2 worlds of design come together
I travel quite a bit. Mostly day trips with the occasional 3 to 4 day stretch away from the home office. Sound familiar? When traveling (and facilitating) I go lightweight – it’s an operating principle at the core of my practice.
Now that I have worked out how to sync stuff across my MacBook, iPad & iPhone, I only travel with the phone and pad. The larger, heavier and more valuable MacBook stays safe at home. The options available to protect the phone and pad are staggering and many products do the job. But, how many are truly beautiful? I have discovered 2 products worth a look … and both reveal my old fashioned design tendencies. I also get loads of questions from others about this stuff … so now I can simply point them to this post.
A first glance it looks like a very small, leather bound book from 2 centuries ago. It even feels of another age.
This little case is actually a ‘lightweight’ wallet and iPhone case all-in-one. So, when traveling I only have 1 thing to remember … 1 thing in my pocket … 1 less thing to leave behind!
The magic for the traveller is the fusion of 2 things into one. Book book also provides great protection and it’s dead easy to get the phone in/out. The only downer is the inability to quickly capture photos in the moment … the phone has to slide out slightly to expose the lens. Otherwise, I love the look and feel of it and if you limit the number of cards/cash it remains ‘pocketable’.
Like Book book, the Dodocase looks and feels like a handmade book from last century.
This case is a beautiful fusion of designs. It was this story of the Dodo Case that sold me though.
As for the applications to support syncing across devices and filing away information/links, here’s a rapid summary:
Dropbox – I know save everything to Dropbox from my Mac and an auto backup all the contents to my separate hard drive (just in case they disappear). Dropbox has an App for both the phone and pad.
Evernote – Everything I do happens in Evernote. Every job has an Evernote note (see image) Everything I choose to keep gets tagged in Evernote. It is now my goto application in the cloud. And I use an App called Awesome Note as the user interface (see image).
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iCloud – Great for syncing photos across devices and for calendar and contacts (although I did lose a few contacts a few weeks ago?). I steer clear of iCloud for Mail and still prefer Dropbox for document storage and syncing.
Instapaper – From just about any browser or iOS App, saving a webpage to Instapaper is a single click “Read Later” process. About once a week I spend time reading through the stuff I have saved – the stuff I want to keep gets saved back to Evernote and shared with you via Twitter.
Google Reader – All of my favourite websites and blogs come to me via Google Reader. The single best thing about the iPad is my ability to read these feeds in a magazine layout using an App called Flipboard.
