My Non-SL Day

Real Life keeps me busy. I'm sure it keeps everyone busy, but lately I've been extra busy. Well, if you count sitting in my Mom's room with an iPad, keeping her company for most of the day "busy." The iPad is important because I use it to talk to Mom, most in writing via the Penultimate app but sometimes via Proloqu2Go.

But I also get to have some fun with games, keep up with people via Message, Facetime with my brother, read books or the news, surf the Web, watch videos, and look up things for Mom when she's not well enough to grab her own iPad. My iPod Touch is always in my pocket with the "dumb" phone I have for texting non-iOS people (I can text for 911, for example).

I like USAToday, though not for in-depth news. I love Circa on my iPod Touch for very high quality news summaries. Flipboard is mostly annoying. For weather I primarily use WeatherBug.

Our house has Netflix and Amazon Prime subscriptions so it is not hard to find a good video. Via Comcast apps I can change channels on any TV in the house or watch other on-demand content. Of course there is YouTube and our iCloud video, too.

Amazon's Kindle is our family's book reader of choice because it is cross-platform and we bought a lot of books before Apple's iBooks came out. No one in our family is big on audio books, but my brother and I regularly listen to at least a dozen podcasts between us.

The game I play most often these days is Fairway Golf by Big Fish Studios. It is available for desktops and mobiles, sometimes free if you catch a promotion. Even at full price, though, this wickedly funny and challenging game is worth it.

Android does this, I think, but on iOS I can see all the open browser windows on any device we have or on my desktop computer. Above is one that my brother opened on his iPod Touch. He recently won an iPad Mini so everyone in the family can have a "big" screen to look at ... Even using AirPlay to toss content to one of our TVs via an Apple TV.

Right now, though, I have my brother's Mini and I'm pounding out this blog post in the Blogger app while waiting for the signal to make lunch. Mom has a visitor over so I'm in the living room in a comfy chair, trying to stay awake. Later I might edit this post to add links to the apps and center the pictures since I can't do it here. For now I'm off to other links and some more golf.