Apple has just unveiled their long-.awaited touch screen laptop, which turned out to be a “laptop”. The quotes are necessary, although as negative as they might sound, the fact that the iPad is just basically a big iPhone, is not necessarily a bad thing.

My first reaction was “awesome”, my second was “what a disappointment”, and finally, I decided on “pretty awesome”, which is somewhere between the two, nearer the awesome end of the spectrum. My reasons for disliking this is that it’s a blown up iPhone. It runs all your iPhone apps, with apps of its own on the way, and in development, but to me, having OS X would have been a much better option, since there I can use all the apps I want to do some coding, web design and such. I’m sure similar apps will be made available soon, but with a full OS X installation, I could have had all the Mac goodness in one go.

On the other hand, it does look a bit like the future. I am not a fan of any OS today, simply because they’re big and clunky. I enjoy the OS of the iPhone, because it is much more of a software-on-demand system, allowing me to customize and use my hardware in any which way I like. Especially now that we’re all moving into the cloud, we can afford looser operating systems. Perhaps the iPad is a precursor to that era, truy the start of something new?

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As you use Windows, you create application, change icons, change specific properties, all of which are recorded in one way or another in a central place, called the registry in Windows. As you can imagine, things can become a bit crowded in there, after a few months of usage you might want to do some spring cleaning, weeding out all those unneeded registry entries.

Windows has a built in one, but Defraggler offers a better user interface, some more visuals, and options to customize what you are doing. It is offered by Piriform, the company who created CCleaner, a great tool for keeping the garbage off your system. My favorite part of Defraggler is that you don’t have to know what you’re doing, just choose a drive, click defrag, and wait for the magic to happen.

After a defrag you might see a slight increase in performance, since your hard drive has to work less to retrieve data from all over the place, so this tool is especially useful for lower spec systems, where every drop of power is needed. Do you use a defrag tool, other than Defraggler? Please let us know in the comments below!

It’s Monday morning, you’ve just arrived at work, you go and get some coffee, do you really want to start working right away? We all need a few minutes to kick off the day, so why not read some of last week’s great posts from  Hack Your Day and other superb blogs? Try to be relaxed, happy and productive, and have a nice week!

Hack Your Day

• Top tools for designing anything
  Need some fresh tools to whip out a design or two? Aspiring artist? Take a look at the commercial and free, online and desktop tools you can use to create your new masterpiece
• 3 methods to add more data to task lists unobtrusively
  If you manage your daily life with lists, but have so much data its overwhelming, take a look at these tips to help you hide your details in plain sight

Other great blogs

• Readability Extension for Google Chrome – on gHacks
• How to Put Your PC to Good Use While You’re Sleeping – on Lifehacker
• Hiring & the Sixth Sense of Expertise – on Dustin Curtis
• Chipping away at massive tasks – on the Remember the Milk Blog

Last.fm is a great music streaming service, enabling you to create your own radios based on keywords, genre or artists, making it a perfect tool for creating playlists to fit your mood. I tend to listen to a lot of different kinds of music, but when I’m working I usually go for ambient/soothing music. This in itself contains so many sub-genres, that sometimes it’s not the best just to start “Enigma radio”. Here’s how I manage, and listen to my music collection on Last.fm.

First of all, you’ll need an account, and since a year or so back it’s sadly not free. You can get all the Last.fm goodness for $3 a month though, not a huge setback for this service I think. Once logged in, you can start listening to music by starting a Last.fm radio which can be based on artists, tags, or a user. The great thing about the player is that you can opt for a multi-artist, or multi-tag radio, which allows you to enter up to three items. This is great if you want to listen to ambient music with female vocals and piano dominance. You could just input “ambient”, “piano”, “female vocals” as the three tags.

The real fun is creating playlists from your radios. Last.fm will allow you to play a playlist of songs if the playlist has 45 playable tracks from 15 different artists. This means that you do have to do some work to create your lists, but the positive side is that the more work you put in, the better your playlist gets.

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Do you need to work with designs in your professional or personal life? If so, you might find the following quick list quite useful, some of my favorite applications for design, editing images, photos, and just playing around with some concepts.

If you’re new to editing images online, I strongly suggest taking a look at Aviary, you will be surprised out how powerful it is and how much like Photoshop it is.

Also, if you’d like to support the blog, please consider buying the commercial products from our store. It’s an Amazon store, so perfectly safe and secure, and Pixelmator will only set you back $30 or so (and is a pretty awesome app).

Commercial

• Adobe Photoshop – Buy from The Hack Your Day Store for Mac or for PC
• Adobe Íllustrator – Buy from The Hack Your Day Store for Mac or for PC
• Corel Painter 11 – Buy from the Hack Your Day Store for PC
• Corel Draw X4 – Buy from the Hack Your Day Store for PC
• Pixelmator – Buy from the Hack Your Day Store for Mac

Free, for your desktop

• GIMP – available for OS X, Linux and Windows
• Paint.net – available for Windows
• Krita - available for OS X, Linux and Windows
• CinePaint - available for Linux
• Pixen 3 – geared toward pixel art, for Mac

Free, online image editing

• Aviary – a whole suite of products
• Splashup

While Dustin Curtis does not have a specifically productivity related blog, he does have a lot of insight on a wide range of topics, and mainly, his posts are extremely entertaining. Topics range from an awesome story – almost an opera – about American Airlines, to an MRI of his head, and the underlying story of his brain. He is full of ideas, wit and charm, please do check him out, I promise you an interesting read!

Apart from the cerebral entertainment, Dustin also engages the designer in you and provides visual joys for the aesthetically inclined. Only a very small bar joins his posts together, other than that they are all custom built, like a magazine, all underpinning the content of the post. My favorite example of his shrewdness in design can be found in a post about the evolutionary findings of Niko Tingergen (How Niko Tingergen Reverse Engineered the Seagull). If you read the post, you eventually see a red border to the left, which has three white breaks in it at the very end. Just after you see this as you read, you actually realize the meaning of this visual element, completely awesome.

Since posts are not that frequent on his blog (the quality more than makes up for this), you can also follow his day to day adventures on a more run-of-the-mill blog, which is a simple photo-and-comment blog, made with pictures from his iPone.