And so it has come to pass. The magic “Jesus Tablet” has come to mere mortals. And it’s name is iPad! Like Manna from Steve Jobs and company, it has been delivered unto us this holy day Wednesday, January 27th 2010. Steve came from the mount @ 1 Infinite Loop and presided over his flock from a singular leather chair, stage left of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, San Francisco. The “reality distortion field” is strong with this one. I could only imagine the excitement of the yet unanointed.

With so many rumors flying, no one knew what to expect. Would Steve start with something innocuous, the new iPhone OS (which didn’t happen) or a new iPhone (which also didn’t happen) and then at the last moment …. oh … just one more thing. No. He launched straight away into setting up and introducing the new iPad.

There will be those that will rip it apart for what it doesn’t do. No phone. No Camera. No Verizon. No multitasking. But as a consultant, I need to talk about what it does do. And the possibilities it brings. Oh. And the joy!

Tweetboard is a cool little piece of java coding that lets you add a forum to most any website or blog using Twitter as the engine. It will allow threaded replies like no application I’ve seen yet. As the Tweetboard website explains it:

“Tweetboard is a fun and engaging micro-forum type application for your website. It pulls your Twitter stream in near real-time (max 1 min delay), reformatting tweets into threaded conversations with unlimited nesting. Conversations that spun off the original conversation are also threaded in-line, giving your site visitors full perspective of what’s being discussed.

Tweetboard is also a powerful viral tool that engages your website visitors. Each time someone posts (or replies) via your board, a link back to the corresponding conversation is appended to their tweet, creating a viral stream of Twitter traffic to your website.”

Written by the folks at 140ware, this little piece of java heaven is a little tab that resides on the left side of your site. When there are new Tweets to be read the tab color becomes red and displays the number of new tweets since your last visit.

As a consultant I wear quite a few hats, as it were. I troubleshoot issues with Macintosh computers. I set up & install new Macintosh systems. I develop and implement FileMaker databases. I also do web design and development.

Wearing the chapeau of web developer I have several tools that I use regularly. Besides the obvious ones like Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, I use a little coding application from Panic called Coda.

I use Coda regularly. As they say on their website “text editor + file transfer + svn + css + terminal + books + more = whoah.” I don’t know if I could have explained it better. It’s a text/code editor, with full color formatting