When Apple released iPad 3 with a retina screen I had to update some of my favorite wallpapers to take advantage of the full resolution of the new device. I have been meaning to share these wallpapers with whoever might want to use them. For those of you who like the photographs, but have an older generation iPads I’m posting the images in both resolutions — 2048×2048 and 1024×1024.

Path

• Download 1024×1024 version wallpaper.
• Download 2048×2048 version wallpaper.

Wood

• Download 1024×1024 version wallpaper.
• Download 2048×2048 version wallpaper.

Grass

• Download 1024×1024 version wallpaper.
• Download 2048×2048 version wallpaper.

With an imminent arrival of iPad 3 tomorrow (barring any FedEx screw ups) I decided to write down some of my thoughts on the past year of my “relationship” with iPad 2.

The most important thing that stands out is the fact that there really haven’t been a single day (with very rare exceptions) when I have not used it. I use it at work, I use it at home and I use it for travel. This last vacation was the first in 10 years when I finally felt brave enough to leave my laptop at home.

At this point I can state without any hesitation that it was money well spent and the only thing that can and did make me give this device up is the arrival of the new model of the same very thing. And I did stop using iPhone at home for anything but phone calls because it feels so tiny in comparison, but it still is the best on the go.

Software

Obviously iPad is nothing without its software. Good, quality software is what makes this device so addictively useful. Below is a list of my favorite and most used applications.

Reeder is my by far the most used application. I do a lot of reading on my iPad and most of it happens inside this app. Reeder is a great RSS client which actually made me love and use RSS. Beautiful and simple design makes it a pleasure to use. This is the best Google Reader client out there.

New York Times is my favorite news source on iPad. I read it every morning before going to work. After their subscription wall went into effect the app has been very limited, but I’m happy to report that I have subscribed to a print version of the paper which comes with all digital access — much more economical way to go than their actual digital plans. As of today I have full access to all the sections.

Tweetbot is my Twitter client of choice for both iPad and iPhone. I’m not a heavy Twitter user, but after the iPhone version of Tweetbot came out I just could no longer stand using the official app — it’s been getting progressively worse since it has been aquired by Twitter. I liked Tweetbot so much that I started using the iPhone version on my iPad. Needless to say I was very happy to learn that Tapbots came out with an iPad version of their Twitter client a couple of weeks ago. Beautiful UI and UX. Has everything that I want from a client and more.

Instapaper is another one of my favorite reading apps. I don’t often have need for it as I’m always on Wi-Fi, but for those times when I do not have Wi-Fi — planes, vacations — it’s amazing. Just find a bunch of articles that you’d like to read, hit Instapaper bookmarklet, sync Instapaper and go. Now you can read all those in a nice streamlined and cleaned up format offline.

Portfolio is the way to showcase one’s photography work. When I was buying an iPad having my photographic portfolio on it was one of the reasons. The app could use some polish around the corners, but it has a lot of functionality — it lets me create as many albums as I want, give those albums a cover and arrange the photos in any order I want among other things. Photos can be loaded from numerous sources — Dropbox being my preferred one. And then it just lets you let anybody browse your portfolio with photos showing up in full screen.

iA Writer is one of many minimalistic writing apps available for iPad, but iA Writer is an especially beautiful one. I do not use it very often, but it’s really nice to write in when on vacation. It also has Dropbox and iCloud support and it works especially well with a wireless Bluetooth keyboard which I plan to carry with me when I travel.

1Password is an app that I bought to replace SplashData — an app I used to use during Palm days. Initially I was quite unimpressed with 1Password because at that point they just came out with an iPad version and it was full of bugs. It all got sorted out by now and I keep all my data that needs to be secured inside of it now. I also use an iPhone companion app with it. SplashData has been long retired — good riddance.

Calcbot is another beautifully designed app from Tapbots. Since iPad comes with no built-in calculator app I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Calcbot for iPhone that I already had turned out to be a universal app. It is convenient to do “math” on a large screen of iPad.

Prompt is a really nice SSH client. I tried a good number of them and when Prompt came out I couldn’t resist. At first it had a few issues, but they all had been worked out a long time ago and rather quickly by Prompt’s creators. This one also works very well with a Bluetooth keyboard and some actual coding can be done pretty comfortably in Vim or Emacs. By now I have deleted all the rest of SSH clients I had and Prompt is my client of choice.

The apps that I didn’t list and still use pretty often are — Zagat, Dropbox, IMDb, Articles, OffMaps 2, Facebook, Skype, BeejiveIM, Magical Weather, 500px and many others.

I also have a couple of magazine subscriptions that I read primarily or only on iPad — Popular Photography, The New Yorker, Time Magazine and The Economist. I’ll probably add a couple more in a near future. But some of these guys have to figure out a better format for serving their content or the files will get extremely huge for retina display of iPad 3. And I wish they would all update their apps to support Newsstand too.

I also play some games on my iPad sometimes. I actually have a whole bunch of them installed on it — taking up 2 full folders, but I usually get bored with them quickly and rarely revisit. They are just sitting there for the most part.

Well, there you have it. An amazing device and an amazing set of apps. Hopefully somebody will find this useful and discover a new good app or two for themselves. I certainly am a big fan of all of the apps featured above and am thankful to those developers for making iPad so useful and pleasant to use.

I started seeing the game named Machinarium get mentioned on multiple blogs that I read. I looked at it, but tried not to be temped and just moved on. But it kept coming up in various places and eventually ended up on number 1 spot in the App Store.

So I bought it. Turned out to be a lot of fun. Probably the first adventure game that I finished. Made by a small independent studio the game is very well drawn and is filled with clever puzzles for the player to solve. I just couldn’t stop. It’s not very long. I finished it in two nights. But it was great while it lasted. Five bucks well spent.

I found a cool use for my 6,000 pixel wide panorama of New York City that I took several months ago. Looks awesome on dual monitors.

You can download a 3840×1080 version that will work perfectly on a pair of 1980×1080 monitors. I use Actual Dual Monitors tool to manage my dual montors and it lets me set a single wallpaper for both screens.

I’ve been wanting to add some AJAX functionality to the Photography (Photostream) Section of this blog for some time now. The browsing of photos seems like a perfect fit to be done this way to speed up the process and not have to reload the same stylesheets, javascripts and static images over and over again.

I used jQuery (comes bundled with WordPress) to implement the functionality. I created an XML output based on the same very template that is used to display the normal photo page and the generation of the dynamic XML itself is handled natively by WordPress. I’ve ran into some conflicts with Prototype (used to power Lightbox feature), but was able to sort all of them out. Continue Reading

Here is a small number of my photographs converted to desktop wallpapers as has been requested. There are 2 resolutions — 2048×1152 (16:9) and 1920×1200 (16:10).

Big Meadow

• Download 2048×1152 (16:9) version wallpaper.
• Download 1920×1200 (16:10) version wallpaper.

Last Days

• Download 2048×1152 (16:9) version wallpaper.
• Download 1920×1200 (16:10) version wallpaper.

Last Leaf

• Download 2048×1152 (16:9) version wallpaper.
• Download 1920×1200 (16:10) version wallpaper.

New York

• Download 2048×1152 (16:9) version wallpaper.
• Download 1920×1200 (16:10) version wallpaper.

After over 10 years of having a dedicated server in one data center or another and paying the bill I decided to put those days behind me. And no, I’m not going to give up having an access to a Linux box on a high speed connection, nor am I planning giving up my root access to such a machine.

We’re simply moving to virtual hosting. Hosting has evolved considerably in the past several years and VPS business has matured to a point where it is a perfect solution for somebody like me. All the same benefits as having a dedicated server without the cost. My monthly bill is going to go down from $130 to $40. And that considering that $130 just came down to that number from $170 only a couple of months ago. Continue Reading

It seems Alena and I have developed a bit of obsession with an iPhone app I stumbled upon a couple of days ago. I don’t think that most people will understand, but I’m sure Ignat and Mike will.

You see, Gowalla is an iPhone based geocaching app on steroids. Throw my passion for National Park stamp collecting into that and you got a killer app, at least as far as I go. Ignat and Mike have been into geocaching a while ago and it didn’t really appeal to me as there was no record of your discoveries or check-ins left.

With Gowalla you have a list of spots located close to you. If there are places you go to often and they are not on the map you can commission a spot yourself. Then you can become a founder by leaving one of the items behind. And each of your check-ins is logged in your stamp list.

Each user is given 5 items at the start. As you check-in into more places you have a chance of discovering more items. If a place already has founder(s) you can pick up the item left by other people on the condition that you leave one behind too.

Each item has a history attached to it and you can see where it has been from the start to the point that you got it and then after you left it somewhere. But you can read more about items on Gowalla blog.

Then there are special stamps and pins. There are goals like visiting 5 pre-set locations in Central Park and you’ll earn a pin. Or commission 10 places. And so on. Also if you check-in into any location inside New York state you’ll get an NY stamp and the same happens for any other state.

Overall the feel and the design of the application and their web-site (where you can check for spots and multiple other stats) are pretty amazing. I usually like to nitpick on the smallest details and here everything just looks great. So if you have an iPhone or any other phone with location aware browser do join in with us.

Here’s a small Twitter integration showcase. The idea behind it is that it’s much easier to leave a simple note or observation through one of the numerous Twitter applications available than to make a blog post. And I tend to leave such simple notes during vacations, when we’re away from any computers, through iPhone.

I used a slightly modified¹ version of Alex King’s Twitter Tools. Now this plug-in is actually a bit of an overkill for what I needed it to do, but nobody is forced to use more than needed. I also put together an ugly hack to force this thing to import tweets from both myself and Alena. It runs every 10 minutes and imports all the new stuff it finds.

I’ve modified Rubinary template and devised a new way to display this type of posts. One special thing about it is that it groups consecutive tweets into a single post. The time “sticker” on my posts shows up in blue and on Alena’s in green — as all other things on the blog.

If you mouse-over over a “sticker” you will see a reply option. By clicking it, you indeed, can reply. But there is a catch — you need to have a Twitter account to do so.

That’s pretty much it. For those who care — I personally use a free version of Twitterrific on the iPhone. And of course no post of this kind would be complete without a mandatory “I hate IE” conclusion.

I’ve spent a good part of day drawing up a new look for the blog in Photoshop. I most certainly do not have plans to actually implement this as it would be way too much work, but I figured I might post to for everyone to see. I think it came out looking damn well.

What do you think?

Apple has just approved my first update to CheckSplit. It should be popping up in your App Store Updates tab very soon if you one are of the proud owners of CheckSplit. The update carries a number of a small updates and one major new feature:

• You can now tap on the tax or tip fields to get to the tip & tax adjustment screen.
• You can now label parties with text initials, in addition to colors. Just tap any colored icon while entering the check and you will be presented with a screen to enter the initials for that person or group. To clear it out simply drag the letters off the icon. These will be saved for future use as well, so you do not have to re-enter them every time.
• Splash screen while loading.

Please rate CheckSplit in App Store, or update your review if you like it.

For those who are interested — here are the results of sales for the first week. I’ve included the first day in the chart, but it should be noted that the app was released somewhere late in the evening.

Overall it’s a pretty interesting experiment. While the app was showing up in new released, the sales very relatively strong. As the app moved off the first screen the “volume” went down. It’s also interesting to note that all other countries combined have got nothing on U.S. market alone.

Beside that I’ve been contacted by some buyers saying that they really like the simplicity and streamlined interface. There also have been some good feature suggestions that I’m going to try to implement.