Filed under: Productivity, Mobile Minute
Mobile Productivity the Mario Way - With A Nintendo DS!
With a toddler and a 6 hour drive to the nearest major center to consider, purchasing an iPod touch wasn't really one of my options. However, because my little guy loves Mario it was easy for me to justify buying a shared Nintendo DS for "the family."Now - thanks to an ambitious homebrew community - my favorite gaming addiction has become an incredibly useful productivity tool. With a $35 transflash adapter and a $40 4gb SDHC card you'll be amazed at what you can do with your DS.
What can you do with it?
- Twitter - Yes, the first stop on our list is everyone's favorite (and simultaneously most hated) microblog. Still, it's everywhere, and that now includes your DS. The developer of DSTwitter is Spanish, so at least a cursory knowledge of the language is helpful. It's easy enough to get set up and it works very well.
- Get Organized - There's a touchpad. There's just as much screen area as most PocketPC and Palm devices. Why can't the DS be a PIM, too? DragonMinded's DSOrganize is an incredible suite, combining a calendar, address book, to-do list, scratch pad, calculator, file browser and reader, media player, audio recorder, IRC client, and web browser. I've only really ever used basic functions in apps like this, but DSOrganize works just as well for me as anything on my PocketPC did.
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
