I wrote a blog post for dreamBIGLY about how to create a kickass life list. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Hold up! That’s NOT a cue to give up and go home. Just cos we can’t think of any better alternatives, does not mean there aren’t any.

The reason we don’t push ourselves any further is, in my opinion, 2 parts fear and a huge dollop of laziness! We stay stuck in our boring lives because we can’t really be bothered to put in the hard work that goes towards fixing it. Also, we’re a huge bunch of scaredy cats. Cos making big life changes is hard, and nerve-wracking, and we as normal human beings tend to shy away from anything that makes us feel uncomfortable.

And I get that. Which is why I am presenting a totally unthreatening, no-commitment, list of 10 questions to ask yourself to get you thinking about your life direction. 

The purpose of these questions is for you to start understanding what you could offer to the world that will get a huge grin on your face and racing to wake up in the morning.

You won’t have a plan to quit your job by the time you’re done, but you’ll be clearer about where your passion lies. Use this knowledge how you wish – to take an online course to further your knowledge, to start a small biz sideline, to give yourself an hour a day to indulge in your passion, whatever. Just be clear about what makes you feel alive.

10 Questions to Jumpstart your Passion

(By the way, this exercise works best if you print this page out, grab a pen and a coffee, and go somewhere quiet to take 30mins to really think about your answers. Write them down so you articulate your thoughts clearly. If you don’t have the time, ask yourself why you don’t want to invest your time in making your life better?)

1. Don’t be shy: What are you ridiculously great at?
2. What were you doing last time you felt really excited, like you had come alive?
3. Who/what inspires you?
4. What do you love to work hard on? Why?
5. What are you doing when you get ‘in the zone’?
6. If money were no object, how would you spend your time?
7. What topic/s get you most passionate? Like, you could talk about it hours?
8. What do you love helping people with?
9. What is it that you can’t wait to get started on?
10. What would you want your Wikipedia entry to say about you in 100 years time?

Go on! Print me! There’s nothing more important that you can do for yourself than making sure you know what makes you want to live with purpose and excitement. Get started making a change right now.

The first lesson is the hardest. Not everyone is ready for what you are doing with your life. There’ll be discouragement, snide remarks, disbelief and unsupportiveness (is that a word?!) Don’t let that stuff distract you. These people, the people who don’t support your dreams and passions, their feelings have nothing to do with you. Their reactions are coming from a place of defensiveness. Because they know they wouldn’t have the courage to do the same thing.

• Cut 90% of what you want to do.

Starting out, we had the biggest dreams ever. We still do. But if we tried to build all of that straight out of the gate, we’d still be building and would not have shipped anything yet. Don’t be scared of releasing stuff before you think its ‘perfect’. Its never gonna be perfect. Get to the bare bones of where the value lies and start with that small seed. All the other stuff, the 90% – that can all wait till you’ve proved that the small seed is worth continuing on with.

• Don’t be afraid to ask for help

Working in a startup is to learn at a ferocious rate. Each day brings a new challenge and something else that you don’t know. You cannot do it alone, and nobody expects you to. Don’t be too proud to admit that you don’t know what something means. Find mentors, find e-books, find resources, find conversation with other smart people. Ask for help – people are surprisingly awesome at being there when you need them.

• Complement and compliment your co-founder

Co-founding? Choose wisely, because you’ll be spending a hell of a lot of time together. You need to be able to work with your co-founder through anything – the easy, fun times and the heart-wrenching shit times. Find somebody that complements your talents and personality – it should feel like you are both bringing valuable skills and points of view to the table, as well as being able to bounce of each other and feed into each other’s good points.  Make sure you can make each other laugh – there’ll be times when you will sorely need it. And finally, compliment your co-founder every single day – constant appreciation and respect will keep your partnership alive through anything.

• Feeling stupid is normal

Not a day goes by where I don’t feel stupid at something. Embrace it. If you don’t feel challenged, you are stuck in your comfort zone, and you’ll never progress further. Lack of challenge is a huge part of why so many people feel stifled and bored at their job. So really, your feelings of stupidity are contributing towards your overall job satisfaction! Go you!

• Uncertainty is your new BFF

This is certainly true of how we roll at our startup – you simply have no idea whats going on most of the time. We don’t have any grand 3 year plans, hell, we don’t even have a 3 month plan. Its what keeps us nimble and free to abandon something at a moment’s notice if we don’t feel like its working. We don’t get too attached to anything. Its just a series of small experiments that we hope will someday lead us to glory (GLORYYYY!). Be prepared to roll with changes.

• Articulate what you want clearly

This is still a tough one for me. I’m used to doing the whole office dance where you have to negotiate 8 people and wait a week to decide anything. You develop coping strategies to make the best of this situation and I have found, for me anyway, that an unfortunate side effect is that I now find it hard to just come out directly with what I want. I get flustered when my co-founder asks me to state directly what I want, being used to having to couch things in much more subtle ways. But when its just the two of you, or a small team of you, there’s no need for any of the bullshit. You decide stuff and then you do it. You may find yourself asking for something in kind of an indirect way and being utterly shocked when it has been done 30 minutes later. Its awesome! But don’t hold your mouth wide open for too long.

• Have FUN!

You can get so swept up with the craploads of work that you are doing, and stressing over activation rates, and wondering where your next meal is coming from, to actually stop and realise that you are having a freaking awesome time! I’m absolutely living my dream right now – I’m working on products that honest to god feel like my children, I get to work my own hours (night-owl shout out!), I make decisions without 10 other people weighing in, and I can work from anywhere in the world. This is my dream, and you’ll be living yours too – so don’t forget to smile!

• Get a Master’s degree
• Get my first tattoo
• Buy a DSLR
• Visit Bruges
• Drive Across Europe
• Visit all 50 States: New Jersey
• Visit the Vatican
• Go camping
• Sell stuff at a car boot sale
• Send a handwritten letter to a friend
• Digitise my quotation collection

In 2011:

• Find out about my genetic history
• Visit the Grand Canyon
• Photograph the Eiffel Tower
• Chill out in Amsterdam
• Visit all 50 States: Arizona
• Visit all 50 States: California
• Visit all 50 States: Nevada
• Win/Lose money in Vegas
• Own less than 250 things
• Own less than 150 things
• Fly in a helicopter
• Be my own boss
• Give a public presentation
• Go to see Take That

No one is coming to your rescue, and nothing will change until you do.

–Dave Navarro (rockyourday.com)

What happened in 2011

• I got simple and minimal – I reached my minimalism goals of about 100 items!
• Started freelancing again – I quit my fulltime job yay!
• Co-founded a startup! – I joined forces with Rob to go on the most exciting adventure building amazing products!
• Improved my front end skills – I became more and more proficient at front-end coding, mostly due to the goal above!
• Travel! - I went to Paris, Amsterdam, and the West Coast of the USA (where this post is being written from!)
• Did more life list items -My aim was to cross one life list item off a month – I am pleased to say that I achieved 13 life list goals this year. Yay!

What I learnt in 2011

2011 was an incredible year of growth and self-discovery for me. There was so much change in the past year, that I really feel like I have learned a huge amount. Here are a few lessons that stuck out:

• I need much less than I think I do. - My minimalism journey this year has really taught me about the beautiful experience of having less things that are more precious. Another area of my life where this lesson has been reinforced is through my startup adventures, and learning about Eric Ries’ ‘Lean Startup’ movement. I’ve taught myself to question the place and value of everything, both in my personal life and in business. Its made my life so much richer.
• Think less, do more, push for even more - This was a year where I really left my comfort zone and made a huge leap in a different direction in my career. It was vital for me to stop worrying about what if I jumped off the proverbial cliff. Instead, I started worrying about what would happen if I didn’t do it – absolutely nothing would change. I worried about how boring that would be. And made the change.
• Build something and SHIP IT! – Creating stuff has always been extremely important to me. What was highlighted this year was the importance of getting out into the big wide world what I build! If you don’t ship, if you don’t let people see what it is you are creating, if you don’t let people experience your creation, what the hell is the point.
• Partner with people who challenge you - One of the most important lessons I’ve learnt this year is the huge value in finding people who push your boundaries. I’ve been incredibly lucky to have a stellar group of people surrounding me this past year. The most honourable mention, particularly this year, goes to Rob - Rob makes me a better designer, and most importantly, a better person. He tells me straight when I’m wrong, he questions me constantly, he stretches my mind and my imagination, and always has my back. This year would’ve been immeasurably different without Rob and I thank him from the bottom of my heart.
• Stop chasing the ordinary - This year more than ever, I have really felt myself find a comfortable place in my mind in terms of my goals and aspirations. I’ve tried to break the mould this year more than ever before, pushing myself to try new things and new ways of thinking. I’ve started think differently about my life and what I want from it, and for the first time, I find myself on the brink of being able to commit to the extraordinary, rather than the ordinary.

Where to in 2012

Of course, I want 2012 to be a year packed full of ridiculous awesomeness. But I need to get more specific. Here are some things I will be committing to this year:

• Go Paleo for 3 months – I need to start taking better care of myself, and start caring about the quality of things I’m putting in my body.
• Go on 5 trips - In 2011 I did 3 trips. In 2012, I wanna up the ante. Locations tbc.
• Live in another country for 1 month plus - I want to experience living and working somewhere completely different to London.
• Cross off another 12 items on my life list (one for every month)
• Save £500 every month
• Dedicate 5 hours a week for learning. I wanna level up, and to do that, I need to keep pushing myself. 5 hours per week will be solely for my own personal learning and are non-negotiable.
• Make products that thousands of people use and enjoy. This year will be a year of exciting growth and opportunity for our startup. It’ll be tough, but we are ready and willing.

This year is going to be super awesome, I can feel it in my bones. I want to be more audacious, more daring, more playful, and more committed to living the best life I can. Bring on 2012. Bring. It. On!

Next, I wanted to reduce further to 100 possessions by the end of 2011. I set the goal of 100 items as a benchmark amount that would force me to really prioritise and make value judgements, on an unprecedented scale. Saying to myself, “Right Yael, you only have room for 100 items – what are they gonna be?”, really focused my mind down to decide what was truly valuable to me. This was eye-opening.

So, I didn’t quite get to 100, but honestly – it isn’t the final number that is important. It is going through that process of prioritisation and long thought about what I choose to make part of my life. From this exercise, I have learnt so much.

Here is a breakdown:

• I now own 125 items (full list at the bottom of the post)
• Of that, 85 items are for wearing – clothes (39),shoes (8), underwear (25), accessories/jewellery/bags (13)
• 14 are techie gadgets
• Caveat: I didn’t include anything I own in the count that is replenishable, like toiletries, or pens, or food. I count electrical items and any of its accompanying cables and cases as one item – as the other stuff would not exist without the electrical item itself (an exception to this is when I have bought something extra that it didn’t come with, like the alupen stylus I bought for my iPad.) I don’t own any furniture, or utensils etc.

You can see that the vast proportion of my remaining items are to do with my personal appearance. This was the toughest area to cut back on. Although I think I have quite a limited wardrobe in comparison to many girls, learning that 83(!) items I own are things I wear came as a surprise. I know that within those items, there are things that I definitely don’t need – but turns out, I value those clothing items over the other stuff I decided to throw out in its place. Who knew?!

The other big clump of items comes in as gadgets. Gadgets are invaluable for me as I try to cut back on my possessions – without my kindle, I would have included lots of books on the list; without the ipad, lots of notebooks and stationary; without the laptop, well, I dread to think the amount of actual folders I would need to match the number of virtual folders I have!

So, what have I learnt on my minimalism journey so far?

• Find out what you truly value

There is something incredibly unencumbered and free about ridding yourself of all that excess stuff in your life. But each person will have a different idea about what that ‘excess stuff’ is. Exercises like ‘you can only live with 100 things, what are they?’ are really invaluable in forcing you to make value judgements on your things, and may reveal some surprising things about what really you can’t do without and what you could actually cope fine with.

• Quality over quantity

Having less stuff means that you want what you do have to be of the utmost quality. I now buy more expensive things than I used to, because a) I’m not wasting money on things that I never wear/use and b) everything I buy is viewed as an investment. Buying things based on proper value judgements (“Do I really really need this?”) means that everything I buy should be in my life for the long haul. This means it needs to be incredibly perfect for me and great quality. I used to buy cheaper clothes because I bought into this whole Primark culture of almost disposable fashion – clothes that are so cheap you do not feel guilty in wearing it only a couple of times and going for more shopping trips. No more.

• Think multi-purpose

I have also learnt about the beauty of thinking about things in a more multi-purpose way. Because every extra thing counts, if you can buy one item that does multiple things, this is obviously a bonus. A classic example of this is my new coat, which was an excellent buy. Previously, I had a heavy black long coat, with no hood. This, from a minimalism perspective, was  probably the worst coat I could own! It had no hood, which meant I had to own a hat. It was heavy, which meant I had to own a lightweight jacket as well. My new coat however, has ensured that all I need is one coat – it has a great big hood, which removes the need for a hat, and has a detachable inner lining which means it turns into a lightweight coat. 3 items down to 1 – perfect!

• Own what you own, girl!

Finally, this process has taught me to really love everything I own. Each of my things is special and really really wanted. I don’t have anything that is languishing in the back of a cupboard or that sits on a shelf. Nearly everything gets used regularly, and I love the sense of utility and pride that I get from my things.

So thats it – I can say that I have achieved my minimalist goals for 2011 with a big smile on my face. But this isn’t the end – I view minimalism as a lifestyle choice that I will continue learning from and working towards in the coming year as well!

And for the hardcore reader:

A full list of my items, also viewable as a flickr set:

1. Lacie hard drive

2. Hair straighteners

3. Apple hard drive

4. Wacom tablet

5. Passport

6. Travel padlocks

7. Travel light

8. Day bag

9. Doc Martens

10. Perudo, the best game in the world

11. Samurai picture 1

12. Samurai picture 2

13. Towel

14. Laundry basket

15. Comic book store print

16. iPhone

17. Hairdryer

18. Shoe boots

19. Purple flats

20. Black flats

21. Pink vest

22. Grey tiger tee

23. J’adore vest

24. Tetris tee

25. Leopard print vest

26. Grey tee

27. Flying birds vest

28. Black smart vest

29. Black & white smart top

30. Printer

31. Folder

32. iPod

33. Spare earphones

34. Spare apple charger

35. Little camera

36. UX cards

37. Pencil case

38. Thule laptop case

39. Wallet

40. Kindle

41. Alupen stylus

42. iPad

43. Oyster card

44. Umbrella

45. Keys

46. Thule backpack

47. Toiletries bag

48. Jewellery case

49. Blue feather earrings

50. Pearl earrings

51. Blue India earrings

52. Pearl ring

53. Red Michal Negrin earrings

54. Owl necklace

55. Grey feather earrings

56. SkullCandy headphones

57. MBP

58. ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’ mug

59. Leather Gloves

60. Scarf

61. Black boots

62. Black bow shoe boots

63. Flip flops

64. Converse

65. Black clutch

66. Converse travel bag

67. Guitar

68. Travel moneybelt

69. Nikon camera and bag

70. Shrug

71. Paypal Slanket

72. Nike Joggers

73. Blue jumper

74. Blue jumper

75. Grey joggers

76. F is for Foxy tee

77. South of France tee

78. Love tee

79. Owl tee

80. Matisyahu tee

81. Metallic vest

82. Blue vest

83. Black vest

84. Black cardigan

85. Yellow jumper

86. Grey cardigan

87. Long grey cardigan

88. Dress

89. Blue dress

90. Black formal dress

91. Black dress

92. Black & white dress

93. Leopard print blouse

94. Black jeans

95. Worn black jeans

96. Blue jeans

97. Mirror

98. Bed linen

99. Coat

100. Business Cards

(That brings us to 100 items! Not pictured: underwear! Grand total: 125 yay )

Seeing as there is barely any time left in this year, I thought I would take this opportunity to revisit my plan for 2011 that I made around this time last year, to check up on my progress and see how I am doing.

Last Year’s Goals

Last year, I had some solid plans for what I wanted to achieve in 2011. Briefly, they were:

• Get simple and minimal – cut waste, unneeded possessions, both physically and emotionally
• Start freelancing again – lose the cushy fulltime UX job and start pushing my boundaries again
• Improve my front end skills – get lots and lots better at front end coding
• Save money in my life list fund - put money away each month so I can fulfil more of my life list goals.
• Travel! - do 3 trips – 2 small, 1 large
• Do more life list items - aim to cross one life list item off a month

How am I doing?

I’m unbelievably pleased to report that I am actually doing pretty well!

• Get simple and minimal

At the beginning of 2011, I worked really hard to get into a really minimal state. I managed to decrease all my possessions to under 250 items, and got rid of a couple of really big ticket items, namely my car and my iMac. Though I’ve still got more to get rid of, I am confident that I can get into the kind of shape I want to be by the end of 2011.

STATUS: NEEDS MORE WORK BUT ACHIEVABLE!

• Start freelancing again

Big news on this front. Not only did I quit my full time job this year, but I also started working with @robcthegeek on our very own start-up!! This is truly the biggest adventure of my whole life and I have no doubt that I’ll be blogging more about this separately. Suffice it to say, I consider this goal of mine to be well and truly surpassed!

STATUS: AWESOMELY AWESOME!

• Improve my front end skills

This time last year, my front-end coding skills were complete newb, painfully crap, would hardly know where to begin. Now, though I still have a looooong way to go, I can really say that I have definitely improved. A big project for me this year to help achieve this goal was to code up my very own personal site, which I did with great effect. I launched Triangle Sandwiches, my personal life list site, in the middle of this year and I am very proud of all I have achieved with it. I am also very involved in the front-end side of things in our start-up which has given me even more impetus to improve, something which I very much want to continue with next year too.

STATUS: GREAT!

• Save money in my life list fund

The plan with this was to put away a tidy sum of money each month that would go towards funding my life list exploits. Unfortunately, I did not do as well with this goal as I would have liked to. A combination of personal factors, and also just plain weak-willedness on my behalf, made this goal really suffer this year. I’m not at all proud that I really haven’t saved as much as I would have liked to, something that will affect the amount of life list goals I can now achieve going forward. Must try harder next year.

STATUS: NEEDS IMPROVEMENT.

• Travel!

I wanted to do 3 trips in 2011; 2 small trips to places that are relatively close, for short breaks and not too expensive, and 1 big trip to somewhere far away, for a longer period of time and where I can splash a little more cash! I am incredibly pleased to say that I have done exactly what I set out to do with this goal. My two small trips this year were to Amsterdam and Paris for short weekend breaks and were a lot of fun! My big trip is all booked for December and will take me to San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas baby! Its going to be a great trip and I couldn’t be more excited!

STATUS: AWESOMELY AWESOME!

• Do more life list items

I wanted to aim to cross at least one life list item off a month. I definitely did not achieve this goal. I crossed 10 life list items off this year (more on this to come in a separate post), so if I want to hit that magical 12 mark, I need to get 2 done in the next 50 days. I feel confident that I can get this done, so BRING IT ON!

STATUS: NEEDS MORE WORK BUT ACHIEVABLE!

Feeling confident?

I’ve done a lot better with this year than I thought I had! There is still some things that I really want to try and get done in the next 50 days but I am totally game. I’m also looking forward to getting some time before the end of the year to have a nice long introspective think about this year and a massive planning session looking to the next year so I can really start moving myself closer to my dreams. Exciting times! And remember, only 50 days left of 2011 – make ‘em count!

Charity Hack is an event that aims to bring technology and charities together by asking teams to work towards coming up with an awesome hack that can help charities in some way. Each team has about 24 hours to plan and execute their brilliant charity-focused idea, as well as getting fed with copious amounts of pizza, beer, and caffeinated drinks!

My team was myself and Rob - and we started hacking on Rob’s awesome idea called Charity Spuds!

Photo: Kai Chan Vong

The idea focused around ‘Charity Hot Potato’ – you “bake” a potato for a particular charity and then throw it on to a friend, who has to donate to throw it on and so forth. The thing about this idea is that the viral aspect is particularly interesting – your potato could travel a long way, raising lots of money for a bunch of charities – you would be able to see that Leroy the potato has travelled 340 miles, raising £289 pounds for 4 charities! Pretty powerful.

Though we had some slight hiccups along the way during the hack that prevented us from having something polished to show, we got a bunch of important things up and running that meant we could demo it effectively to the rest of the Charity Hackers. Reception was pretty good – people really liked the social and gaming aspects to this simple idea. And whilst it is not finished quite yet, we hope that a more polished version of Charity Spuds will be coming to rock an Internet near you soon!

I know I’m pretty late to the iPad party, but when I was googling around for apps to put on it from a UX perspective, there was not that much out there to help guide my decisions in setting up. I’m pretty convinced that wielded right, an iPad can really augment a UX workflow, so I thought I’d take some time to document how and what I’ve done to set my iPad up.

Why did you buy an iPad in the first place?

So, I bought this iPad specifically to help me go about my business as a UX consultant. And having used it for a little bit, am convinced that this was a good call!

My business partner, a developer, has had one for a while, and I was continually envious of his ability to do awesome stuff like annotate wireframes on the go, sketch out quick stuff without worrying if he’s got a pen/paper, as well as other stuff like being able to use his time more productively when commuting etc. All this stuff was being facilitated by the iPad, and seemed perfect to help me do my job better.

The iPad itself

So I bought the cheapest spec iPad, Wi-Fi only. This is because I try to keep most of my stuff in the cloud anyway, so I figured I wouldn’t be needing that much memory. I chose Wi-Fi only because I am very often in scrabbling distance of a Wi-Fi connection and I’m envisioning using it most in situations where there will be Wi-Fi freely available anyway – like at work locations, cafes, and my home.

I also bought a Just Mobile Alupen, aka the raddest stylus in the world! A lot of the work I will be getting done on the iPad will involve sketching/drawing/annotating. A great performing stylus is a must-have. I really love the alupen because its quite chunky so it feels like you are actually holding a pen, rather than like, a twig. It also has a proper rubber nib that gives great feedback as you are using it – it is very rigid and doesn’t squash like some other foam styluses I have used.

App Set-up

These are the main apps I use as part of my everyday UX workflow:

Skype

Despite some really annoying flaws in the Skype Mobile UX, it is still my go-to client for talking to others, whether video or chatting via text. For us particularly it is invaluable, as we operate a virtual office. Whilst there are LOTS of improvements to be made to the iPad app (pet peeve: when you open skype, it loads ALL of your conversations oldest first grr!), it still wins because there is nothing else that comes close. Skype – when you get competitors, you’re gonna be in some serious pain!

HootSuite

Us UX designers do like to get our Twitters on. This is the best client I have found for hooking up multiple accounts at the same time. It also offers ‘old-style RTs’, which makes it win over Twitter for iPad anyday

Sketchbook Pro

Sketching is an absolute delight using this app and the alupen stylus. Like most UXies, sketching is a massively important part of my process. However, when I’m bouncing from client site to site, various different coffee shops, meetings, hack sessions, and even when I’m just at home, I find myself constantly accumulating sheafs and sheafs of paper with little bits of sketching on! And whilst I don’t believe that any app could fully replace sketching on a piece of paper, Sketchbook Pro is invaluable for those times when you know that you’ll want to email your sketches somewhere, or upload them, or even just to save you carrying round millions of pieces of paper! A note of caution: this app is pretty heavyweight. However, it is also great for getting out quick, broad strokes, sketches with minimal effort. A must have if you are just sick and tired of carrying round about 6 trees’ worth of paper!

iMockups

iMockups is an incredibly quick and simple way to produce basic wireframes and prototypes using your iPad. I repeat, basic wireframes and prototypes. It comes with a small selection of stencils that you can use, as well as handy features like colour customisation, being able to lock elements down, canvases, and moving elements forward/backwards on a canvas. It also is pretty good at basic prototyping, allowing you to link to pages. It has lots of exporting options so it makes sharing easy – a recurring theme for why my iPad is so vital.

Noteshelf

This is a great little app that produces notebooks for you, filled with your sketches & ideas. You can create as many notebooks as you want, and customise them per project or per client. The way Noteshelf beats just taking sketch notes by hand, is that a) exporting/uploading/sharing is an absolute dream, and b) it has a nifty feature where you can change the background paper of a notebook with the click of a button – you can have graph paper, blank paper, and more sophisticated stuff like make it look like a diary. Together with the alupen stylus, writing in this app is really really easy. It helps out even more by having an awesome zoom feature where you can zoom into the page and write in an enlarged view, so it makes your writing a lot more precise.

WordPress

If you blog with WordPress, you will be pleasantly surprised at the WordPress iPad app. Its packed with all the major functionality of the site, and its pretty simple to flip between editing and previewing (something that a lot of blog apps fall down on). I’m trying to get more into blogging on the go – writing future blog posts while I am commuting or have spare moments at cafes – the wordpress mobile app is really facilitating this.

Instapaper

Instapaper is a really great way to read content. I love its beautiful simplicity. The best thing about it is that it allows you to read articles and blogposts offline, really handy when you’ve just got the wi-fi version of the iPad and you’re stuck on a train! The only thing with this is that you have to get into a routine of syncing your instapaper iPad app up with the stuff you’ve bookmarked. I find that syncing it up when I’m at home in the morning, and early evening seems to do the trick! Oh and there is also a beautiful ‘dark’ mode that is perfect for when you want to read in bed, or when you don’t want a massive white screen glaring. Lovely!

Air Display

Oh, this app is pure amazingness, even if it is a slightly pricey as apps go (£6.99 in the UK). Taking about two minutes to set up, this app basically turns your iPad into a second screen for your Macbook Pro. I have the 13inch MBP, so hooking up my iPad to this is almost doubling my screen real estate. Huzzah! There are a bunch of really pleasurable ways I particularly enjoy utilising this. The first is when using Omnigraffle/Photoshop – the iPad serves as a way to rid my screen of those troublesome palettes, stencils, and other extra floating windows that come with these programs. Its a really nice way of being able to focus on my work on the MBP screen, yet have all my tools in easy reach. Another thing that I really enjoy doing with it is mashing up the MBP and a touchscreen device! For example, I can have information up on my MBP screen, and be annotating a wireframe from that information by sketching onto it with my stylus. Its great fun and a definite must have.

Dropbox

Thank god for Dropbox. And, the iPad app is also set up for sweet sweet offline sync – just favourite the files you want to be able to access offline, and thats that. No more pain!

Remember the Milk

This app came as a surprise to me. RTM on the iPad is a far superior experience than it is on the web, where quite frankly, it bores me to tears. But on the iPad, RTM really comes alive. I won’t say anymore because task list apps seem to be an intensely personal thing and there are hundreds on the market. Just pick the one you love – but know this, if you have a RTM web account, you will be pleasantly surprised at their iPad offering and its definitely worth a download.

And, over to you

So, thats my set-up so far, one week in to my iPad experience. I didn’t mention all the obvious stuff, like Mail, iCal etc, but if you guys have any awesome alternatives to those, I’d love to hear from you.

So, I just know that I’ve missed some awesome apps out there that would really help me. I want to hear suggestions and recommendations for awesome iPad apps that you guys use day to day as UXers! Comment below!