I’ve been using Waze for several months now, both the iPad version and the Android version (they are basically the same on both platforms), and have to say I love it.

It uses the power of social media to help you decide the best route to travel by using reports from other Waze users to both calculate your best route and visually show you where the traffic is on a 3d-like map display. The whole concept of using user reports of traffic in real-time is awesome and marrying that to route navigation and calculation sometimes seems like magic. Waze has sent me home on numerous different routes (including ones I never would have thought of on my own) by taking into account user reports of traffic and accidents along the various possible routes.

Waze is free and I highly recommend it.

Thinkbook by bitolithic is the killer application for iPad in my book.  It has helped me organize my notes and keep track of todo’s in a way that feels comfortable to me, mainly because it is so flexible (todo’s can be put right in the notes, yet an overall ‘Dashboard’ can be created to give a consolidated view of all of those todo’s – very neat and powerful).

Some of the main features of Thinkbook include;

• Plenty of note types: text notes, todos, questions and projects. Notebooks and pages behave like notes too so you move them around however you like using the slider.
• Use special finder notes to create dashboards. This feature is powerful, let’s you organize your todo’s basically any way you like, yet you can still get a view that consolidates them.
• The slider, a brand new way to make new notes and rearrange, move, copy and delete existing ones.
• Tag everything you can see. They’re inherited, tag a notebook with ‘work’ and every note in it will be treated as work.
• Fast search for text and tags.
• Dropbox integration. Backup and restore to Dropbox, export and import notes, pages, notebooks and projects as text, work on them on your PC, then import them back into ThinkBook.
• Easily email notes, pages or books.

The only thing missing for me is a desktop counterpart.  If bitolithic would just come up with a PC and Apple desktop version, I believe they would have a hit application on their hands. I highly recommend Thinkbook to all iPad users.

Time for a rant. Why is it that we, the consumers, have to suffer with this ridiculous HDMI copy protection DRM crap that causes interoperability issues with certain hardware?

Perfect example is my Roku XR box and Vizio TV.  Once the TV goes to standby, the Roku and Vizio will not handshake properly and I get the infamous green screen instead of video.  The only solution that works for me is literally unplugging the HDMI cable from the Roku and re-inserting it. That is completely absurd and makes the box useless to me. I am not the only one, the Roku forums are full of complaints going back years and yet the problem still exists.

I blame Hollywood for this HDMI crap but the specific hardware/software implementation on the Roku, or the Vizio, is their issue – I don’t know which party is to blame but they don’t play well together.  Don’t waste your hard earned money on the Roku, you’ll regret it.