Category: iPad

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Misc. Browser Links

I’ll post sooner than later (yet this weekend, certainly) about Thanksgiving at home this year, but in the meantime, it’s time once again to post a ton of links to stuff open in my browser that I want to and/or need to come back to sooner than later.  In no particular order here:

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Yet another miscellaneous links round-up post

Still have lots of pages open in my browser, and this morning seems like as good as any a morning to try to clear that:

  • From Jakob Nielsen, “Children’s Websites: Usability in Designing for Kids,” which cbd posted a while back.  I don’t always agree with Nielsen’s proclamations about all things internets, but this seems pretty interesting and potentially useful for English 444.
  • Speaking of which:  some of my teaching evaluation reviews from this last summer’s section of English 444 and English 328 were pretty bad, and I think it’s mostly because the 7.5 week summer term makes students kind of crabby, and because this is another short term that comes after the short spring term.  I try to warn students, try to repeat often the mantra of “it isn’t half as long, it’s twice as fast,” but often to no avail.  Next year/this school year, I’m scheduled for spring term teaching, so we’ll see if that makes much difference, and I am also tentatively scheduled to teach a section of 444 this winter as an overload.
  • “Project explores potential for use of iPad in education at Penn State,” which is another story about what the headline suggests.  The one thing that’s a little different/unusual is I sort of know a couple of the people involved with this project.
  • Tweet Library is a software for keeping a Tweet library on an iPad, which is all fine and good, though I personally would prefer to have it on my desktop.
  • Here’s a pretty interesting assignment from Bill Wolff at Rowan University, “wrtf10 assignment 2: mixin’, mashin’, and remixin’.” There’s a couple of different things I can steal/borrow here for stuff students are doing this term in both 328 and 121.
  • I don’t know exactly how much this matters, but here’s a link to a blog that links to a site called Haltadefinizione, which has super-duper high resolution/detailed images of some famous paintings.
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My iPad, a (little over) six months later

A few thoughts on iPad ownership, just over six months since it came out and I bought one (well, Leslie bought one for me and I bought it from her), in no particular order (other than I have piled up some links as of late on this):

  • I’ve shown this to students in my in-class version of English 121, to my informal gatherings with grad students, and with other students I’ve met with in my office for one reason or another, and they are generally unimpressed.  I’m not entirely sure what that means, other than there is still a fairly hard-core less than interested adopters out there in a segment of the population I would think might be interested in these things.
  • The iPad has taken off at a lightening-quick pace.  At this rate, a) my students will be sold on the usefulness of these things soon, and b) textbook companies had better start thinking about ways to take advantage of these things.
  • The iPad is not a substitute for a computer, and now that the fall term is well underway, I find myself using my laptop a lot more than I did over the spring/summer.  There are certain things that I need to do with my laptop in my teaching that would be more trouble than it is worth with my iPad.  I mention this in part because I had a link at one point (I think I misplaced it now) where a college was giving students the choice of getting (as part of their “package” of some sort– this was a small and expensive school) either an iPad or a laptop and the college was surprised at the number of students who wanted the laptop.  Well, DUH! My iPad can do lots of cool things, but not as many as my laptop or my desktop.
  • The iPad can create content, and here’s a link to a good article about “10 Ways People Are Using The iPad To Create Content, Not Just Consume It.” What’s interesting here is that the people who are using the iPad to create tend not to be writers– that is, the iPad is really good for painting, mixing music, editing photos, DJ-ing, etc.
  • That said, here’s a good and interesting link called “iPad Apps For Writers.” I had my own thoughts of the iPad as a writerly device way back when, but I think that purpose and “space” is everything here.  As I wrote before, I do much/most of my writing (including this post) at my desk and on a desktop computer.  As I’ve mentioned already, I tend to use a laptop at school most often because of its functionality and its usefulness for typing stuff in a meeting or whatever.  But I do like taking my iPad and my keyboard to a coffee shop once in a while, too.
  • I read on my iPad a fair amount (see below), but those bastards at WIRED are still dead to me.  And, from what I read, there’s still a lot of fuzziness and confusion about how a newspaper or magazine subscription via the iPad might work.  This is a shame.  The publishing industry dubbed this thing the Jesus tablet because they saw it as a way of saving them, and it just might– if the greedy publishing bastards and the greedy Apple bastards could just come to term.
  • What do I use my iPad for, you ask?  I like the email interface quite a bit.  I do some light web browsing, and while the lack of Flash is an issue, not huge.  Weatherbug.  Facebook. Kayak (great app). Calendar.  Facebook.  Keynote (probably more than Pages). I like “Reader” as an RSS feed reader quite a bit too.  But…
  • … my “killer app” remains iAnnotate, and while my students generally don’t get the point of this thing, when I show them iAnnotate and the PDFs I’ve assigned for our classes, there is a bit of a light bulb moment.  It is an excellent app.  Seriously, this is a revelation/revolution for me about reading these kinds of documents.  I’ll never work with nasty paper photocopies again.
  • And I like the Kindle and the iBooks apps quite a bit too, especially while reading in bed in the dark.  Which I’m soon going to go do.
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And in more link catching up news

Again, in no particular order– just things I want to keep track of that I have left open in my browser for a while now:

  • “Reading in a Whole New Way,” which is a very readable/accessible piece about how technology has altered the sense of “book,” from Smithsonian.com. And this is a link to the article itself, where there is worry about the iPad.
  • Speaking of which:  “Revisualizing Composition:  Mapping the Writing Lives of First-Year College Students” is a WIDE whitepaper/study about the way that students use writing technologies to write in different aspects of their lives.  There’s a lot here, but I was struck by the idea that students write as often for “personal fulfillment” (with Facebook, texting, etc.) than for school.
  • “Nine Important Trends in the Evolution of Digital Textbooks and E-learning Content,” from something called “xplana.”  I think these trends are debatable at best, but I like things that speculate about the future of publishing, especially when they are horribly wrong.
  • I really liked this cbd post “Taking Notes,” and I wanted to keep a link– a note?– of it for future reference.  Lots of good stuff here.
  • To be honest, I don’t know if this is worth passing on, but I will anyway:  From Inside Higher Ed, “An Adjunct’s Novel,” which in some ways seems amusing but in many ways seems rather predictable to me.
  • Here’s a link to an iPhone app I might try out later, something called the Sleep Cycle alarm clock. Though the whole thing seems a bit problematic to me.  First off, I set an alarm for a particular time not because it is the “best time” for me to necessarily wake up, but because it is the time that I logistically need to wake up to go on with my day.  Second, I don’t get how this app could possibly work, and I guess what bothers me most is that the reviews suggest that it does indeed work.
  • I might get this book called The Whuffie Factor:  Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business because it does sound pretty interesting.  But to be honest, between stuff I’m reading for school and for fun right now, this is going to have to go down the list a bit. Still, for the Kindle (iPad, of course) edition, it might be worth it for the next time I’m on a plane.
  • What’s the point of an iPad?  How might it be used in the “real world?”  Here’s a link from Apple to tell us. I’ve pulled my iPad out a couple of times in my first year composition class and what I think is interesting is that my students in that class seem pretty dismissive of its usefulness.  So much for “digital natives” understanding this stuff so much better.
  • Speaking (again and again!) of the iPad:  I recently won an iShine give-away from PadGadget by being early enough on Twitter to retreat an article from the site PadGadget.  Here’s a review of the iShine, which I mostly agree with.  I prefer to have my iPad in its Apple case because it’s easier to prop it up and such, but the iShine bag is handy and easy too.
  • Finally, this is something I really ought to do with my laptop:  from Lifehacker comes “Starting from Scratch:  A Step-by-Step Guide to Reinstalling Your OS.”
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iPad-themed (with Logorama) catch-up post

This has been a busy week and a half (give or take) with school and life, and I’ve starred a bunch of stuff in my Google reader to go back to and post eventually, mostly iPad related.  In no particular order, here they are:

There was another article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that I can’t find the link for about how iPads are being used in universities, mostly misused as far as I can tell.  There was some school where they gave students the choice of having either a laptop or an iPad and they seem surprised at the number of people who chose the laptop.  Well, that’s a no-brainer to me.  I still get asked on a fairly regular basis what I think of my iPad, and while I like it a lot, it is not a replacement for a computer.  I could probably live without a laptop with my iPad because I have a desktop computer, but an iPad is not a substitute for a computer.  What I have mostly enjoyed my iPad for as far as school goes lately is just reading and marking up the PDFs I am teaching. iAnnotate is my killer app.

And on a completely unrelated note, here’s a link to the completely excellent short film Logorama:

Logorama from Human Music & Sound Design on Vimeo.

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Three brief thoughts on burning the Koran

You have perhaps heard this story, about the nut-jobs in Florida (so many of them are in Florida) who are going to have a “Koran burning” on 9/11.  See, for example, “Pastor’s Plan to Burn Korans Adds to Tensions” from the New York Times from a couple weeks back.  At least three things occur to me, each of which has something to do with my line of work (well, sort of at least):

  • If it were not for Web 2.0/social media and the 24/7 news cycle, no one would have ever heard of these crazy people.  In other words, this is a highly “immediate” rhetorical situation, as I discussed in the Diss oh so many years ago, and it is yet another example of how technology directly impacts the ways in which rhetorical situations are processed by rhetors, audiences, and messages themselves.  Technology gives much, but it also causes bat-shit crazy stuff like this.  In any event, one wonders what would happen if this whole thing had simply been ignored, if we thought more carefully about the exigence for this situation, if this would even be possible before cable news, etc.
  • I am reminded of the flag burning debates of a few years ago with all of this.  Sure, this has a distinctly different flavor in the shadow of 9/11 and “war(s) on terrorism,” the non-issue of the Burlington Coat Factory turned  mosque/community center somehow vaguely near “ground zero,” and just a sort of general ill-placed fear of “Islam,” which is at least as diverse a religion as “Christianity.”  But I am also reminded of a Miss Manners article way back when, in which the always delightful writer Judith Martin pointed out that there was no point in legislating against flag burning because the reason why someone burned flags was to make a point by being terribly rude.  Of course, this is extra-über rude, but still.
  • Finally, this once again speaks to the extreme importance of the materiality of the book, and by “the book,” I mean the old-fashioned codex book, paper pages, pagination, a cover, the whole nine yards.  I don’t mean the Kindle or the iPad, and I hasten to add here that I really do like (love might be too strong) the reading experience on my iPad a lot.  I’m reading a couple of books on it right now, and I am going to be preparing for a day of getting some articles I’m teaching on my iPad after I finish this post.  Obviously, electronic reading and writing has an incredible power (see observation #1).However, if these crazy people got together and said “hey, we’re going to burn this here Kindle with the Koran on it,” or “we’re all gonna bring our laptops and erase our copies of the Koran all at the same time,” no one would have given a shit about that.  Not even a little bit.   What’s got everyone all excited is that these things are the actual and material thing that was previously the only definition of “book,” and they really will burn and give off flames, smoke, and heat.  Never mind that there are millions of other copies of the Koran, so it’s not like these people will have any real potential to damage the religion.
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A few miscellaneous thoughts on eReading and annotating

I have in mind a few more blog posts over the next few days about the end of the summer term/beginning of my 13th school year at EMU, but I’ll start this morning with some of the things/links/thoughts I’ve come across lately about publishing, reading, and writing.  Most of these have been left open in my browser for well over a week, and it’s time to clear them out.  And the clean the desk and then the kitchen.

First, there’s this helpful info-graphic, I believe from Newsweek:

Click on it to read it more clearly. Much more after the jump.

Continue reading “A few miscellaneous thoughts on eReading and annotating”

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WIRED, you’re dead to me

And it’s not because of all the stupid “The Web is Dead” stuff, either– though I guess that’s part of it.  No, I am thinking of the still not complete saga of how WIRED screwed me out of my iPad application, which began back in early July and which still continues.  This has been a lot to go through for a five dollar app.  Anyway, after the jump, most of the story, but the moral of the story here is crappy customer service is a bad thing.

Continue reading “WIRED, you’re dead to me”

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Novels released exclusively on the iPad (and similar devices, eventually)

I saw this here, here, and here (more or less in the reverse order of that list):  Japanese novelist Ryu Murakami is releasing a novel called A Singing Whale, which will apparently include video, a soundtrack, and other multimedia elements.  Part of the deal is about money because under the deal, Apple gets 30% and Murakami, composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (and presumably whoever else in invovled in the production end of things) split the rest, more or less cutting the publisher out.  But mostly, it isn’t about money.  Here’s a smart passage from Mashable:

Although the author advises publishers to “read it and weep,” this doesn’t mark the beginning of the end for the publishing industry — at least not yet. What Murakami is releasing is not an e-book in the traditional sense, but a full multimedia experience that can’t be replicated in print. In some respects, it’s similar to Alice for the iPad, an app that brings Lewis Caroll’s beloved Alice in Wonderland to life with full-color animations and interactive features. Furthermore, the author is also still in talks with its publisher, Kodansha, about releasing a hard copy of the novel.

In other words, Murakami’s project should be hailed less as a blow against the monopoly of big publishing houses over authors and the circulation of their work, and more as a celebration of the kinds of opportunities that devices like the iPad can provide for creativity and cost-effecient distribution.

The iPad is the perfect device for this sort of thing, and without a doubt, we’re going to see more of these fusions between novelistic “words in a row” text with audio, video, games, interactivity, and who knows what else.  One of the glib little comments I like to make in my writing classes is that the reason why it’s often a good idea to include an image, video, or even audio file as part of a writing project is because nowadays, you can.  So it seems just obvious to me that there will be writers who want to break out of the paper confines of “the book” and take advantage of the new technologies available.

Of course, this can go too far and just turn into a gimmick that can backfire.  I for one don’t need to see another 3-D film anytime soon– well, maybe the sequel to Avatar. But it’s also hard to figure out what will be a gimmick and what will be the next big thing until we try.  And this is also the main reason why I for one would like to figure out what it takes to program for the iPad so I could try to make something like this.

Incidentally, I’ve never heard of this writer and I have no idea when this is going to be released, and I have a feeling that unless this gets translated into English, I’ll be limited to reading about this instead of actually reading/experiencing it.

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Condé Nast and/or WIRED owes me five dollars

I wrote my first review of an app on the iTunes Store yesterday after I downloaded the “update” to the WIRED Magazine App for the iPad. It was not a favorable review, either.

Just to back up a second here:  as I previously mentioned, I bought the WIRED iPad App when it came out with the June issue of the magazine, and I was pretty impressed.  I thought most of the critiques about it, while basically accurate (a lot of ads, you can’t copy and paste, etc.), didn’t take away from the experience for me.  While there’s no way I would pay $5 an issue to read WIRED on my iPad, I would pay the same amount of money as a paper subscription to read it for a year– I think that was something like $25 or so the last time I subscribed.

Anyway, I plugged in my iPad yesterday to my computer for charging and synching and when I was prompted that an update of the WIRED App was available, I did what I always do and agreed to automatically update all apps.  But the WIRED App’s “update” replaced my purchased June issue with a free preview and the opportunity to buy the June and July issues issues for $3.99 each. In other words, I was downdated.

So, here’s my review of the new WIRED app on the Apple iTunes Store site:

If you bought June 2010 WIRED, DO NOT UPGRADE!

I bought the June 2010 WIRED (18.06) and was quite happy with it.  Then I “upgraded.”  This new version of the app overwrote the previous version, which means that my previously purchased issue was erased and replaced by a “free” promo that does nothing more than show me the covers of the June and July issues and invites me to spend $3.99 to buy what I already bought.  And I’m guessing that if I WERE to buy either of these issues, it’d disappear again with a new upgrade.

Not cool. Not cool at all.  Conde Nast and WIRED owe me $5 and I most certainly will not be buying any WIRED anymore, electronic or print.  Boo. Hiss.  Boo.

I don’t know why I said “upgrade” instead of “update.”

So I poked around the web site WIRED has for this app a bit, and at the bottom of it, there’s some information on how it’s supposed to be– my June issue was not supposed to be deleted. I don’t know if this is the difference or not, but the instructions here make it sound like I was supposed to update the app while my iPad wasn’t hooked up to anything, which is something I almost never do.

Then there was this:

If you’ve purchased the June issue but it is not available for installation after you’ve updated your app, please send an email to WIRED [at] cdsfulfillment.com requesting assistance. Our customer service team will get back to you with further instructions.

Which I did; they haven’t responded yet.  Grr.