The iPhone Road WarriorDecember 27th, 2009
– tips, tricks, and gear to travel with everything you need in your pocket –
Smaller laptops have long been a staple of business travelers, who need to read and respond to email and to prepare their sales presentations. The same needs apply at least as much to modern freelancers, whose usage I think is similar, but maybe with a different core set of applications.
I have to be able to view and edit documents, participate in email discussions, and write reports on all of my trips. Essentially, I need to be able to do almost everything on the road that I do at my desk – with the necessary limitation: I will be un-tethered. This core need actually starts helping me spec out my requirements very quickly – What apps and services contribute the most towards me doing the things I need to get done, and makes the product convenient to access. The iPhone and to a different degree the iPod Touch (Collectively iP/T) make up a very powerful platform that comes with a lot of difficult restrictions to getting all of your applications to work together like they do on the desktop. And particularly since they’ve been nixing the custom data transfer via USB connection – it can be a little trickier to get your data on to the phone. I gotta say, I don’t like the wifi bonjour sharing and tiny webserver that a lot of apps are running these days. It’s awkward to use even when it’s not using a web interface. But USB has been blocked, so there is little other recourse. Except that there is, and it works better!
Keeping Track of Your Data
WebDav is a great baseline technology that is at least part of the core of both Dropbox and the MobileMe online disk sharing. WebDav does document versioning, single-user lockout, and is kind of a pain to setup and use. It’s just fine for super-nerds who want fine control over everything they use – but there’s a point where you grow out of that need. At least I did – especially now that I’ve tried Dropbox. On the mac side, it installs a new directory into your home folder that recognizes when files have changed and syncs in the background to the cloud. It’s simple, transparent, and utterly beautiful integration…at least for a fully capable computer. The iPhone end of things is distinctly less powerful. You can view your files, and by “favorite-ing” them, save them locally – but you can’t really do anything with them besides that. Most of that is due to the iP/T’s isolation of each application. Apps cannot share data, which on one hand prevents them from ruining each other’s day, but it also limits the advancement of the platform as a really awesomely usable device. Enter MobileMe.
MobileMe is Apple’s pay-for-email/calendar/contacts/push service, which includes the iDisk. While the iDisk (on the phone end) is essentially similar to Dropbox, it has Apple’s explicit API support – and iPhone developers can take advantage of this. Both OmniFocus and QuickOffice can open and read datafiles from the iDisk, making document management extremely easy. MobileMe has gotten badly panned in the past for its awful uptime and reliability, but as basically the only cloud server for documents and other data that iPhone apps can access and share, it may have just become very worthwhile.
Keeping in Touch With Your Communications
So the iPod Touch has no cell phone in it. Maybe you have to have a blackberry. Maybe you can’t deal with AT&Ts flaky service. Perhaps you’re not one of those people for whom fewer devices is explicitly “better.” There are alternatives. I’m using a GoogleVoice number as my “work cell.” It’ll ring my office at any hour, and my cellphone during specified business hours. But if you’re using a Touch, you probably also have a cellphone anyway. Listening to the messages on Skype or GoogleVoice works, I expect, exactly the same way – just without the actual cellphone integration. If you’re a heavy instant messaging user, run don’t walk to BeejiveIM. It’s frankly spectacular – what a aggregate IM app should be – desktop clients take note: this is the app you should be emulating. Another app that I find intermittently (but extremely) useful is the SSH client TouchTerm. It’s simple, straightforward, inexpensive, and works very nicely. I use primarily it to reboot the Java Application Server that runs my Atlassian Confluence/JIRA installation. There is also a slightly more costly Pro version that does a lot more than just the simple login/kick procedure that I need.
The primary limitation of iPod Touch versus the iPhone is the lack of cellular data connection. But this isn’t any different from netbooks, unless you’re forking out for a cellular data plan and USB stick or portable router device like the Verizon Mifi. However, there are solutions. There are handfuls of coffee shops in urban areas that offer free Wi-Fi which you can use to get to your cloud data; Starbucks and AT&T banded together sometime this year (I think?) to offer 2 hours of free connectivity per day with the registration and reasonably regular use of a Starbucks gift card. This is great, but limited to Starbucks locations. These solutions are fine if you maintain regular stops and locations, but less good when you’re in another city every week. I’ve gotten myself a Boingo Mobile subscription. For the low low price of $7.95 a month, I have Wi-Fi access at more than 100,000 different hotspots around the world. Airports, coffee shops, McDonalds, and just about every other local public pay-per-access hotspot I’ve found. The Mobile subscription is geared specifically towards smartphones (and related devices like the Touch), and does not support laptops. It is by far my find of the year in terms of great travel support.
Not Last Nor Least… The Stuff
The Gear portion of this is in many ways the least important. You’re already at least considering an iPhone or iPod Touch – maybe you already have one. But you’ve also got to trick it out, since relying heavily on any one device will always kill a charge. My two must-haves are a Mophie Juice Pack Air and a Belkin 2-port USB Charger. The Mophie is a battery/case with handy on-off switch that permits you to use up its charge or not. It’s reputedly possible to charge both the Mophie and the iP/T at the same time, but I haven’t had luck doing that so far, hence the 2-port USB charger. The Belkin can charge two of any devices that plug into USB ports (bring your own cords) at once in any 110/240v outlet switchable, with up to 500 mAmps of current for charging. I’m also carrying a mini car-charger interface with my GPS, though I may end up putting out the $49 for the Tom Tom GPS app sometime in the future. And finally, a pen, paper, and a book are my final gear recommendations. At some point, something will become a complete blocker, be it power issues, site issues, or even loss. And losing access to all of your tools in one shot should never be a blocker. A book will cover those short flights where you’re never at an altitude where it’s “safe” to use your electronics. And a pen and notebook will let you jot notes, do quick sketches, rip a page out to share your contact information, and just about anything else.
In Conclusion
I’m just about ready to ditch 6-7 lbs. of devices and put all of the replacements in one small pocket-sized place. I am convinced that the hardware is sufficiently mature enough to handle it. The only thing that makes me uncomfortable is the software. QuickOffice, despite its advantages, is still a little clunky as an iP/T port. I have high hopes though. Plus, as the rumors of an Apple Tablet grow, I have more and more hope of leaving the full-sized laptop at home; and these apps will have to get better to keep up.
Bonus Materials
A few extra things I really like to have around, which I wouldn’t really qualify as crucial, but can be super handy. First is the great Amazon Kindle application. It’ll sync your Kindle books and give you another way to read your content. Stanza is the more open version of the ebook reader, and is also very worthwhile. SimplifyMedia makes a fantastic utility that effectively shares your iTunes library through the cloud, and their Music 2 app connects your iP/T to that one or up to thirty libraries! FarFinder will connect you to your Mac from anywhere. Check it out, its pretty amazing. Other things I have really liked recently include GoodReader, a pdf reader that touts its ability to read very large PDF files. It hasn’t failed me yet, where others have. It can download files from the web, and has one of the aforementioned tiny webservers for bonjour sharing and wifi upload of your documents. Instapaper is a fantastic web service that bookmarks and isolates the text of websites and adds them to your own personal archive that can be downloaded into the free iP/T app and read on or offline. SpanningSync is a Mac desktop app I’ve been using heavily for long enough that I bought the lifetime subscription. It syncs your iCal to your GCal. This may be a wash for me at this point, with the MobileMe subscription, but if you’re a heavy GCal user, it’s a great way to take that data out of the cloud and put it on your desktop/iphone. Speaking of which, an app called Saisuke Calendar has recently been heartily recommended to me – it is a calendaring app that reads/writes directly from GCal as the data source. Use it in place of iP/T Calendar for the pure cloud experience. It may not be so great if you don’t have the always-available net-connection, though. I rarely travel without a male-to-male 3.5mm (1/8″) stereo cord, so I can plug my music directly into 90% of the rental cars I use. Finally, I love the Apple Composite AV cable for watching videos on a full-sized screen.
Do you have any other favorite must-have apps? Let me know!