Computer

Accordance for iOS is out NOW

In yesterday’s post I commented that it was coming soon, well by evening it was released and available in the App store. Accordance for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad is now available for FREE. I only saw it at 11:30 pm so I have had little time to play with it but I have very good first impressions. Best of all, if you log in with your account you can use their “Easy Install” feature to directly download all the modules that you have already purchased. It also comes with a nice set of preinstalled texts (including a demo version of BHS which unfortunately you cannot delete once you have installed a purchased copy) so you can get up and running right away. There are more details on their site.

So far just a few niggles. When you go to easy install it took me a few tries for it to load the complete listing of my available modules. Unfortunately that included Atlas files which cannot be installed on the iOS device. Every text has the book and verse reference on every line. You can turn that off in the desktop app but I cannot find the option to do that in the iOS app. You can only open two texts at once, not really a complaint, even on the iPad you cannot really see more than that usefully, but I could not close the Bible text pane in order to open just the Hebrew and English Mishnah texts.

And all of those comments should be seen as minor. This is an incredibly welcome app to the iOS and further moves it to my only device on the road. I will post a more complete review next week, in the meantime, it is FREE so download it now!

My PowerBook 140

Dec 9th, 2010

by Christian Brady.

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The aforementioned machine.

Sharing my thoughts on stories

Aug 19th, 2010

by Christian Brady.

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I realize I am very late to this game, but if you are reading on my website you may have noticed that I added my “shared” items that I am reading via Google reader. (I use NewsRack on the iPad and iPhone which connects and syncs with Google Reader.) When I am reading stories via the web I use the Note in Reader » [drag the preceding text up onto your browser's toolbar to use it] feature to link, share, and add my own notations to a story or website I find interesting.

Today I was reading a story about the legality of using your iPhone to record a conversation without notifying the other parties. I added a few comments along with the link and it occurred to me that no one may read them, stuck over in the sidebar. So here is how it appears on my S hared Google Reader page:

Court OKs Covert iPhone Audio Recording | Threat Level | Wired.com

via www.wired.com on 8/19/10

Targuman:

Very interesting ruling. With the iPad note apps capable of recording I have wondered how to legally and ethically use this in lectures and meetings. (Lectures are considered “public” so fair game, but departmental meetings, for example?)

Using an iPhone to secretly record a conversation is not a violation of the Wiretap Act if done for legitimate purposes, a federal appeals court has

So please feel free to check the sidebar, go directly to my S hared Google Reader page, or comment here about the items you see there.

Accordance on the iPad

Aug 11th, 2010

by Christian Brady.

6 comments

In order to make sure I have access to my files and programs on the road I set up VNC on my office MacPro. This is all built in to the MacOS (and Win XP and 7 I believe) but not into the iPad. After much deliberation I purchased iTeleport for $24.99. Wow! Very cool. It takes a bit of getting used to because your finger is working like a mouse rather than as in the iOS, but once I got the hang of it I was happily checking out Ruth on Accordance. UPDATE: There is a preference for touch mode, so clearly I have a lot more playing to do!

Believe it or not, that is Accordance on an iPad!

(I was using it in landscape mode, hence the sideways screenshot.)

Review: HDRtist – excellent software at great price, free!

Aug 10th, 2010

by Christian Brady.

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rocksHDR

My brother and Tony have been talking up HDR, the process by which one can achieve “High Dynamic Range” images that compensate for lighting difficulties and differences. A search of flickr for “hdr” reveals some pretty dramatic results. There are lots of software solutions out there (including Photoshop) but me, I’m cheap. So I was thrilled to find HDRtist, a free solution for the Mac. It is simple, elegant, and produces some stunning images. You can see one of my more serious attempts from my recent trip to Finland here and at right. These rocks were shot with my Sony alpha and I intentionally bracketed with three separate shots. I used the extreme setting in HDRtist to show how far you can take the HDR effect in HDRtist.

Below is an example of what it can do with some fairly mediocre images. These two images were taken with my iPhone 3GS and nothing but my big ‘ol body to stabilize the camera. You can see how in the first screen shot the images are slightly off. HDRtist aligns the images (this takes a few minutes and in my case required cropping out the non-overlapping bits). Then you simply use the slider below to get the level of effect you are looking for. The result here is not great because the starting images were not very good. But when you compare the result with the sources, wow! Now I have a reasonable image worthy of being placed on flickr. (OK, not really, but I put it up anyway to illustrate this post.)

Verdict: For free you often get what you pay for, in this case free gets you an excellent and easy to use app that does what it advertises. For a hack who is not interested (right now) in serious HDR manipulation, it is darn near perfect.