Steve Jobs, Hero to Humanities Profs

He repeatedly declares that good technology requires the liberal arts, to global audiences.

Now (okay, couple weeks back, I’m slow) he shoots down the classic student entitlement whine.

Student:

Because I have had such good experiences as a college student using Apple products, I was incredibly surprised to find Apple’s Media Relations Department to be absolutely unresponsive to my questions, which (as I had repeatedly told them in voicemail after voicemail) are vital to my academic grade as a student journalist.

Jobs:

Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade. Sorry.

Jobs is a wacko, and there are plenty of days I hate Apple despite being a die-hard Mac user, but you gotta appreciate.

 

How Apple Changes Markets

So, maybe the Kindle beats the iPad as an ebook reader (although, at $140, I could justify a Kindle now and still buy myself a second-generation iPad next year), but with the iPad, things like this are available to a mass audience with a couple clicks:

One example is the ‘Enhanced Edition’ of Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein, a chronicle of our 37th President. The book contains the full text of the book first published in 2008. It also includes 27 videos of the former President and newsreels that put those turbulent years into perspective.

Or things like this:

Civil War: America’s Epic Struggle (US$4.99) from MultiEducator Inc. is a full history course in an iPad and iPhone app. It contains at least as much information as most textbooks on the Civil War at a fraction of the cost, while adding elements that no textbook can. There are 24 multimedia presentations, some as long as nine minutes, a nice selection of music popular during the Civil War, and a wonderful navigation system that just makes sense.

 

Jinx

About a day after posting how I used my phone more than ever before, I went to slide it into my purse while leaving the house, missed the pocket, and dropped it about 4.5 feet onto my concrete stoop, where it bounced down onto the next step.

Oops.

No case, either.

The glass shattered.

But the phone still works fine, and the glass shattered in place, it didn’t fall out of the frame. I used it, even, although it felt a little prickly. I immediately drove to the AT&T store and bought a plastic film protector (set of three). As the glass continued to spiderweb, producing little shards, I had to take off the first film and put on the next one, but so far that’s holding up.

Not very comfortable to read on, though.

I’m just hoping I can hold out until the release of the next iPhone (June? July? August?) this way….

I think I’ll buy a case for the next one.

 

Notable Quotations

when you have an ecosystem populated by talented people who make really good stuff, it’s a nice place to be.

Written about Apple, but applicable to many things, including an academic department (in which case “make really good stuff” includes teaching).

Such a weak blogger these days—old quotations are all I have for you, at the moment.

 

I Have Used My iPhone More in Three Weeks of Sewing…

Standing in a fabric store, researching which type of satin is best for pillowcases, how much satin I need, how to pick good thread.

Taking quick and easy shots in the process of sewing. I need to do more of this, I like to document things in the making.

Shots of pretty brocades in the fabric store to send to my friend so I can learn her tastes before making her a gift.

Shots of fabrics I want to make something from someday. I anticipate a lot of A-line or full skirts. Trying to figure out how I could make beautiful raw silk an everyday fabric, since I don’t need formal clothing.

Syncing my custom Fabrics, Projects, Patterns relational database to the phone so that I can continue to add pictures, ideas, notes on the go. In fact, I find myself adding pictures on the phone, because it’s way easier than using my laptop.

• • •

Unfortunately, I see a lot of rationale here for moving up to a phone with a better camera when Apple (presumably) releases one this summer. Maybe I can hold out another year. Planning to jailbreak after my warranty is up and the new one is out—that should help.

 

Small Technical Trick

So, the key to managing information is having it available when you need it, but not letting it clutter your mind or life until then.

A potential approach, for the geeky-minded Mac user. If you’ve ever wondered what use Automator or AppleScript might be, here’s one way I use them. Even then, this post is probably really boring.

I keep notes on the projects and photogifts I am working on in iPhoto, in a quick-to-launch TextEdit file. I never need these notes unless I am actually in iPhoto, doing stuff.

So, I made an Automator workflow that opens my iPhoto Notes file, and saved it in the script menu that always sits in the main Mac menubar.

So—information accessible in two clicks when I need it; but entirely out of the way and not cluttering my OS-wide Favorites menu since I don’t need it that often. Nothing for me to remember about where I saved a file or what I named it (or what words I used in it—full-text search isn’t really the end-all, be-all of file organization, if you ask me). To keep the script menu from becoming cluttered, I saved the workflow in username/Library/Scripts/Applications/iPhoto. Putting it in an application-named folder inside Applications means it will only show up in the script menu when iPhoto is active. (Huh. Maybe you’d think an Apple application might have its own script menu, to make it easier to use AppleScript? Apparently not. Thank you, Apple.)

This is Microsoft’s idea—it’s my attempt to replicate the Work menu in MS Word, which lets you pin certain files that you want quick access to, but that you don’t access enough to keep them in the Recent Documents menu. My Work menu generally consists of my current syllabi, and the Extended CV file where I enter every little thing I’ve done re teaching workshops, showing up at a prospective students day, etc.

The other use I’ve found for this approach is reminding myself to what size I want to crop a photo for my blog header, information I need maybe every 3 months (except for using it 3 times in the last week or so). For this one I used an actual script in Script Editor rather than an Automator workflow (thank you, Apple, for doing a half-assed job with Automator so it isn’t nearly as useful as it could be).

tell application “Acorn”
display dialog “Ocean Mist Theme, default header size is 736×229.”
end tell

“Display dialog” pops up a little dialog instead of launching TextEdit to show me a file, a wee bit quicker for short bits of information.

(I don’t understand how it is that Acorn 1 understands “display dialog” but doesn’t seem to be scriptable such that I could just automate the resize and the crop setting, but okay.)

 

Mac Users: Cheap Software

The Mac software ecosystem has a habit of doing bundles—nine or ten programs for $50 or so. It can be a good way to find new programs or cheaply pick up some programs you think might be useful.

Anyhow, two are running right now, available for the next week or so—check them out.

MacUpdate (rock bottom price on some big expensive programs)

The Mac Bundles (especially has some very good programs for customizing how the system works)

 

Merging or Combining PDFs

I am working through the transition period with a new laptop (macbookpro).

I was really excited about merging PDFs in the new version of Preview included with Leopard (OS 10.5), but:

Apple’s PR showed us a clever way to merge PDFs, which apparently isn’t documented anywhere. Open two PDFs in Preview, then choose View | Show Sidebar. When Sidebar pops up, just drag the pages of one PDF to the Sidebar of the other and hit Save. The two are now merged into one PDF doc.

Well, that’s a godawful hassle the minute you get over two documents, or don’t have a huge screen. And how do you make Preview show Sidebar for all open windows at once? No wonder they didn’t bother to put it in Help.

I’ll stick with Combine PDFs, thanks.

Incidentally, the task at hand is sorting, cropping, merging, and converting the high-res tiffs from the digitized volume I got from the archives. I am using Graphic Converter (which came free with my old powerbook) for the cropping and converting, so that I have, for instance, a lovely single PDF document of a petition to the king, nicely zoomable at need.

 

A Visit to the Eye Doctor

Still blind. But not as blind as I thought. Only about 20/30 at present (ETA: that’s with my glasses on), and a slight uptick in my prescriptions.

Problems with dry eye, exacerbated by wearing contacts. She said that it wasn’t that my vision has gotten so much worse, but that the dryness in my eyes made the light fly away and therefore signs in the distance were really fuzzy (I think it made sense when she said it—but it doesn’t now. There was definitely something about light involved. And I was definitely able to correlate the sudden deterioration in my vision (which really had me worried) to suddenly switching to wearing contacts for a few hours every day, so the ability to see is definitely tied to the dry eye, which is going to require six months on Restasis, at least. But she said I should also have my doctor check for thyroid and other things that could be causing dry eye).

This may explain why I felt totally able to read some road signs in the fog driving home. The light didn’t fly away?

She gave me a PSA: don’t try to read books on an iPhone. You can turn it to landscape, dial back the brightness, and take an eye break every twenty minutes, but it still just isn’t a good idea (even though she does it too sometimes: “is that Stanza“?). She recommends the rumored Kindle 2, if I must have ebooks (I don’t usually think of my eye doctor as a tech nerd—the office uses shiny silver iMacs, too).

Up next: the joy of picking new frames.

 

Makes Me Wanna Cry*

I’m sure Pixelmator’s a nice program and all, but I really don’t like light-on-dark color schemes. But you know, it’s just for editing photos, I’m not reading, so I guess I can handle it.

But then I launched Pixelmator help and saw this:

I will switch from Mac to Windows if Apple goes all light-on-dark, I swear.

* Actually, i think my eyes are abnormal such that light-on-dark is harder for me than other people, because this is a crazy overrreaction. Although my tendency with all photo-editing programs is to get very frustrated. I once spent about an hour in Adobe’s help learning all about how to use the Crop tool, but not how to actually turn it on (press and hold a different tool). In fact, with Pixelmator, I had been unable to find the Crop tool because the gray-on-black toolbar scheme made it too dark to be visible. Function over form, y’all.

 

All of the Early Adopter Downside, None of the Early Adopter Cred, Part II

Yes, I bought an iPhone exactly two months and a week before they announced the shiny new hotness.

However, it’s not so bad. I do get all the software updates that let me run new apps and such (free updates, will have to pay for some apps). And since all the developers have been testing against the old iPhones, I think the apps will be supporting it for a while.

The main new hardware features are 3G wireless and GPS. Neither are brand-new functions, just improved versions of existing functions. GPS I’m not particularly bothered about—the phone has basic locator functions, and apps like this don’t really appeal to me. 3G is a different cellular network—much faster for downloading web and email,* but eats more battery when talking. Slow data is aggravating, but the apps that will come out will let me do more things offline to work around slow downloads.

I was not expecting the big price drop, and was a bit chagrined about that.** But the money is about a wash, it turns out. Apple dropped the price by $200, but AT&T increased the price of the required data plan (admittedly, people will be downloading more data at a faster speed, and I’m getting less for my cheaper data plan).*** So I spent an extra $200 in April, but save $240 over the next two years. Which makes me feel a lot better.****

I’m hearing mentions of improved audio, which I’d be a bit sad to miss. The (not very good) camera is said to be unchanged.

But they changed the headphone jack, so if I want better headphones, I better buy them fast, because companies will probably stop selling the v1 sets pretty soon.

* The keynote did a test using the National Geographic website, and came up with iPhone 3G at 21 seconds, and iPhone EDGE at 59 seconds. So naturally I tested too. My iPhone EDGE didn’t take 59 seconds to load that busy site. About 40-45 seconds.

** I was expecting similar prices but bigger capacity—e.g., $500 for 32GB instead of 16GB—and knew I didn’t really care about capacity. Guessed wrong.

*** And stopped sharing revenue with Apple. So, AT&T seems to be racking in a lot more money? Or are they paying Apple the price difference on the phone, as is common with mobiles? Of course, they just put more capital into their 3G network, and it’s definitely going to get hammered, as a lot of people are going to buy now.

**** I’d feel better still if I had gone to the AT&T store just one day earlier than I did and grabbed one of the last half-price refurbished phones, but oh well. That’ll teach me to think it’s okay to buy a birthday present for self two days after my actual birthday.

 

Mac Users Tired of EndNote?

Bookends is 50% off until midnight eastern today (Thursday).

EndNote equivalent, but Mac-only, so no sharing with other EndNote users or the Endnote Web abilities (whatever those are). Already works with Word 2008. You’ve got a few hours to test the demo. I’ve played with it, and it looks good, but never gotten around to switching because I fail to put the necessary energy into these programs anyhow, despite having paid for EndNote three or four times.

 

All of the Early Adopter Downside, None of the Early Adopter Cred

I bought an iPhone! Yeah, I know, stupid. They’re going to release a 32gb, 3G-network phone by August at the latest, probably at the same price. Might be May, June, or July, depending on who you ask. And syncing with Entourage, which I use, seems pretty screwy right now.

But, seriously? I bought my last phone in 2003. It was the free Nokia (which, actually, I prefer using to the free Nokia I just got). The friendly man at AT&T laughed at me when I showed it to him. People point and laugh when I pull out the antenna. I don’t know how to text. Mysterious messages appear on my phone and I call people back. I kept breaking my voicemail. I really needed a new phone.

My only regret? That I didn’t buy it in February just after the Macworld updates.

 

Frustrating

Last weekend I tested Aperture, RapidWeaver, and Sandvox, all in an effort to deal with photos. None were satisfactory.

I hated the user interface in Aperture, RapidWeaver’s lack of real-time editing was too annoying, and the limitations in the Sandvox trial version meant I couldn’t really test what I needed to. Nothing worth leaving iPhoto and iWeb for.

On the upside, I did find a great free plug-in for creating webpage slideshows out of iPhoto. And, I’ve got four or five slideshows of my cats.

 

I Should Switch to Windows

Interrupting this scheduled outage to say, “my god, the web is ugly on a PC.” I bet I’d waste a lot less time surfing if I used Windows. I even hate the way my own blog looks.