Thursday, April 1, 2010

An iPad App I'd Love to See

If you're like me you get messages from colleagues and friends throughout the day with links to interesting articles, blog posts and other items they're suggesting you read.  I rarely have an opportunity to look at those links immediately and I have to admit that sometimes they fall through the cracks and I never get to them, which is my loss.  I try to reserve some time each night to catch up on the latest news and articles but I've never found an effective way to pull in all those items that come to me through email and IMs.

I'd love to see a solution where I right-click on any url on my laptop (in email, AIM, a document, etc.) and a menu pops up with an option to "Save page on iPad".  So I want a desktop applet that talks to my iPad, telling it to go out to the web, pull down that page and save it so I can read it, even if I'm offline later.  If my laptop and iPad aren't linked up my laptop should queue up all these link requests and transfer them as soon as they can reconnect.  One of the keys here is that I need all these pages to be available offline (like the Instapaper model...in fact, this would be a nice feature for Instapaper to think about), so that I can read them on a plane, for example.

I'm not sure of the best way to enable this laptop-to-iPad communication, but it shouldn't be hard to pull off, right?  Is this an app you'd use?

3 comments:

  1. I was thinking along similar lines the other day... very often I find URLs in Tweets I want to go into that 'read later' category. Right now I just email them to myself. For bonus points, I want them to end up in the "read/review" part of my GTD system too.

    In the broader sphere, I think we'll find Bonjour-based "local cloud" services emerging quickly to support communication between iPad/iPhone and your laptop. For an existing example, see the Pasties app which does this with the clipboard – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pastie/id324527519?mt=8

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  2. You should check out Evernote. Save everything (pics, docs, links, inline text, email msgs, notes, voice notes etc)to the cloud and sync across all devices. They have a cool iPhone App already which I'm sure they'll port to the iPad.

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  3. drop docs into iDisk, Apple's storage. Requires Mobileme, but that's only one advantage of that syncing system. Once downloaded onto device, the doc stays. Then, can read later.
    I've used on iPhone; now on iPad.

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