Anyone use IPAD for fishing related anything?

[Bass Tracker]

Probably a stretch but I was wondering if anyone happen to know if the IPAD is capable of reading the "bass insider" digital magazine from bassmaster.com



or any good ipad / fishing apps that anyone uses?



thanks

 

[Bass Tracker]

And I just noticed BASS stopped accepting new bass insider members.. so GREAT... that sucks..

 

[Jim B]

The only thing i have used mine for so far is for a little "prefishing" with the navionics HD app.



Someday hopefully someone will write a good fishing log app for it. I have one now i use on my iphone but its a pain on the water with the small keyboard and wont run full screen on the ipad. So to date im still taking notes using my voice recorder app and waypoints



I think the bass insider thing is mostly because of the impending sale. Nobody knows whats goign to happen in the future.

 

[Bass Tracker]

HI Jim



Ya I figured the sale had something to do with it. I hope they square that away soon. and a voice recorder is a great way to keep a quick log. But I agree a very clean and nice Ipad fishing log would be key.

 

[Texas Transplant]

For me (at least), I simply don't get the whole 'IPad Thing'. If you are going to spend that much money, why don't you simply get a laptop?



When I flew up here to Omaha last week, the person sitting in the seat next to me had an ipad. He played games on it, the entire flight. Donkey Kong/Mario Brothers type games. Not saying that is all bad, but that seems to be a lot of money for something to play games on.



The iPad delrium (sp?) reminds me of the story of NASA and all the trouble that they had designing and manufacturing a ball point pen for the astronauts to use in a weightless environment. You know, one of those $185.00 'toilet seat' government things. The Russians simply used a pencil.



For that matter, I don't get the whole 'smart phone' thing either. Don't have one, or really want one. I have cell phones, and they are plenty smart. They ring when a call comes in; and they connect me to whoever I have dialed. Seems plenty smart enough for me. Of course, having said that - I'll probably have one sooner or later simply because getting a 'regular cell phone' is getting harder. :wacko: :unsure:



Tex

 

[TrepMan]

Tex - I was like you and am slowly becoming a convert to the smart phone. I did have a blackberry when I was in China, it was great (and provided by my company to me free) allowed me access to my business email, instant messaging, and other web/internet stuff where ever I went in the world. The last 2 years i've been on the plain old ordinary Cell phone thing, until i found Metro PCS here, and their new national free roaming agreement with Verizon. Long story short i'm now an Android OS smart phone user (great deal too, only $50/month no tax and unlimited Voice/Text/Full internet capabilities).



Anyway, even though I work from home, the few times i've been out and about its been really helpful and cool (not a must have, but a nice to have, and since Verizon was charging me $45+tax/month for only 450 minutes, 200 texts and no internet this is a deal!). For instance, we were in the car, needed to know where a specific store was near us (other store was out of stock on an item), google voice searched it via the free GPS Nav on the phone, and it showed the map and voice directions to get there. We got there, and i used a free scanning app to not only price check the product, but found it on Amazon.com with free 2 day shipping for less! OK so I should have FIRST done the scanning thing, and just ordered it from Amazon!!LOL.



Also it has the free live radar, so on the boat Sunday i kept track of the storms so I knew when to get off the water, had free streaming radio from Pandora on the boat. Its a Toy to me right now, the phone was a present from Beka and the service is a wash with Verizon (though Verizon/Sprint/ATT data speeds are faster then Metro, but the $80/month difference in comparable plans isn't enough to bother me, you KNOW i'm cheap!! LOL).



Touch screen took getting used to, but with some of the voice commands its really easy. Beka's still on the plain jane cell phone and very happy!

 

[TrepMan]

Duplicate sorry guys - But to topic (iPad, iphone, or Android phone/tablet) for fishing I haven't found much use yet, other then weather and to check fishing reports while not at my PC.

 

[Bass Tracker]

Well to answer the "Why not get a laptop".. I work in IT and I deal with Laptops and computers ALL day and night. So for me personally. I already own 3 laptops and would still rather just pick up something lighter, smaller and pretty versitale.



but I agree. they are expensive. and I am getting the Ipad so I can get rid of my Iphone.. $100 month gone, $25month in.. .. I stream Howard Stern all day at work and my work gives me a Blackberry for free so I might as well use that instead..



I called over to ESPN/BASS and the guy said no insider accounts untill Late January 2011...

 

[Jim B]

I also work in IT but i have an ipad for a different reason. My company bought mine as a part of a pilot for ultra light mobile computing platform and my first impressions is it will do the task quite well. Over 50% of our laptops users use email and nothing more while on the road. The Ipad will work well for them for that task at about half of what a "business class" laptop costs and at a fraction of the weight and size. The reality is they dont carry thier laptops because they dont want the bulk and this solves that problem quite well. We plan to deliver some apps to them as well using Citrix which really makes them a useful device for those folks. We also plan to allow access to documents via VPN.



For me personally its a tool that allows me to read all sorts of electronic docs(like white papers and manuals i dont have time to read at work), do email, surf the web, watch a movie, etc in a nice small light package when im on the train commuting. I would have one regardless of if my company bought one or not. I have an hour train ride into Boston each way and a lot of times i dont get a place to sit or get a place to sit where using a laptop is even feasable due to the seats being so close together. The ipad is small and light and i can use it anywhere. I carry my laptop and my ipad every day and the ipad is always the device that comes out of the bag first.

 

[Teri C.]

Let my know how Citrix works on the IPad. I find it very slow on a PC.

 

[Jim B]

Teri,

It works pretty good. I have been using it for a while now mainly to access a citrix published desktop.



If your finding published apps run slow its most likley not the platform your running as a client, its the server/citrix farm is either overloaded or underpowered or has no network bandwith. I have a handfull of apps that i publish thru Citrix exclusively to our desktop clients tnd the performance has actually improved vs having the application loaded locally on a desktop. My Citrix farm is built on pretty beefy hardware and is 100% 64 bit with lots of ram.

 

[Bass Tracker]

Jim you ride the train to boston for an hour and dont get to sit down? i had no idea the trains were that busy. dam.



and I wish we would use Ipads for work lol, our field techs would break them in about 2seconds flat. we use the dell "workbook" netbooks now, basically wrapped in a rubber casing and they still manage to break them..



And pushing Apps through citrix sounds like having a form of SMS. thats very cool

 

[Teri C.]

Jim, I am guessing the farm is overloaded and underpowered. They use Citrix at the client I am at for countries like Brazil where they don't have an established trust between the networks. Citrix runs super slow! Not my issue but I have always found in training classes and places that use Citrix it's always slower than a direct log in.



As far as a smartphone....I might die without mine. I have the iPhone 4. Although I HATE HATE HATE AT&T, I love the iPhone. Luckily, I hate to talk on the phone so the crap service I just deal with. I use the camera all the time and it takes great pics and video. I loaded up the iPod and listen to music all day at work and in the car. I can access the internet just about anywhere to get phone numbers, directions, movies, etc. and yes, I play the occasionally video game when on a plane or standing in line. I am a huge texter, my way to communication. I just can't say enough about having everything in one device!

 

[Jim B]

basstrackerma,

The train is normally packed. I normally get a seat in the morning but the spots where you can use a laptop, like table seats or the ones with no seat in front of you are all taken. By the next stop its standing room only. On the way home i get on in back bay and its rare that i actually get a seat. The rush hour trains are just super duper busy on the framingham/worcester line.



My user base is a little different. I deal with stock market traders and analysts. The ones that have them now really like them a lot. They can use them on the train to do reasearch and with the Blomberg app they can do market research and read Bloomberg email.

The two biggest apps they benefit from the most is Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal app. A some of the traders that have ipads use both on the train and it saves them a ton of time during the day.



SMS and Citrix are two very different things. SMS is for deploying applications to a desktop/laptop that will run locally on the client machine. Citrix runs the applicatons on a farm of servers and just sends keyboard and display info between the client and server. All of the processing happens on the farm and the applications are platform independent on the client side. You can also use Citrix to publish a virtial desktop, and also stream applications to clients running isolated from the OS(think MS App V). Citrix Xenapp is really quite slick. We use it to publish some apps that just dont play well with other apps on the desktops and it solves that issue very well. We also use it for virtual desktops so our users can work remotely whenever they want without having to provide them with a laptop to maintain. A lot of my users like that so if they have a kid thats sick or a bad weather day they can just log in and use the virtual desktop and work just like they are here.



Teri,

Id bet your right its a combo of both, some applications dont work well via Citrix either. We have some custome written apps that when published via Citrix are dogs, its the apps not the farm in that case. My users here that use Citrix remotely to use the desktop say they are every bit as fast on Citrix as they are at thier desk using brand new machines. I know the reason for that and its the hardware that was chosen. i have 14 servers in my farm each one is a 16 cpu core box with 128gb of memory and local sas storage. Each one of these boxes can support over 50 users but we built it so they never see more then 25 or so per box. Even at 25 users they are not even close to 50% capacity. Since we use Citrix for BCP when we had a test in Nov we had 170 users all connected at the same time and everyone said it was as good as being at work.

 

[Bruce Yeaton]

I also use Citrix at work / home, as well work in IT.

We made some changes to the user profile portion that eliminates the tsprofiles and uses the default user for storing the user file settings. Seems to be working well and login times have improved.

I also have an iPad 3G and iPhone4 and can use either anywhere there is a signal to log on and do some sort of work if I need to.

As far as fishing related - I have the Navionics app on the iPhone as well as an app called BaitShops

 

[Carlos Hathcock III]

Where is Mini? I bet he has an ipad by now!



Teri, our Citrix connection is faster then our direct connection!!!! Gotta love DoD connections!!!!