The iPad represents one of the most intuitive ways to manage email and I find I can blast through it each morning on the train, marking unread the items that require deeper assistance with my laptop (which I now leave in the office).

If I need access to any web apps safari or individual apps provide all the access I need (evernote, omnifocus, gmail). If anything requires more robust formatting or graphics tweaking, I move the drafted doc to my laptop-as-desktop via evernote, email or pages to email.

Whats striking after a month is that with mobile me and dropbox, I can keep all of my machines (including the iPad in sync quite seamlessly. This makes me yearn for a true desktop both at home and at work…a bit ironically perhaps.

I’d venture a guess that other traditional laptop only-types like me might have the same urge. So my conclusion is that desktop mac sales might actually see an increase in popularity with the advent and wider adoption of the iPad, I am curious what others think…

We were just ranked #9! Link is here or read our blog post.

The first example is the acquisition of Flip Video by Cisco. The news set off a post from crunchgear that asked if we were moving into an era of “dumb” tech (bad choice of words IMHO…”better designed” tech would have been more appropriate). The meme here is that tech is indeed becoming more efficient and more usable through better design (this is what made Flip attractive to Cisco and the millions that bought a Flip camera).

The next example is a higher order geek problem today, but it serves to show that we are getting closer to a world where my Mom could build and deploy her own cloud server. Although she probably doesn’t know what that means yet, if she knew that she was capable of  building something like this, it might trigger her to think about putting these tools to use and  build a solution to enhance her productivity with her clients. Dave Winer identified the potential of using the Amazon EC2 to buld a cloud based server in an hour. The key to the concept is that he published non-technical directions to put this technology into the hands of the masses who had previously thought this was unattainable without technical help. I hope this will help spur creative solutions at a time when creativity will be accelerated by contracting economic conditions.

The mass use of easy-to-consume technology (technology designed for mass consumption) will eventually help us get our economy back on track. Ideas will be executed, revenue generated, and jobs created because non-technical people will be empowered to create and use their creativity to solve problems.

Jobs and revenue have been created recently through simplification of technology: Look at the iPhone: a better smartphone and development tools lead to massive adoption of the platform and the application store. There are thousands of developers now earng a living creating applications. Millions carry the Flip them in their pockets and update and share videos in minutes (and create new online ad inventory of which they may share in profits).

Tough times often lead to great leaps of entrepreneurism and creative disruption. It looks like that maxim is holding true today.

Given that ~30% of users access the internet from work, it looks like we still havent seen the sweeping productivity lift that pundits promised back in the gogo years, but we are on track. Go web, go!

Below is some interesting data about this work online activity:

<a href=”http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&showPlaylist=true&from=shared” mce_href=”http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;from=shared” target=”_new” title=”Future Vision Montage”>Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

This is a really nicely produced piece MSFT did about what they believe the future will look like, conveniently including the use of  future software and haptic technologies.

What’s funny about this video is that all the UIs in the video imply that in the future, Microsoft will have had some pretty serious changes of thought about the emphasis on great design. I would venture a guess that most of the concept UIs in this piece were created by designers not engineers.

I look forward a future when good design has a more strategic role in burying complexity to make our lives mote productive.

I have officially solved my digital notebook issue.

The need for the notebook comes from the need for a repository for the myriad of details that collect each day that don’t warrant a separate doc, but still have value to later projects or later recall.

I was looking for a solution that would sync among all my devices, provide backup, and to leverage search and tagging so finding the information in the piles of notes was easier.

Prior to trying Evernote, I used a great and flexible app called Mori. Mori is a great app but it lacks the backup and sync functions and has no application for the iPhone. I made the switch because I got tired of syncing up the latest notebook to my other machines.

I have been using Evernote for a few months and it delivers on its promise to help out your short term memory. With the complexities of a small and growing business and a recent marriage, there is a lot of non-document information that needs to be captured, stored and classified for later retrieval. Evernote allows me to do this and access this information intuitively and from any device.

The UI is very simple and intuitive and it allows for simple capture of notes via email, web clipping or photos. The app also allows you to search images for words so that you can identify search returns in your images. An example use case is taking a photo of a wine label, sending it to Evernote, then searching your notebook to have it call up a picture ot the label for a later purchase.

So far the app is a winner with me and I highly recommend registering for the beta and giving it a try. Its fast, flexible and works well on Mac, PC, iPhone and Winmo.

Any other Evernote users out there with some thoughts?

Word: nice UI, but I still find pages a more intuiive way to create nice looking docs

Excel: Still the champ here, but I have to say Numbers is winning me over when it comes to visualizing data and simply creating nice graphics

PPT: not interested. Keynote is by far the most useful presentation tool I have ever used.

If you need Office, it performs better natively, but I don’t think the $$ is justified until Entourage is the clear winner for mail and calendar. Also, I have noticed I cannot have Mail and Entourage open at the same tie without crashing Mail!