1) Air Sharing – Turns the iPad into a Wifi / WebDAV hard drive for transferring documents to and from the iPad. With it’s built in PDF reader, it is a nice addition to iBooks for reading technical docs, white papers, etc. that cannot be pulled down from the store.

2) Things – An excellent GTD (Getting Things Done) oriented task manager.

3) Mind Node – A mind mapping tool that rivals Mindjet’s Mind Manager. Also supports exports to a variety of formats including Freemind.

4) OmniGraffle – I started using OmniGraffle on my Mac a few years ago, as an alternative for MS Visio. Now, I feel like I use Visio as an alternative to Omnigraffle. It’s a great app, and having a native version on the iPad will continue to come in handy for quick UI wireframes and technical diagrams.

5) 1Password – I already use this on my Mac and iPhone. It seamlessly syncs across all devices. With iPhone OS supporting Copy / Paste, password generation and management with this app have become transparent to the point that I do not have to think about it.

6) Wordpress – With all the additional real estate and a full sized keyboard, this app is much more usable on the iPad. In an effort to eat my own dog food, I am also using it to write this post.

7) Desktop – Supports both RDP and VNC for connecting to Windows and Mac desktops respectively.

8) iWork: Numbers, Pages, and Keynote – I am still not sure how often I will use these to create new documents, but they will definitely come in handy when reading / reviewing documents from others.

9) Mover – This is actually a vanilla iPhone app that allows for transferring contacts and photos between iPhones / iPads. I wish it supported more file types (Office docs, PDFs, video…).

10) Evernote – I go through phases of relying heavily on Evernote, versus other note management systems, but I keep coming back. My biggest issue stems from how I typically access Evernote from multiple devices simultaneously. I am going to make an effort to adopt it again and only access it from the iPad to keep the issues introduced from syncing and merging isolated.

11) Safari – I know this is the only App on my list which is embedded in the OS, but it’s still worth mentioning. With the added speed, battery power, and screen resolution, I can open Rally Dev and the Omniture report suite on the iPad and they are very usable.

Anyway, that’s my current list, in no particular order. Feel free to send me your suggestions / impressions, as well.

The big day finally arrived, and the wedding went off in Gloucester without a hitch. Liz and I have been absolutely humbled by the number of people that have sent us photos from the wedding. I have put together links to each of the albums below so that we can track them all in one spot. I have also included a link to our professional photos from Sharon’s Studio of Gloucester.

We owe a big thank you for everyone that took photos for us and captured this special day. Despite a few small “hiccups”, the entire day seemed to just fly by! Sorry for the non-”Business” interruption… Now its back to work!

Sharon’s Studio of Gloucester

Flickr Album

Dave & Kim

Mike & Benoite

John & Leena

John & Jennie

Flickr Album

Brian & Eileen

In my consulting, I have typically suggested a comprehensive plan for getting inside the head of visitors.  In my opinion there is not one "all encompassing" solution for monitoring a web site, campaign, or in some cases each persona, since each organization’s objectives are different.  I believe that the full view can only be achieved by reviewing a site from multiple angles:

UI Design & Content Popularity:

Frequency: Weekly
Suggestions: Google Analytics

I was a HUGE fan of Urchin’s analytics before Google bought them.  Unfortunately, since they were acquired, some of the more advanced features have been removed, but they still offer an excellent package.  A number of “premium” packages (ie: Webtrends) are available, but most organizations don’t know how to take advantage of the types of detail provided by WebTrends.

With Google’s latest refresh of their Analytics package, there really is no reason to use “heat map” tools like Crazy Egg or ClickTracks.  Google’s package now includes similar functionality (although more basic), called “Site Overlays” making Google’s the most comprehensive of tools in its class.  I am not a big fan of running multiple remote analytics tools simultaneously on the same site, because they typically rely on embedded Javascript loaded from the vendor’s server, and if their analytics environment ever goes down, it can lead to page rendering issues or perceived slowness.  This threat can be mitigated by limiting the analysis to only one embedded vendor (ie: Google)

E-Mailing campaigns:
Frequency: Monthly / Quarterly
Suggestions: Constant Contact

I would imagine this is an area most Marcom reps are already well versed in but its worth mentioning, as often your mailing / e-mailing strategy will fold directly into your Conversion tracking.  Along these lines, you may find the following article from a couple days ago helpful:

http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/senior-marketers-little-confidence-in-ability-to-track-multichannel-campaigns-3171/
 

Profitability / Conversion:

Frequency: Weekly / Monthly / Annually
Suggestions: Google Analytics or custom implementation

Conversion can be difficult to track accurately, on some platforms.  Depending on how your site / application tracks a user’s session data, you may have to get creative in how remote applications (ie: Google) interpret the visitor’s navigation paths towards conversion.  In the last 12 months, I have seen a number of web content management systems (CMS) implement internal reporting to address this; examples being Wordpress, DotNetNuke, and Plone.

Additionally, if you are planning an Adwords / Adsense campaign, there is no substitute for Google, when monitoring conversion from these services.

Reliability / Speed / Availability:

Frequency: Daily / Weekly / Monthly / Quarterly / Annually
Suggestions: DotComMonitor or host-tracker.com (both free / inexpensive)

This is an angle that too many people forget to consider.  No one likes a slow site, and any number of factors could slow down the perceived speed of your site: Browser Quirks, slow DNS requests, a broken Javascript, etc.  Solutions like host-tracker.com (I use this for my own domains) have a swarm of geographically distributed servers that can provide you with a geographically significant uptime statistic, as well as break down how much time each phase of the web request is taking (ie: 10 seconds total to load a page, of which 5 seconds is DNS, and 3 seconds is requesting the HTML, and 2 seconds is all other images).  Watching these numbers often uncovers bottlenecks in the delivery and rendering of a site, and may explain erratic navigation paths in a site.

1. Strictly Business
   This community will serve as a home for all things related to my career and professional hobbies.  I have a number of small software projects that I have kept around and I plan on releasing here from time to time.  Additionally, I believe that a career-focused site is a great way to centralize my involvement in other web communities (YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, etc.).
    
2. A Lighter Side…
   Although my goal for this area of the site is similar to Strictly Business, I envision that the content and audience will be much different.  I plan to use this community as a vehicle to share my personal accomplishments, hobbies, and media.  My hope is to share much of the personal content that made it on my previous site that typically focused on Sailing, Labrador Rescue, and family activities.

The Geeky Stuff: A bit of history…
I have used previous re-inventions of my own site / brand as a chance to show that I "eat my own dog food", and also as an exercise to stay up on new / popular platforms.  I initially bought matticus.com back when I was still working for Path Communications, in Marina Del Rey, CA.  I had a coworker who constantly called my Matticus whenever I walked in, and after a while, it stuck.  I hacked together a Linux server in my dorm room and didn’t really do much with it until a year or so later. 

My senior year at LMU, I assisted in teaching a Senior-level Computer Science course aimed at taking students through a typical Software Development Lifecycle.  The class was two semesters long, beginning with a semester for gathering requirements, and a second semester to actually develop the project.  We structured the class project around my love affair at the time, Jakarta Struts (I was still employed at Path and they were exclusively Java).  As Senior year came to a close, I wanted to continue experimenting with Struts, so I wrote my own Blog engine to track my progress across Europe, for a trip I took after I graduated (a great story for another time).

After returning home to the real world, and continuing my career, I spent some time exploring the .NET world, creating various incarnations of my site based on DasBlog, DotNetNuke (DNN), and briefly Sharepoint.  Each platform had its own pro’s and con’s, but inevitably, each framework had a quirk that would feed my desire to experiment with something new.  Most recently, I have been spending a considerable amount of time working on the Plone CMS Framework.  Built on top of the powerful Zope server, I find Plone to be a very compelling solution for small and medium sized businesses.  In my case, I chose to move on to Wordpress not for a lack of functionality in Plone, but instead to find features in other tools that could compliment Plone.  Which brings us to the new site…

Why Wordpress Mu?
I arrived at Wordpress one afternoon while looking for a solution to rapidly prototype an idea I had for a Blog Media Plugin (now available in Projects as Media Link).  The Wordpress platform has a large number of plugins already available, and since its based on PHP, that means a lot of example code.   I sat down over a weekend, having never worked on PHP, or Wordpress, and had a proof of concept running of MediaLink in a matter of a couple hours.  It became clear to me that Wordpress would make an ideal platform for the next incarnation of my site.  I had also been playing around with the idea of having a separate career-driven and family-driven community, so the Multi-blog version, Wordpress Mu, was an ideal choice.

Regardless of whether you are a friend, family member, coworker, or random visitor that stumbled in from off the street, I hope this site will help you find answers.  Also, please feel free to introduce yourself below!