Halloween season came around and with it came big bags of candy at the office. Some candies disappeared faster than others, leading exclamations like “aww all the Twix are gone!” or “there’s nothing but stupid 3 Musketeers left” to be heard around the office. Summer remarked that we needed an app to tell us how best to divide the candy so that no one who didn’t want stupid 3 Musketeers would be forced to eat them, and the weirdos who actually like 3 Musketeers could revel in their abundance. Enter my next pet project.

While reading on Hacker News about Spidermonkey performance, I saw commenters talking about switching from Chrome to Firefox and Opera. One commenter described Opera as Chrome without Google, which sounded interesting to me. I hadn’t tried Opera in a few years and I like to cycle through browsers occasionally to see what I’m missing. So I downloaded Opera 25 on my MacBook and gave it a try.

I recently ordered a Fitbit Zip because I missed the Moves app but didn’t want to return to them now that they’ve been acquired by Facebook. I also wanted something I could carry around more easily on my person than my phone. Sure, I take my phone almost everywhere I go, but I have to remember to grab it if I’m going to go downstairs or otherwise take a quick walk. With a Fitbit, my hope was to always wear it without even having to think about it.

Recently, I became interested in Google Music All Access and decided to try it. I had already used my free month back when the service first became available, so this time around I had to shell out $10/month. I’m used to that price, though, having paid the same for Rdio and Spotify before it. I went ahead and cancelled my Rdio subscription because I only need one streaming service at a time.

I subscribed to Spotify for over a year, ever since they became available in the US. I paid $10 monthly to get mobile access because I loved being able to sync playlists offline and play them in my car. Spotify radically changed how I listen to music. I no longer had to purchase songs then hook my phone up to my laptop to get those songs on my phone so I could listen in my car. The most I would do was sync a playlist to my phone from within the Spotify app so that I could listen uninterrupted while I drove through areas with bad cell coverage.

Back in the day, I created a group called Dachshund Lovers on Facebook. It was open just to people at my university, and it gathered a few members but wasn’t anything big. Then later, when I was able to open it up beyond my university, I made it a public group so anyone could join. Things were fine, people joined and I didn’t have to do anything about it. Just anyone who wanted in could join and there was no approval process.

I’ve recently had some annoying experiences with Google’s apps on my iPad and iPhone. I was having a conversation on Google+ the other day with a friend of mine, and I wanted to share some photos in the conversation thread.  I had photos on my iPhone that I wanted to somehow get online and link to them in a reply on Google+.  I wanted to put them in a Google Picasa album, but Google doesn’t have a Picasa app for the iPad.  I’ve seen Picasa apps put out by third parties, but that always makes me nervous, giving some outside source access to my photos.  Why should I have to, anyway?  Google makes plenty of iOS apps, why not provide one for Picasa?  Picasa is something users can spend money on, too, which should be an incentive to make it convenient to use, regardless of your device.  I spend $20 a year to get extra storage space, but the best way to upload photos is still on my desktop computer.  This sucks because I don’t take the photos on my computer, hell I don’t even take photos on a camera anymore.  I take photos on my phone, and half the time I never sync the things to any other device.  I need to be able to share my photos on a dedicated photo-sharing site, uploading them directly from my phone.

Thanks to Joe’s recommendation, I’ve been using Turntable.FM recently, and I love it. I’ve found several new songs I’ve really liked, and actually several artists I hadn’t heard of either. It’s been a nice alternative to Pandora, which tends to play the same songs and artists for me over and over on the stations on which I’ve Liked/Disliked a lot of songs. It’s also been preferable to Spotify because I spend more time looking for music on Spotify than actually listening.

I downloaded Depict tonight after seeing someone on Reddit suggest it as another multiplayer iPad game like Words with Friends. It was $0.99, and it may be the best $0.99 I’ve spent so far on an app.

I feel like I gave the impression that I’m not enjoying my iPad, or that I regret its purchase. I don’t, and have been having a lot of fun with it. My big grief in the last post deals with stupid corporations, not limitations of the iPad. Anyway, from my few days of using this thing (I’m typing this blog post on it now), here are some of my favorite apps: