Technology
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I have been using Keynote since 2006 to present slides in the classes I am teaching, but starting this spring, when I bought an iPad 2, I began using the Keynote for iPad to present my slides in class. The tablet edition lacks a few of the desktop features I need when presenting. For example, I like having a clock, current and next slides, and presentation notes on my presenter’s screen. The desktop edition has it, but the tablet edition can only show the current slide with notes or the current and next slides. Oh well.
There are a few real advantages to using an iPad. The biggest one is that I don’t have to tote my notebook computer around in my bag. The other thing is that because Keynote for iPad is pretty basic, lacking support for certain transitions and embedded video, and that limitation keeps you from pimping your presentation, which is one of the reasons I used Keynote in favor of Powerpoint. Less is more.
Speaking of “less is more,” presenting from an iPhone is even better. One of the disadvantages of presenting with an iPad is that you can’t present, using the Apple VGA Adapter, and charge your iPad at the same time, unless you’re willing to do a little surgery. This was an issue a few weeks ago, when I realized I was running low on battery power and needed to finish a presentation. I ended up importing my presentation to my iPhone since that device had a lot more juice, and I had Keynote for iPhone installed.
How did it work? It didn’t miss a beat. In fact, it was even preferable because you won’t have your iPhone display mirrored in your presentation. Your audience only sees what you present. That’s important because I don’t want everyone to see me enter my passcode every time the device auto locks.
But as many have said, don’t throw away your desktop or notebook computer. It is very hard to make presentations from scratch on an iPad or an iPhone. I find it easier to create the presentation on an iMac (or a MacBook Pro) because I have to add a lot of images to my presentation, and it’s easier to place those images with a computer because you have that pesky file system. Also, you can’t create a presentation using your own theme, which is a bummer because I have bought and created quite a few over the years. (If you create your presentation on a computer, Keynote for iPad/iPhone will import it with a few warnings but few noticeable changes.)
Currently, moving the presentation from your computer to your iPad/iPhone is a little challenging. I prefer using Dropbox to keep the most current presentation from my computer available on my iDevice. Make sure you have the Dropbox app installed on your iOS device, load your presentation, and open it using your Keynote app. iCloud might make things easier, but I won’t know yet until it actually comes out next week.
Have you tried to present with your iPad? Are you ready to leave the notebook computer at home as I’ve begun to do?
The other day outside of the IFC Center on Sixth Avenue, I found that my iPhone had automatically connected to the attwifi network, which makes sense since I was within a sight line of a McDonald’s. But it was a weak signal, so when I tried to turn off the WiFi radio, I saw these “open” WiFi networks with familiar names, such as Amazon, Google, Groupon, and Hotels.com.
Now, I know the downtown area is pretty well-connected with technology companies, but I doubt that these open networks are actually run by the companies in question. I am guessing is that these open networks are there to sniff unsuspecting users’ personal data, such as passwords and account numbers.
I wonder if anyone has noticed these networks around other parts of New York, and whether anyone has been brave enough to connect to them.
Although I’m not quite the music fan I once was, I know that Spotify invites have been quite the valuable (promotional) currency lately. It looks like News Corp. has realized that too since they are now dangling Spotify invites to people who get the newly relaunched version of The Daily.
I gave the application a try earlier this year when it came out (and when I bought my replacement iPad 2), but as I wrote earlier, it didn’t seem to bode well for the future of the iPad-only magazine when college students didn’t much care for it, especially since it was a subscription service (not unlike Spotify).
I will update the application, and maybe, if I am dying to look for something to read, I’ll buy a week’s worth of content. And maybe I’ll take that Spotify invite, too. After all, we all know that I can be bribed.
For those of us still adjusting to NYU’s migration from our in-house mail and calendaring systems to those hosted by the everyone’s favorite technology behemoth and personal data farm, it’s been a little tricky to get our mobile devices to synchronize with our mail and calendars. But hey, if every other company uses Google Apps, why can’t we?
Actually, I found myself liking the transition. I now actually use the calendar and the Office-like apps have been pretty handy, especially on my iPad.
However, my biggest challenge since the migration has been getting more than my default calendar to appear on my iPhone and iPad. I was really pleased to see that in today’s New York Times technology section, they offered a solution to my problem. Well kind of.
What the article failed to mention was that we can’t access our Google Apps settings using Google’s default settings page. We have to do it through our host domain. For those of us, at NYU, we have to visit a different page. But once you navigate there, authenticate yourself, it’s just a matter of clicking the right boxes. After that, you have to have your iOS device remove your Google hosted calendars from your device. (Don’t be scared, it’s in the CLOUD.) Add your calendars anew, and a few moments later, your calendars will appear on your device.
As reported in Broadcasting and Cable today, the US Senate will be considering a bill that would make a felony the unauthorized streaming of “stolen” copyrighted work, including television programs and movies. It is already a felony to upload and download digital files of copyrighted work, and this would extend that protection to work that is streamed.
The move seems like a fair one. I believe that one should have to pay for quality content. But I’m concerned that this move could go too far and cripple time and place shifting technologies that allow users to stream video that one recorded at home. Last fall, I began using Elgato’s EyeTV hardware and software products to turn my iMac into a digital video recorder that’s connected to an over-the-air antenna. One of the nice features about this product is that it allows you to stream the content recorded on my iMac to a mobile device, like my iPhone or iPad, using an iOS app. It’s not a foolproof process—you have to wait for EyeTV to convert the raw MPEG-2 broadcast file to a H.264 file that the iPhone/iPad can actually play.
I’m concerned that a law like this would apply to technologies like this or to something that Slingbox. I’m not trafficking in this content. I’m merely shifting the location where I’m watching it from my home to somewhere else. I’m not accessing channels that I don’t have access to using perfectly legal means using an over-the-air antenna to receive broadcast signals and a perfectly legal recording device. My concern is that either the companies and personnel that produce the content or the Internet service providers that carry the data will put a stop to innovative new ways for viewers to access video content they’re authorized to use.
Macworld finally got around to reviewing the “Find My iPhone/iPad/iPod” application for iOS. It has indeed been really cool to have when I can’t find my phone, and I am pretty certain that it’s either at home or where I was last. But the one time I really needed it was when I lost my iPad on the way from Los Angeles to Washington, DC.
I tried to use “Find My iPad” but there were three problems.
- First, I had switched it off, as your supposed to do when flying below 10,000 feet.
- Second, there was a passcode for the device so even when someone turned it on, it wouldn’t do anything. I also had it set to “self-destruct” if someone incorrectly entered the passcode ten times.
- Third, I had turned off both the WiFi and 3G antennae so even if someone had turned on the device, it would not be on the networks.
It’s safe to assume that whoever found it just wiped it and has been using it since or has been sold somewhere.
Oh well.
Today, AT&T sent me an email about setting up a meeting with a “trained representative” to learn about how to “Empower” my smartphone. At first I was going to delete the message, but after reading it, I was intrigued by the offer. For one thing, it originated from some regional manager. I guess that small bit of personalization worked for me to have a look at the message.
It read as follows:
As a special thank you for meeting with us, I authorized 1000 Free Rollover® minutes at no charge*.
We’ll share with you some simple tips, tricks and free apps that will help you get more out of your phone than ever before, such as:
- The simple settings changes that can deliver big improvements to battery life
- How to use Wi-Fi® networks to maximize your data speeds and save you money
- How AT&T can help you to check and pay bill balances, monitor voice and data usage, and report network problems on the go
- How to customize application-specific “Alerts” to only provide the updates you really care about
- And much more!
So if I’m reading this right, it looks like a lot of what they’re going to show me is using less data, especially with the second point so I can use more WiFi. Also, they want to show me other ways so that I don’t get surprised with overages once they finally cancel everyone’s grandfathered unlimited plan, that sweet but kinda useless unlimited iPhone data plan, and replace them with metered plans.
I might actually take advantage of the meeting. Sure, voice minutes are almost a worthless currency these days, but 1,000 free rollover minutes is a nice nugget.
This was a first for me.
For my History of Cinema III class at Queens College, I assigned the textbook by Winston Wheeler Dixon and Gwendolyn Foster, A Short History of Film (Rutgers University Press, 2008). This is the first time I’ve taught this particular course and the first time I’ve used this book. I selected it for three reasons:
- It is used in the other History of Cinema courses in the Media Studies department.
- It’s very inexpensive, especially compared to other college textbooks.
- There was an ebook version available, and there’s an audiobook.
The ebook is actually for Kindle, which made me a little reluctant. For one thing, there’s the whole proprietary issue and the students will be locked into a single platform, although you can use Kindle on just about every platform save for your television set. But at the same time, the Kindle is not a bad way to read books, and I thought that the early-adopters in my class would find it a valuable use for their e-readers. Rock on!
What I had forgotten to consider is that when most instructors assign readings, myself included, we do so by listing page numbers. That has worked fine on the other electronic book I’ve used, Campbell, Martin, and Fabos’s Media and Culture (Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2010) because the ebook is only readable using a web browser. And the text shows up with virtual page numbers that correspond to the print edition.
Page numbers on true ebook titles are useless. Formerly, the only way a book would get repaginated would be when the publisher printed a new edition. Now, this happens at the whim of the reader. If you resize the type, the page numbers are instantly recalculated. Turn it sideways on an iPad or an iPhone, the page numbers are again completely revised. One student brought this to my attention, and I was caught unprepared for a solution, although I did come up with one.
Thankfully, chapters remain stable in this new reading experience so I devised a workaround using the chapters. The syllabus now contains a decoder that includes the chapter number and the particular headings.
Instead of assigning
Dixon and Foster, 239–264
I now have to assign:
Dixon and Foster, 239–264. Chapter 8: “French New Wave” to “Italian Cinema in the 1960s”
And the student has to hunt for it.
It’s not the biggest pain, I guess, but there has to be a better way. We could use in-text anchors or something similar to what certain research databases used when reproducing full-text articles in HTML rather than PDF. But we have to remember that there’s no fewer than three commercial ebook formats (the varying flavors of epub from Apple iBooks, Kindle, and Nook) and because one supports some new coordinate system, it doesn’t mean that the others will support it.
[Insert rant about proprietary media formats.]
The above links to Amazon are affiliate links. If you buy something through those links, I will earn a commission fee.
News Corp’s The Daily might seem like a groundbreaking new platform publishing news, except that early accounts say that app itself doesn’t work and that the news is pretty superficial. But it also looks like college students don’t really care for it.
In my Introduction to Media Industries class at Fordham University, Lincoln Center, I assigned a research review where students look in news databases about a certain breaking topic in a particular media industry. For their first topic, I asked them to look into The Daily. I asked them to describe what it is, whether they would be interested in such a product, and whether they think it will change how they (or everyone) will consume news.
For the most part, the students were pretty much in the dark about The Daily. Only a handful of them had heard about it, which I didn’t find all that surprising given that it’s a little hard to describe what it is. It’s a news application that you subscribe to for access to news content, curated by the news-gathering operation of News Corp.
Second, when students read up on it, they didn’t seem that enthusiastic about. Almost none of them had iPads, and of the few that did, only one downloaded and installed the application. One of the reasons for the reluctance is the price. When I asked them in class about it, many felt the $40 per year a huge expense. But I think that has to do with the fact that younger students have grown up thinking that the news is available for free.
Third, most of them agree with a lot of the early reception for The Daily that the news just isn’t that good. One student very adeptly pointed out that one of the editors comes from the New York Post‘s Page Six and that doesn’t really exude journalistic pedigree. (That explains why the second news category is “Gossip.”) This might be good for the neanderthals that read the New York Post, but I’m guessing that the iPad’s affluent user base and the serious news reader are a more evolved species.
Most curious, however, is the students lukewarm reception for the iPad and other tablets. I’m beginning to think that the love that the iPad has received has been among an older set of Internet users. It’s one thing that I see about half of a first-class cabin on an airplane with iPad in hand, but it’s quite another when you don’t see too many on-campus. That’s tough because many of the articles I see about the iPad seem to put it as an educational tool. And while I loved mine for reading and research, it was not good for note taking or for organizing my research. (Speaking of which, when is OmniOutliner for iPad coming out?)
One student very succinctly put it, “if I need something from the Internet, I have my phone.” I’m beginning to think that students regard the tablet device’s form versus a smartphone’s form as an analog of the desktop computer’s form versus that of the notebook. Or maybe it’s just a phase, and they’ll grow of it.
I was admittedly caught in the hype of the post-Thanksgiving sales. After the news media figured out that all the talk about the body scanners and pat-downs at our nation’s airports turned out to be nothing really once people actually went through our nation’s security checkpoints with little incident, they got all excited about the Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And since I basically had half my week cancelled (I teach two of four classes on Thursday), it was easy for me to get distracted.
Anyway, I found that all of the sales were underwhelming. Here’s a partial scorecard.
Griffith’s 70% Sale
With free shipping! But only good on deprecated products, and now there’s only two iPhone 4 accessories. And I already have their awesome Reveal Etch that I got free, courtesy of Apple’s Free Case program, which is the best one. I was hoping for the Radio Shark to be on sale or something useful like that.
Virgin America’s Cyber Monday Sale
I wasn’t gonna bite on this anyway since I need all the United miles I can get to keep my meager Premier status, but I clicked through and learned that this wasn’t much of a sale. They basically rolled over their lowest published fares past March, where they stopped last week, through May. This was just a fare sale that was announced on Cyber Monday, and not much more. (Now I hope that United will match and roll their T and S fares on NYC-LAX past March 17.)
Apple’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday
I’m still using one of the Airport Express base stations I bought in 2003 when the Apple Stores first started doing these Friday sales. I scored that base station for $79, a full $20 of retail. But nowadays, they basically match the Educational discount on the computers. And sometimes, they Educational discount is even better. Today’s sale was mostly on accessories, but that’s just spending money on what I don’t need.
Omni Hotel’s 999 rooms at $99 per night
This is a great deal at one of the best hotel chains in the country. A bunch of rooms at hotels in the chain were $99 for stays between now and the end of January. But all the dates in LA and Washington I wanted were blacked out. They did have a deal at the San Diego property after Christmas, but we already booked an equally good deal via Travelzoo. So after waiting all weekend to book a inexpensive room at a great property, there was nothing I could use.
I really wished my local sushi place was offering a Cyber Monday deal. I would have ordered online!
