The iPad is the perfect productivity device, at least for me: I read articles, catch up with the news, write posts, do email and browsing with it. I’m starting to realize that 70% of the activities I used to do on a Macbook can easily be done on the iPad, without compromises of any sort. Sure the iPad App Store still lacks a good WordPress app and a decent FTP client for uploading pictures, but I’m moving my overall daily tasks to this new device. It’s smaller, more focused yet powerful enough to allow me to do stuff without losing the ability to do it well.

Of course I needed a good task manager to manage my todos on the iPad: after the Twitter client quest and the search for a great feeds reading app I decided it was time to install a GTD application to organize, sort and process tasks. As you can guess, the first choice was Things from Cultured Code, an already excellent app for Mac and iPhone which has been ported with a complete interface revamp to the iPad and was also available on day one. I installed Things, but I still have to try it because I’m testing another application now, Taska for iPad from BitAlpha.

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Living in Italy and writing MacStories, I have to keep up with what happens in the rest of the world, which in most cases means “catch up with the news from the US”. As you can guess, I had some problems with time zone at the beginning, but I’ve gotten used to it. Coffee also helps a lot, if you ask me.

But for those of you who still have problems with timezones, there’s an app for that. It’s a webapp actually, and it works pretty great on both Safari for Mac and iPad. It’s called Every Time Zone and through a beautiful, mouse and touch compatible interface allows you to quickly check what’s the time on the most important timezones around the world. All you have to do is move with either your mouse or finger that little tab which is your local time and see the changes in the other timezones. It works great on the iPad.

Check out the screenshot after the break.

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TUAW has posted an interview with Brent Simmons, the developer of the popular RSS application NetNewsWire. If you’ve been browsing the App Store you may have noticed that NWW for iPad was out on the launch day, and from what Simmons says, it’s been a very successful launch.

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Many applications try to take the minimal approach nowadays, and a very few manage to achieve it and combine it with an actual usability. Fortunately, these very few apps are indeed some of the best apps around, and if you take a look at the App Store you can see plenty of them in the top paid and top grossing charts. I’m talking about apps like Reeder, Simplenote, Taskpaper: applications that didn’t aim at empowering the user with tons of features and graphical goodness, whose developers just focused on elegance and usefulness. Sure there are applications like Pastebot that mix custom, rich graphical elements with a real purpose, but I thank God every day for apps like Reeder.

But what about the iPad? If you look at the apps out now, you’ll see that most of them try to follow the user interface guidelines suggested by Apple, just like with the first iPhone apps that came out in 2008. Then, after some months, designers and developers started to explore new ways of designing mobile apps, and I bet the same will happen with the iPad. But then again, there are some differences between the launch of the iPhone App Store and the iPad one: it turns out that some devs have already started experimenting with their apps, trying to break the rules established in Cupertino  by introducing custom, different and non-native looking UI elements in their apps.

Now back to Reeder, there’s a reason why I mentioned it: today I’m going to take a look at Headline, a feeds reading app for the iPad which, in my opinion, might be the “new Reeder” for iPad.

Too soon to tell? Let’s take a look.

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Google has released an update to its Google Mobile application, making it compatible with the iPad. Guess what, the application seems to really sucks, as it doesn’t take advantage of any new feature of the iPad and only cares about putting the same old iPhone things on a bigger screen.

From the App Store page:

- My Location - avoid typing your current location when searching for nearby businesses;

- Google Suggest - tap suggested web search queries and local businesses that appear as you type;

- Search history - quickly search again for queries you recently performed;

- Vertical search - search Google Maps, Images, News, and Shopping

The very same old stuff. Check out the screenshots after the break.

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I haven’t been an Evernote user for a long time. I remember tried this popular service many months ago for the first time and while I was impressed by the tons of features it offered, I was seriously disappointed by the official Mac client. It didn’t feel native to me, and the UI was a mess. Even after I applied some custom elements from Susumu Yoshida, I wasn’t happy with it.

But I’ve got an iPad, and I heard the optimized version of Evernote for the new device was worth checking out. Still, I had my doubts. I mean, going back to the service I tried and didn’t like? Having to deal once again with that Mac app? After putting some thought on it, I decided that I had to try it again, anyway. New platform, new app, new interface - perhaps Evernote would have done better this time.

Evernote on the iPad is very good. So good that I’ve been writing my posts on it for 5 days now.

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Remember iPhone Screentaker? It’s that useful app from developer Fabian Kreiser that allows you to take a screenshot on your iPhone, move it to your Mac and embed it into a great looking iPhone template. This is a must have for bloggers who want to include beautiful iPhone screenies in their posts.

We covered the app a while ago here, and that’s just been updated to a new version.

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Seems like iPhone developer Steven Troughton-Smith is on a roll these days. After managing to install the iPhone clock app on the iPad, he installed and run Windows 1.01 and Apple’s Rhapsody using Bochs on the iPad.

Sure they’re buggy and crash, but it’s a good achievement nevertheless. Not just because he managed to run Windows 1.01 (I mean, who wants to use it anyway?) but because this opens many possibilities, like trying to run Chrome OS on Apple’s new device. Stuff that geeks and hackers love, basically.

We’ve included the pictures after the break.

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In my review of Twitterrific, I wrote that one of the first things I did when the iPad App Store went public was to search for good Twitter clients. Guess what, right after I settled with Iconfactory’s app I started looking for a decent RSS application. At the moment of writing this, there are not so many feeds readers available for the iPad, but I can say there are a few good ones. I bet it’s just a matter of time for Google Reader clients to come out, as developers are finally working on real devices now.

To better understand the situation, we should make a step backward and recap what’s going on with the iPhone and feeds readers. Reeder 2 is the application I’m now using every day to catch up with the news while I’m on the go and I have time to read something. It’s an elegant, minimal and polished piece of software. But, we at MacStories have reviewed many Google Reader clients before and I’ve been switching back and forth between different solutions myself, until I decided to keep Reeder 2 on my home screen. There’s this other application for iPhone though, which is very popular among users, that sports a good amount of features geared towards power users of Google Reader: Newsrack, previously known as Newsstand.

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