links and attachments at a glance with a single mouse click. The Postbox developerss have taken that functionality a step further with this new version, allowing you to export any image attachments in your mailbox directly to iPhoto. You’ll need to go through the somewhat lengthy process of completely indexing your inbox before you can do this, but it’s a really nice little feature that’s well worth the wait, especially if you have a lot of shutter-happy relatives and friends, as I do.

Many Other Improvements

There’s lots of little additions and under the hood improvements in version 1.1.1 of Postbox, too. One of the better ones is the ability to drag any icon to the Postbox icon in the dock and have it automatically create a new email with that file as an attachment. It’s a small thing, but it’s also indicative of the kinds of refinements put into this version aimed at making it more than a match for its native Apple competitor, and for other popular options like Mozilla Thunderbird, too. Postbox is free to try for 30 days, so give it a shot, especially if you’re a Mac user who’s had enough of Mail.

Are you a Postbox user? What do you think of the new version?

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Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated

I want to find the perfect flash drive like baseball pitchers want a perfect game. The perfect gadget is elusive and amazingly rare, and I’ve often come tantalizing close to finding it without actually getting there. I think I’ve found the perfect drive now, but I’ve thought that in the past, too. So, here’s a run down of where I’ve come from, and where I’m at now, and why I think I’ve come as close to perfection as possible.

Monarchs of Old

Two flash drives come to mind when I think back on the long parade of USB keys that have come and gone over the course of my life as a gadget-addicted web worker. Both shared some similarities, but I liked them more for their differences than for what they had in common.

Lexar FireFly

The FireFly represents the first time I paid attention to the case design of a flash drive. Before this, it didn’t matter what it looked like, and to my mind, none really looked that good anyway. It didn’t matter that there were complaints about the speed of the drive, and even some murmurs about high failure rates. It felt solid, had a blue glow, and genuinely resembled its namesake.

When I started using a FireFly, a 512MB capacity drive was all that I really needed. I still have the neon green one that I had back then, and it still works, though I don’t use it any more because all of my documents are now online, and at that capacity there’s very little else I can carry on it. They’re still available from Lexar, but the capacities don’t seem to be increasing and keeping track of the cap started to become a nuisance, so I moved on.

SanDisk MicroCruzer

To escape the tyranny of caps, I moved on to the MicroCruzer, which again boasts a pretty attractive form factor, but with a retractable USB connector to eliminate the need for protective covers. A reassuring orange glow lets you know it’s working, and you get the reassurance of using a SanDisk flash product, a company I’ve found to be tremendously reliable. Many of my MicroCruzers are still in service.

But not all. The retraction trick may prevent the connector from getting damaged and reduce the need for a cap, but with lots of repeated use it seems to wear down, and now some won’t catch when extended, making it much harder to connect them to the computer. And it shares the same small but chunky design with the FireFly, which means they still feel like a bulky imposition in my pants pockets.

Current Ruler

LaCie CooKey/IamaKey/WhizKey

The flash drive so nice they made it thrice. LaCie originally released the IamaKey model of this drive, which I bought as soon as I became aware that it existed. It’s a USB key meant to resemble an actual key, thanks to a housing designed by 5.5 Designers for the Mac-friendly accessory maker. When that model took off, LaCie introduced two further designs that essentially replicated the form factor.

Which is a good thing, because it’s actually perfect, insofar as my current flash memory needs go. The keys come in a range of capacities, from 8GB to 32GB, and they sport a rugged metal design. They’re as thin as house keys, so they fit can on your key ring. The connector is one-sided (doesn’t have the traditional box of a male USB connector, only the business side with the contacts), which allows for the thinness of design.

A little plastic cover is provided for those who are paranoid about damaging the contacts, but as someone who promptly lost that cover on his first key, let me tell you that it isn’t at all necessary. The construction of the contacts is such that they seem impervious, even when kept with the rest of your keys in a pocket filled with change and other bric-a-brac. They’re easily portable, functional, unobtrusive and stylish. Plus clients and people I meet in the course of doing business almost always fall in love with them, so they help with networking and they make great corporate gifts, too.

Have you found the perfect flash drive?

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Luckily, Facebook recently opened up its API to allow third-party developers more access to core features, which gives them a chance to rework the web app and deliver something a little easier on the eyes and potentially less frustrating. That’s exactly what Microsoft’s done with its new Silverlight 4 Beta Client for Facebook, available for Windows and Mac. It’s also demonstrated that Microsoft can sometimes make something I actually like.

As you can see from the screenshots below, the Silverlight Facebook client does something visually striking with the content it pulls from Facebook itself. It uses a fairly sparse dark theme with big, easy-to-read type that borrows just enough from the standard web-based Facebook layout that you won’t find yourself hunting for commands and interface elements.

Your main view shows your news feed (the live feed, not the “News Feed,” which is completely useless and should not be the default for any reason). You can filter your news feed results using the same filters you’d find on Facebook.com, which appear down the left-hand side. Commenting and “liking” is enabled in the news feed, and you can post status updates by clicking the “what’s on your mind?” link at the top. Clickable selections from your friends’ photo updates appear slightly blurred on the right-hand side, providing even more functionality.You can also switch to either “grid” or “photos feed” modes. Grid displays your news feed in a columnar view, so that you can see more at once. Photos feed brings the partially-obscured photos backdrop to the fore and displays a mosaic of your friends’ recently uploaded images. It’s quite nice looking, and it provides a way of looking through your contacts’ images that’s far more appealing than Facebook’s standard method.

The photo browsing in general is very cool, and it feels much better checking out albums than it does on the web. The only downside I’ve found is that some albums, for whatever reason, aren’t browsable in the app, because of some setting the uploader has used in creating them.

What really puts this client over the top, in my opinion, is that it gives you access to both Events and your messages. Thanks to the inclusion of both of those features, I no longer have to visit the web-based Facebook at all. You won’t be able to use Facebook chat through the Silverlight app, but there are other solutions for that, too, including some web-based clients and multi-client apps like Beejive for the iPhone (which is what I use).

Other limitations include some control issues –you have to click on a column’s arrows to scroll, instead of using a mouse wheel, for example. This may be a limitation of Silverlight itself, or it could just be because the client is still in an early beta stage at this point, but it does get a bit annoying. You also can’t hide things you don’t want to see without visiting the Facebook web site, and some types of links will take you back to the web, though I didn’t encounter this very often because those are mostly Facebook app links, which I don’t generally use anyway. There are also some obvious bugs, but again, this is an early beta.

By far the most useful aspect of the Silverlight Facebook client is how it treats Facebook more like a CRM system and less like something to use for idle distraction. For example, whenever you view messages between yourself and someone else, it populates the right-hand side of the app with the latest updates, links and photos posted by that person. That way you can refer directly to that contact’s recent activity. It isn’t providing you with any information you can’t get on the web site, but it is combining and presenting it in much more useful ways.

It’s a solid Facebook client, and it makes the service feel much more professional. If you use Facebook during the course of your work, and you aren’t happy with how it works on the web, the Silverlight Client is definitely worth checking out.

Post your thoughts on the Silverlight 4 Beta Client for Facebook below.

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I’ve been pleased to find a number of my favorite Firefox extensions available in the new gallery. The following are six of them that can help you get much more out of Chrome, including extensions for making life with Google’s own applications easier. (Note that you must have the latest beta version of Chrome to work with these, and it’s available here.)

iMacros. This extension for Chrome looks and works exactly like the hugely popular iMacros extension for Firefox. It lets you easily record repetitive actions, such as loading groups of tabbed sites that you use all day, and then play them back with the click of just one button. OStatic has a complete visual tour of how to use the Firefox version here.

Xmarks. If you’re a longtime Firefox user, you probably already use the Xmarks bookmarking and synchronization extension. Now it’s available for Chrome. As jkOnTheRun has noted, Xmarks can revolutionize the way you work.

Google Apps Shortcuts. This is a simple extension that lets you get at Google Apps with one mouse click. You can jump right to documents, spreadsheets, presentations or Gmail, for example, as seen at left.

ChromeMilk. RememberTheMilk has been a popular online to-do list manager for years, and is now available as an extension for Chrome, dubbed ChromeMilk. It lets you access your to-do tasks right from Chrome’s toolbar.

One Number. This extension lets you keep an eye on incoming traffic to Gmail, Google Reader, Google Voice and Google Wave. It’s an all-in-one dashboard, as seen here.

AdBlock. Ask some Firefox users what their favorite extension is, and they’ll say AdBlock Plus. It removes all kinds of ad-oriented annoyances from your browsing experience, and this version for Chrome carries over all the features from the Firefox extension.

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