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iPad

Apple’s AirPlay – The good and the oops!

Nov 28th, 2010
by Christian Brady.
1 comment

iOS 4.2 update for iOS devices came with some much hyped features. AirPrint, unless you have one of three printers, is effectively DOA, while AirPlay “just works.” In fact, AirPlay works a little too well. The premise is simple. You can have the audio or video from your iPad or iPhone stream to either your AirPort Express attached to a stereo (as I have it) or to your AppleTV. Video and music work great on the AppleTV and music streams nicely over the AirPort Express.

So what is my problem? If you have set the music on your iPad to stream to your stereo, even if you have stopped the iPod app from playing, and begin to play a game, say Plants v. Zombies, the audio continues through to your stereo. Having snuck out of the family room to complete a level of Angry Birds, I was caught by the sounds of exploding birds and grunting pigs going throughout the house via the stereo. Oops.

 

Hebrew on the iPad, at last!

Nov 26th, 2010
by Christian Brady.
6 comments

The iOS 4.2.1 update for the iPad brings a number of goodies that we have long enjoyed 0n the iPhone.1 One that I had been particularly eager to use is Hebrew input! First impression: Very nice! It seems to work across all apps, but some handle it better than others and some even have key features not available in other apps.  So, a quick rundown followed by a gallery.

  • You install it by going to Settings>General>Keyboard>International Keyboards and add Hebrew. Activate it by simply tapping on the globe icon to the left of the space bar.
  • Pages – seems to work fine, but does not automatically change the alignment to right justified.
  • Evernote does! See the screenshot, but Evernote automatically right-justifies the paragraph as you change keyboards.
  • Mail and Twitter also do so AND all such apps (including Evernote) give you a nice little “change direction” popup (see screenshot of Twitter).
  • Office2 HD is, as with the app as a whole, more crude. It will accept Hebrew but with few frills including change of direction.
  • Keynote also accepts Hebrew input without any fuss. It does not, however, allow change of direction (that I could see).
  • If you use a BlueTooth keyboard the onscreen keyboard disappears to give you more room on screen. How do you switch languages? Two options:
    • Using the BT keyboard simply use cmd-spacebar
    • Press the Eject key (top right of BT keyboard) to bring up the onscreen keyboard and select it from there.

I have a lot more playing with Hebrew on the iPad before I can say it is a unmitigated success, particularly seeing how files created on the iPad transfer back to the Mac and web (Evernote seems to handle this with no issue). But so far this is a great addition for those of us who want to use the iPad for biblical and rabbinic studies.

 
  1. One of which was adding “Find my iPhone” feature, previously requiring a MobileMe account, for free. Unfortunately it tells me so far that my iTunes account does not work with this feature (?). [↩]

Shared stories

Oct 29th, 2010
by Christian Brady.
No comments yet

Just a reminder that if you want to also follow what I share via Google Reader you may: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/prof.brady

You do not need to use Google Reader, by the way, to see my shared items or even to use the GR features. Or at least you don’t need to use GR directly. I useNewsRack on my iPad and iPhone which connects and syncs to my GR account. It allows me to Share, Like, and so on from within the app.

 

Using the iPad – Research, meetings, and fun

Oct 3rd, 2010
by Christian Brady.
8 comments

Over the last few months many students and several of my administrative colleagues have acquired iPads and have been asking how I use the device to best effect. This post is an answer to that request and I hope it will be useful for others.

Dropbox – The first thing I recommend anyone do is signup for Dropbox. A free account will give you 2GB of space, which is enough for many people’s work files. I have gone ahead and subscribed for a year’s service (50GB for $100) since I keep all of my documents on Dropbox.

So what does this service do? First of all it uploads and backs up those documents you have allocated to it on their servers, in “the cloud.” Second, it will sync those files on as many computers as you have the software installed and is always accessible via the web. So my office computer and my computer at home always have the same version of any document I am working on.1 Finally, there is very nice Dropbox software for various portable devices including the iPad. You can now read any of your Dropbox-saved documents on your iPad.

UPDATE: QuickOffice – A few months ago I went looking for a better solution that OfficeHD (below) because it did not handle Dropbox as elegantly as I would have liked. I then found QO which not only has a very Mac-like interface and drag-drop means of moving files, but were very responsive on Twitter to answer my questions. This is now my go-to Office app on the iPad.

Office² HD - This is an iPad app that allows you to open and edit Word and Excel files on your iPad. It is not the most elegant piece of software, but it is getting better, for example, it now allows you to read and edit .docx (for some reason no iPad app that I am aware of let’s you edit .rtf files, which is the default format for Nisus Writer Pro). The best part? You can open and save documents to and from your Dropbox account.

Excursus – Work Habits To give you an example of how I use this, we receive the agendas for our Academic Leadership Council via email. I save that into a folder on my desktop which syncs via Dropbox. In the meeting I open that document from Dropbox within Office² HD, take my notes there and save it back up to Dropbox. Any handouts or attachments I either have scanned or emailed to me and then saved into another folder within my ALC notes folder on my desktop (and thus available via Dropbox on any computer).

Evernote – This is a service and software that I admit I do not use to its fullest potential. Like Dropbox there is a free and a paid service, I use the free. This service/app combination (for both iPhone and iPad) allows me to take notes, images, screenshots, etc. and tag (for easy reference find, etc.) them for later access. You can save multiple notebooks for different topics and tasks.

Very cool feature: OCR. If you take a picture of any text, including handwritten, it will recognize the characters for you and they become part of your searchable database. I use this particularly with my iPhone when on the run (taking notes and snapping pictures) but at a conference this summer I used it for taking notes of each paper and photos of every handout. I then shared that notebook for my colleagues who could not be there to see. You can access it here.

There are certain apps, like Office² HD for Dropbox, that have Evernote integration. You can find them at their “Trunk” but the one that I use all the time that is brilliant is BibleReader. This app, as you might expect, is a Bible reader app, but is one of the most sophisticated and has the best Hebrew/Greek integration. The Evernote bit? You can take notes, verse by verse, and those notes are synced with Evernote (you can take notes offline and then upload when you are back to a network). Give my field of research this is a perfect combination of tools for me.

(more…)

 
  1. Caveat! I have set my Microsoft User Data folder outside of my Dropbox folder for two reasons: (1) It is a very large folder 7 GB+ and (2) Since it is my email database it updates very frequently. The Mail.app database is in the user/library folder so I do not have that backed up either. [↩]

A scholarly reading list

Sep 18th, 2010
by Christian Brady.
3 comments

I was put on to this by The Unofficial Apple Weblog and will quote most of the story below. The gist is that National Association of Scholars felt that many of the books recommended for summer reading by colleges and universities just weren’t up to snuff. The result is their own reading list, one that they felt was more suitable: Read These Instead: Better Books for Next Year’s Beaches. TUAW’s contribution was to provide links to those available in free ePub format, many I have read, but others have been on my to-read list for quite some time.

Many of these titles are freely downloadable in ePub format and can be synced to iBooks for your portable reading pleasure. Here’s a quick run-down of some of the recommended books, along with quick links to iBooks-compatible downloads.

 
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