Near the top of my essential apps list (and I’m using this in the broadest sense of applications that run on PC and Mac OS X platforms, the iPad and iPhone) is Instapaper. What is Instapaper?  It is a free app/service for web browsers ($4.99 for iPad/iPhone) that allows you to send the text of whatever web page, blog post, e-newspaper article, e-whatever to a server, where it is stored until you want to read it later.  The ads are stripped out, though it preserves article graphics, and it is reformatted beautifully. To use Instapaper create an account at instapaper.com, install the Read it later...

Yesterday I posted on a few of the problems we have seen with the latest version of Blackboard at our college.  All considered, they are pretty minor and there are workarounds for all of them.  (Though I might have added the nagging problem of the mobile web service daily failure, but that should be fixed soon).  There is one, however, that has a fix for right now, but it is not the kind of fix we like all that much. I am referring to the problem that Mac OS X  10.6+ users have viewing PDF documents in Firefox and Safari browsers.  Chrome users do not see this problem.  It is a little more complicated...