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Question 340 of 365: Do we hate paper?
The yin: I can now print from my iPhone.
The yang: Google Books is ready to serve up more free ebooks than I could ever hope to read in my lifetime.
I printed something that wasn’t a contract to be signed for the first time in months. I did it as a lark. I wanted to see if I could print from my iPhone. Now that I have that working, I was trying to figure out under which situation I would actually do such a thing. I no longer have to print board passes. I meet primarily online. I edit collaboratively as much as possible. The unprofessionally printed page is losing almost all context in my life. But, this is no big surprise. I knew that the printer was waining as a resource for my working life for years. And yet, I am finding myself energized by my zeal for getting rid of it. I find myself more and more excited about “going paperless.”
Instead of drawing diagrams on napkins, I get out my iPad and make them hyperlined mind maps. Instead of writing out things on sticky notes or even on the back of my hand, I jot myself a quick email or I just speak into my phone and have it transcribed. It is almost ridiculous just how little I want to do with paper.
I still have yet to read an entire book on a digital device.
I still have yet to find a way of actually taking notes on top of text in a way that makes sense as much as using a pen and literally writing in the margins.
I still can’t get over the smell of a bookstore or the feeling of feeling the amount of pages I have left as I try not to look at the clock because I know it is way to late to stay up reading.
I have yet to have a transcendent reading experience in a digital format.
But, I can no longer feel good about printing or writing things out longhand. I no longer can see the notebooks that I used to be so proud of as things that will outlive me. With the sheer amount of information out there, it makes me entirely afraid that no one will ever have the time to go back through the things I have scrawled on paper and make sense of them (least of all me).
Perhaps that is it.
Maybe in the age of permanence and ever-presence, I am so fearful that by putting myself on paper, I am setting myself up to be forgotten. If I don’t take digital notes, they don’t really exist. If I don’t tweet what is going on, it never happened.
I feel like paper is like the Neverland of text. It makes you forget what is real. It lets you transport yourself away from the realities and distractions of all of our digital existence. It is beautiful and unique, but it is fleeting.
Perhaps we are coming to the point in the story of text in which we have to grow up. We can escape from time to time, but printing from the iPhone isn’t going to bring back our joyous moments of forgetting responsibility and working on characters that will never see the light of day.
Paper is precious, and I hate it for that.
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Question 206 of 365: Where is the open book?
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Every time I put my son down for bed, he sees fit to be totally uninterested without a good amount of singing of songs and reapplying blankets. In between each one of these tries at sleep during which he may or may not actually close his eyes, I head over to the bookshelf with all of my old novels on it. As my son considers sleep for the twelfth time, I open up The Great Gatsby or if I’m feeling slightly more ambitious, Plato’s Republic. I read through all of the passages that I have highlighted or notated, which is quite a bit.
Each of the stars next to a given paragraph is enough for me to jump right back in to the person that I was when I first read the book. And as my son wakes up and goes back down with severe regularity, I keep on coming back to the fact that I have absolutely no way to retrieve those moments of insight without opening up each one of those volumes and reading that exact underlining, with scribbles that only I would understand.
Every time I stumble upon something that meant a great deal to me in a book I haven’t read for years, I feel this pang of regret that I didn’t read it on a digital device with syncable notes and sharable annotations. I look at a lot of the works that I read as an english major and how many of them are in the public domain. Each one of those I could have downloaded as an ePub file and opened up on an iPad or Kindle, had they only existed.
I know the intimacy of books is desirable, but sometimes I just wish that I could export those intimate moments and savor them more regularly. I don’t want to have the parts of me that I left on those pages get left behind. I want them at my fingertips.
And I know I could use Evernote to scan in or take pictures of those notes, but I really think that misses the point. If I am only copying over the pages that mattered then, there is almost no hope that I will read the entire work again and discover new things about the author and myself. I want the whole context of these notations. I want the whole story of why I starred entire sections. I want to search through and find the threads that bind together all of my braces hanging in the margins like unfinished picture frames ready to be hung in my digital memory.
I believe that this kind of work will happen when I am not responsible for digitizing the content itself, but only the annotations. I mean that all of the books I read as a student must be available in Google Books or some other easily searchable format. Then I want q scanner that only looks in the margins and maps it to a page number and a paragraph.
It would look something like the formula that a good friend of mine wrote in high school for knowing what page number he should be on in his very different version of Jude the Obscure. The class set was larger print, but my friend’s copy was an antique. He used his graphing calculator to concoct a formula for going back and forth between his book and ours. It worked flawlessly. I want the same thing for my notes. I want a way to map the words I wrote with the ones that my famous counterparts penned. Only then will I be able to look at the little diagrams I made up in the 9th grade with anything but nostalgia and regret.
If I want my past to live into my ore went I need a way to map it to something living. All of the books on that bookshelf are dead. Without commenting and liking or metadata, those words are not going to assemble themselves into something of value. And I want to find that value again, if for no other reason than to see exacltly who I was and how all of that has changed now that I am reading exerpts wle my son sits in his room, screaming because the door is stuck on the inside.
Because, it has changed, believe me.
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Question 194 of 365: What should we brandish?
I could have left the -ish off the question and had it be something completely different. I could have talked about all of the ways in which we need to frame our ideas and link to them and craft a language around them. I could have gone into what it takes to brand a concept from brainstorm to launch. But, that I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to talk about how to massage an idea into what will eventually become. I want to talk about the things we wield.
Our weapons of choice.
What is it that we use above all else to coerce others into doing what we want. We may not be proud of it, or carry it around without a sense of power and responsibility. But, we do it all the same. We pull it out when others question our authority or passion or motives. It becomes our signature and the threat behind which we can hide.
Most often, my weapon is that of obscure expertise. While having never been formally trained on much of anything to do with technology, it so happens that I can wield the most inane details about social networks, web applications, or learning management systems. People come to me believing that the problem they have is so intricate and difficult that they would not be able to parse it out themselves. When, in fact, there are very few things that I troubleshoot or tutorialize that could not be figured out with some simple trial and error. And yet, when I figure them out, there is a sense that I have brandished a fine tool and precisely killed off the beast that was plaguing them.
There is also, hidden within each request for help, a certain fear that everything could come crashing down at any moment with a flick of my wrist. It is a fear of unknown knowledge and unfathomable technologies. If the iPad is magical to people because they can’t understand how it works, then I am the biggest wizard around because everything starts from that singular lack of understanding.
I’m just not sure it is a good weapon to brandish. I’m not sure that being a wizard is what the world needs.
I feel like it might be better just to waive a flag, a rallying cry for everyone else that tells of my quest for the best insight and connections possible. Wouldn’t that allow for less coercion? Wouldn’t that allow for more stories and less commands?
I am under no illusion that people who do not have critical information at their fingertips are in need of some help. It just makes more sense to create the environment with flags instead of guns. That way, no one gets hurt and every time the wind shifts, we will know which way it is going. With a gun, you can only stand in the way of wind and see the everything pass you by as you try to point and shoot at nothing.
25 Killer (iPad) Apps
- Image via Wikipedia
I have been putting this post off for a while now, but I am finally compelled to write about all of the apps that I am using on a regular basis on my iPad. I am compelled by just how many conversations I have had about doing more than just consumption with the device. The following list of Apps are what make the iPad essential to me. They are what make it more than just a toy:
Before I go too deep, here are the apps that I have on my iPad right now (While there are a great many Jailbroken apps that I would recommend, I think that it would be somewhat counterproductive to highlight those in this blog post because the vast majority of users are never going to open up their device as I have.):
- Accuradio – This is the one and only radio service (other than the amazing NPR of course, which has been downloaded so many times for iPhone and iPad that it hardly needs mentioning in this list) that I have found which I do not find myself skipping through songs I have already heard or artists that I could care less about. I think it is because it is being curated by real people rather than by an algorithm. The stations vary widely, but my favorite is Future Perfect Radio.
- IM+ Lite – This is the best way to chat on the iPad (Multiple sessions at any given time, push notification, etc) I use Google Talk all of the time on my laptop, but this was the only reliable way to continue to do so on my iPad. And with backgrounding (either on a jailbroken iPad or in the iOS 4 which is forthcoming), you will never again miss out on a conversation that you could have taken part in.
- Atomic Browser – This is one of the only apps I actually paid for (99 cents). I love the ability to choose tabs over Safari’s odd pagination system. I also love that I can change what the user agent is (this means that I make a website believe I’m running Internet Explorer or another desktop browser). This gives me the opportunity to see the desktop version of every website if I wish to do so, rather than the more limited versions of mobile sites.
- Air Sketch Free – Killer. This app allows me to draw on the iPad and have it display on any computer (or projector) that is on the same wifi network. This means that I can present without cords as well as I can allow everyone in a room to see the same thing that I see. Just awesome.
- DejaPlay – I have written about this app previously because I think that it is wonderful. It is the best way for me to view videos that my friends and colleagues are sharing on twitter and facebook. It compiles every link that is shared and puts them into an elegant video display. Rather than wasting time down the rabit hole that is YouTube, I can watch my network curate my video library in real time.
- GoodReader – Another pay app (also 99 cents) makes the iPad into an uploading and downloading machine. While the app was created for the purposes of viewing big documents, I pretty much exclusively use it for downloading files uploading them to other sites. Here is my favorite use case: I open up GoodReader and pull a file from my e-mail and put it up on Dropbox and then share it out with everyone I wish to. Another thing I do a lot is upload things to FTP sites and web servers that I maintain. This means that I don’t have to wait to get to my laptop to update a file. I also can get access to all of the files on my iPad from my computers without having to use a USB cord. (In fact, I haven’t synced my iPad, ever. I activated it once and that was it. I haven’t seen the need.)
- CloudBrowse – Although this is becoming less valuable to me as I find other interesting workarounds, this is still the only way to really get flash or Google Docs to play nicely on the iPad. Useful, if a bit crippled without a paid account.
- Dropbox – I have become more and more dependent upon this product to sync everything I need. Whenever I need to look at a file or send a link to someone, I just jump into the app and grab it. What else can I say… it just works.
- Sundry Notes – Best App. Seriously. It’s uses are incredibly far reaching. The only thing I can compare it to is Keynote, Smart Notebook, Word, and Skitch all rolled into one. From this app, I can take handwritten notes, typed notes, screenshots from any webpage, insert equations, and do voice recordings of what is going on. This app is ridiculously useful for meetings, brainstorming, presenting, and everything in-between. The export to PDF works great and you can even view your notes online if you want to sync with their service. Oh, and you can annotate PDF’s from your computer if you wanted to do that by syncing them in iTunes. Crazy awesome.
- Idea Sketch – A free and well laid out mind mapping software. Brainstorming in here is a pleasure. Export works great and you can even let other people edit your brainstorms if you e-mail them along.
- Adobe Ideas – The drawings and writing that you can do in this app are incredible compared to pretty much everything else out there. This is mostly because the app translates your jagged strokes into smooth vector graphics. My favorite part, though, is the enormous drawing area that you can zoom in and out of to draw and write in detail. I guess I would most compare it to an iPad version of the Prezi interface. Slick.
- Google Earth – I thought about not including this in the list because of how used it already is, but I think that if you have only used Google Earth on a laptop you are missing out on some of the best interactive learning that is available anywhere. I have spent hours just observing the differences between cities by zooming in and out on Denver and Kansas City. Feeling as though you can control the entire world is just cool.
- Web Projector – One more 99 cent app, here. Although I use my jailbroken capability to project anything on the iPad from the VGA cord, this is the cheapest way I have found to project anything that you can access from a webpage. It works very well and gets updated frequently.
- FeedlerRSS – Other than the web interface for Google Reader, this is my favorite (free) way to read the blogs I follow. It works well and lets you get through quite a number of posts in short order. My favorite thing about it is that I can actually see the blog posts in their original context, which is missing a lot of times when I just read it on Google’s site.
- Caster Free – I can’t tell you how cool this app is. You may just have to see it for yourself. It is a single stop for creating podcasts from multiple recordings, mixing them, processing them and then posting them to either an FTP site, a blog, or even Dropbox. I can’t believe that this one is free, actually. This is content creation at its finest on the iPad. (I know that AudioBoo and other services do this well, but you don’t own the files like you can here.)
- Story Kit – While this isn’t the most polished app in the list, it is one of the most interesting ways to create a book. It would work well with younger folks as well as with very simple content.
- Gooey – I use Google Docs to take notes quite often, or to leave myself reminders. This is a great way to add a Google Doc that is a quick note. There really aren’t a lot of features other than a pretty interface with this one, but I really like being able to save a quick note that syncs directly to Google Docs. I also like that it is free. Watch out, though, some versions of this app do crash. Good thing I only need it for a few minutes at a time.
- Granimator – Possibly the easiest, most creative art app. Basically, you paint with great drawings. It is meant to create backgrounds, but I think that it makes for a great backdrop for note taking or brainstorming. It also definitely gets my creative juices flowing to see someone else’s creation. Just cool.
- PaperDesk LT – If you just happen to have a VGA cord lying around for your iPad and are interested in projecting some drawing, text creation, or other brainstorming activities this is the perfect free app. I really like the way that you can save sessions for later to keep on projecting what you were working on even after you leave the app.
- Photopad – The best free image editor. All of the editing features that you would expect from a desktop editor with the ability to save right back to your Camera Roll. I can’t tell you how many screenshots I have rotated and cropped in here.
- uStream Viewer – Although we can’t record or stream from the iPad with the current version (although I swear you can see where the camera is supposed to go), I absolutely love being able to attend events in real time with chat. This is the only non-native iPad app in the list, but I think that it really works well in pixel doubled mode.
- iDraft – Adobe Ideas does pretty much everything I need from a drawing program and Sundry Notes does pretty much everything I need from a note taking application. So, what do I use iDraft for? Well, to make pretty diagrams and pdf notes with multiple pages. The simple pencil in this app makes it look like I am using a calligraphy pen, with the ability to make thin and thick marks by changing the speed of my gesture. The words I make in this app are nothing short of beautiful.
- JabberPad – Possibly the coolest concept for any app on the list. This app uses open protocols (including a jabber server) to create a collaborative whiteboard with any iPad on the same wifi network. Not only that, but you can chat with the other people in the same whiteboard. I can’t wait until you can contribute using your computer on the same network as well. Brilliant.
- Analytics (It looks like this is no longer free. I wouldn’t pay 6.99 for it, but it is pretty cool.) – While this isn’t really creating or consuming, it is really nice. This allows me to see my Google Analytics account (or at least the most important info to me) on the iPad. I love just taking a quick glance at how the different websites and blogs I maintain are doing and what I might need to change or highlight.
- Desktop Connect (pricey at 11.99, but worth it) – There are many free versions of VNC viewers (log into your desktop or laptop from the iPad) for the iPad, but this is the only one I have found that lets me login to a Mac from anywhere (at least for this cheap). This is because they have a desktop software called Easy Connect that actually authenticates using your Google Account. This means that not only can you see your desktop computer from your iPad no matter where you are in the world, but you can also see any of your friend’s (according to your Google Talk account) computers if they are online. They will have to give you access, but I think that the idea of actually seeing the network of your friend’s computers is stunning.
Well, that is it. That is my list of why the iPad matters right now. Again, there are some missing things that I need to Jailbreak my iPad for, but the ones I mentioned above are reason enough to buy and use an iPad and never look back. The iPad is not a device for mass consumption. It is a device like any other, completely dependent upon what you actually want to do with it. I want to create with it, so that is what I do. While not all of the apps above speak specifically to this need to create, they all inspire me to create more and better. Call me a fan boy if you must, but I believe in creating with whatever is available and it just so happens that I have an iPad.
Question 177 of 365: What is plan b?
- Image via Wikipedia
Preparation is something I had to learn. While I have always planned, true preparation has always eluded me. I mean to say that the ability some people have for seeing the way things will work out before they do has never been my gift. I have to play my way through everything and push the boundaries in order to get at what is possible. I have to see which questions get asked and which conversations are essential before it all makes sense.
That is why when streaming three concurrent sessions at a conference with two video feeds and one audio feed each, I new that everything would eventually work out. I knew that there would be a plan b that I could put in place. I just didn’t know what that plan b was until I saw it.
Originally we were going to use rented powerful laptops, but we didn’t have the right converters for our video feed. Then we were going to use our Boinx TV mixer to give the pictures nice overlays, but our own laptops weren’t capable of handling all of the multimedia. We were going to have the audio pumped directly to the mixer but the Ustream broadcaster wasn’t having any of it. Ultimately, we had a great stream being pumped out with both the powerpoints and the live video. This is super nerdy and all, but I think that the plan b we came up with was exactly what we wanted in the first place, but it took us a few revisions to get there.
It was the process of finding the plan b that was actually most engaging to me. Knowing that things would work the first time is not interesting to me. It is only through troubleshooting and creating a new solution that I feel valuable. It is about the workaround and the new workflow that everything comes together and I truly learn something.
Which is why I am much more inclined to give my children and the other people that I work with a tool that isn’t specificially meant for the task at hand. Perhaps I don’t have the right one, but more likely I know that it is the process of figuring out just what the tool can do that will bring about the greatest change.
People say that the iPad isn’t a creation device. By making it into one, I am learning more than if I just accept that limitation.
Some say that blogging is dead. By figuring out how to make my writing alive and valuable to me, I am able to find it’s relevance.
The conventional wisdom is that boomers aren’t interested in a networked workplace (Personal Learning Networks and the like). The plan b is in figuring out where we can go from a place of resistance.
I don’t believe that we are ever done planning for the future, and that includes creating a perpetual plan B. I want to make sure that all of my actions are in the creation of the best possible option for what comes next.
We are not creating the first version of the future. Everything is a revision, a second and third and fourth attempt at getting things right. So long as we keep at it, I know that it will be everything that we need. It may not be what we hoped for, envisioned or prepared for. It will be what we deserve and what we work for. It will be our best plan b. I promise.
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Question 166 of 365: How can we scrape better?
- Image via Wikipedia
I guess I might as well go on the record for stating that the future of networks is in scraping. I know that some people are calling it the social graph and the power of the connections and links and liking and all of that, but I think that it is much better to just call it scraping. Turn on the full twitter or facebook firehose if you have access, but it doesn’t mean anything unless one person sees significance in the data that is being scraped and served up to them.
Just so I am clear, scraping is something that is done with the links part of sharing. It is done with the location part of publishing, the metadata about all of the things that we are passing around. It is in the description of the thing rather than the thing itself.
The benefit of such a thing was made real to me by a single product called DejaPlay. This video pretty much sums up its features:
Suffice it to say, though, this iPad app makes my network real again. I can sit back and watch the things that all of my friends and colleagues have been talking about and I can finally engage in the process of catching up on the inspiration that everyone around me has been calling upon. This app simply scrapes all of the youtube and other video links from your facebook friends and twitter followers and then creates a video playlist for you to enjoy. It does this one thing incredibly well. So well, in fact, that it makes me never want to click on a link again without it being served up to me in a better format.
Twitter Times does this as well with text-based links (as does Google Reader and Delicious to a lesser extent). It creates a fully functioning newsletter for all of the links that have come through your twitter feed, but I am afraid that this just isn’t enough after watching DejaPlay work its magic. I don’t want a list anymore. I want a tactile exploration through what is going on within my network. I want to explore and have it autopopulate as new information becomes available. I want to dig deeper into what people are reading and watching and see the context for everything that they are sharing. I want to know who the people are that are creating the work I am consuming, and more than that, I want an elegant interface that shows me the path that I have taken down the rabbit hole. While DejaPlay doesn’t currently let me retweet the videos I am watching, I have received direct correspondence from them that it is coming in the next major release. In doing so, the experience would be complete: Network, Scrape, Consume, Contribute.
That is what the process should always be, not to put to fine a point on it. We network to create a space worthy of inhabiting. We find people who are a part of the conversations that we wish to be involved in. We connect to them and start thinking through the problems that we want to solve with their help. We scrape (or should start scraping, anyway) because we know that the value of their contributions is not simply in having them close at hand, but rather in knowing that they are carefully curating our library of knowledge. We have selected them in the networking phase and they are providing us with dividends simply by choosing them. Then we must consume, ravenously, everything that we can from our network. We know that it is good and so we must read and watch and absorb all of the good things that others have to offer us. This type of consumption, unlike our daily bodily intake, never leaves us feeling full. The more that we consume, the more we want to take more in. We make the connections that were always there waiting for us to make them real. Our final step is to contribute back to the network. We curate and add to other people’s libraries. But, now we need to make sure that we are remixing and recontextualizing. Here is where the future is going to come in handy.
Our stuff must get more scrape-able. When we share things, we must share them knowing full well that their contexts must be shifted a hundred times for our network. We must realize that the lists and posts that we have conjured up are meaningless without the ability to dissect them.
Here is what I want:
I would like the ability to see all of the people that I have carefully chosen as a part of my network and I would like to be able to choose what kind of media I would like to scrape from their various shared places. I would then like to be able to flick from their profiles (using my hands, of course) their videos into one corner of my screen. I would like to be able to choose certain people in my network and flick their blog posts into another corner. Then I want to flick the podcasts of those who I know to be quite eloquent with the spoken word (or have an ear for it anyway) into a third corner. The fourth corner I will save for images of those who seem to have an uncanny knack for finding the best arguments through pictures.
I want to be able to play a podcast while looking at the images and then comment on each one directly as I go through. I want to be able to watch a video and then step into the twitter conversation that it sparked. I want to be able to see the blog posts highlighted with everyone’s annotations and then copy and paste my favorite parts with a few of the images that I found and link it together with the videos that are going around in the network as well.
This is what scraping will do for us in the not so distant future. We will be able to remix any type of content into a new one with as few steps in between as possible.
We will know we have reached the point of truly enlightened scraping when we no longer have to care where things are posted (facebook, twitter, buzz, flickr, etc.). We will simply see the people in our network and we will be able to literally grab ahold of what they have shared and put it to our own uses. This will be the future, and this will be now, too.
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Question 154 of 365: What are fences good for?
Nearly all of the houses in my neighborhood have fences, many of which are in severe need of repair. They are coming down because they were all built in the early 80′s. So, every few days I see new fenceposts being dug and placed. Pretty soon, all of the fences will be new again and we the peer pressure will mount on any house that doesn’t pony up.
But, whenever I see a new fence I am reminded of the Robert Frost poem about good fences making good neighbors (or not, if you read the poem according to the author’s intent). The fences that are around our houses are serving to separate us and to ensure our isolation, and for the most part, we are all in agreement that they are a good idea. We know that we are demarking the land that is ours versus the land that is yours. It isn’t egalitarian; it is ownership.
We know that we will never be as good of friends or find the kind of close community that places without fences seem to be able to achieve, but we are good with that. Until we learned that the people who live behind us are the most loving and amazing family. The husband and wife are genuinely attracted to one another and the three children play together and with their parents in a real and wholesome way. There are fits and there is yelling, but they love each other just the same. And my family and their family anticipate living in these two houses for years to come. We are looking forward to that, too.
So, what else would we do, but start planning to put a gate or a enormous slide between our two houses, circumventing the fence in the hopes of bringing our two families even more together. We have decided that it is more important to have the ability to roam freely and rely on one another for things than it is to preserve all of the privacy that was originally envisioned.
And that is the way that I feel closed platforms like the iPad are moving. In the beginning, all of the apps worked on their own and could only speak to their own data. This was great for focusing your attention on a single thing (this goes for many facebook applications and even Google web apps as well), but it was terrible for portability and ease of use. Now, though we are starting to see a sort of convergence where apps can open up files within another app. For example, the mail app now allows you to open productivity documents in any program that allows for editing of those documents. Apps like Documents to Go allow you to edit Google Docs and then sync them back up or upload them to another service like Dropbox. We are moving away from the default of emailing yourself objects and moving much more toward the requirement of syncing objects with all of the things that need access.
All closed systems need to be able to do both. I get the benefit of a neighborhood of applications or houses, with walls seoarating them. This allows each one to be the best house or app it can be. But the value of a neighborhood is when people come together. Be it through slides or garage sales, we all need to find those others that can add value to our existence. The fences are good for preserving privacy, but they are terrible at creating new spaces or relationships.
I want both. I want to be able to have an unique identity and also find a way to see how that idenity fits in to the greater picture. Without the grater picture, there really isn’t much left but being a shut-in without the capacity for collaboration or knowledge sharing of any kind. As enticing as that sounds sometimes, I don’t think it is in anyone’s long term interest,
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Question 126 of 365: Is multi-tasking noise?
- Image by natala007 via Flickr
People have been up in arms since the iPhone came out that it doesn’t allow multi-tasking. In fact, I was one of those people with arms outstretched. I couldn’t understand why any company as visionary as Apple would want to limit their devices to only doing one thing at a time. At any given moment, I have at least 20 programs running and another 20 tabs open in Chrome. This is the way that I work. It is how I communicate with other easily and how I push the flow of data along. Now though, I am beginning to question whether or not this multi-tasking mania is really good for my creative prospects.
I think I get why Apple has resisted multi-tasking so much on their devices. They wanted each one to provide an experience for their users that was unlike anything else they have seen. They wanted to make sure that each app downloaded would feel as though it were made just for them, and not as some distraction for other distractions from real work. As I have gotten used to working on the iPad, I have realized just how powerful it is that I don’t have twitter up while I am writing. I realize just how intriguing answering an e-mail becomes when I’m not distracted by downloads or multiple tabs that keep on redirecting my attention.
On the desktop, I set up tasks in separate programs. I start one and then jump to another while that one loads. I sometimes forget about the first one until I am closing out of things a few hours later. On the iPad, I don’t feel that rush. Everything is fast and the apps don’t work together at all. Ordinarily, I would be frustrated, but at the moment, I like the fact that I am drawing a vector illustration in one app, taking a screenshot, rotating it a second app, then sending it to my blog with a third. Each task becomes sacred. It becomes more time with the process of making something great. On a desktop, it is all done for you. You don’t feel as though you have accomplished something.
And, I want to accomplish something. I want to take my time editing and producing and completely forget that there are other tasks that need to be done. For the moment, there is just one. I will follow it to its logical conclusion and then move on to the next.
It lets my mind be something it doesn’t ussually get the chance to be: organized.
It is like the one time that I cleaned my room for real.
I don’t think that I am alone in complaining about having to clean up my room. Also don’t think I am alone in doing a half-hearted job most of the time because I knew that it was going to get messy again quite soon. I am also willing to wager that I am not alone in having spent one full afternoon really cleaning my room so that I was proud of the result.
I set up action figures in fight scenes on the bookshelves. I put each of my baseball cards into their protective sleeves. I made my bed with special folds at the top that were far to intricate to be accidental. I sorted my books by genre and put the series books into their correct order.
In short, I cleaned that room like it was my job. And, I enjoyed it. I took time with those action figures to make sure that the scenes were believable. I found out new statistics about my favorite ball players. I thought about how many times I had slept in that bed while I folded the top sheet underneath the blanket. And I made mental notes of when I should read those same books again. Each event had its place and I wasn’t worried about getting all of it done because I knew that I would eventually create the finished product.
I feel like that is the power of not multi-tasking. That is the power of quiet.
While I need the noise sometimes to do a lot of things quickly, I know that I will never enjoy them as much as if I only were doing one task at a time. So, the iPad may get multi-tasking this fall, but I can tell you that I will never use it to create noise. I will never enable it just so I can devalue each step in the creative process. I will only use it to know more about the one task I am concentrating on right now. On this device, I will set up workflows only to create better work, never more output.
Because for me, output and work are two totally different things. The latter I love because it gives me more purpose. The former I despise because it gives me generic accomplishments and false understanding.
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Desktop Virtualization for the iPad!
I think one of the things that most intrigued me about the ipad was that It might actually be able to replace a computer running windows or OSX by utilizing virtualization. While there is something to be said for Citrix and their line of remote management products, I wanted to do this for free. And not only that, I wanted to be able to do this virtualization for a number ipads all logged in to the desktop operating system from a single laptop or desktop machine.
Well, without realizing that I would solve this question so quickly after procuring my own iPad, there is a relatively simple way to do software virtualization for about 9 ipads/iPod touches/iphones, all for free. Here it is, step by step:
1. Turn on fast-user switching. This will allow the iPad to connect to an account other than the one that is being used by the computer itself. To do this, go into System Preferences, click on Accounts, Click on Login Options, then check the box to enable fast-user switching:
2. Create as many accounts as you would like to use for virtualization. Click the plus sign within the accounts window to do this:
3. Download Vine VNC Server from http://sourceforge.net/projects/osxvnc/
4. Open up the program you just downloaded and go into the preferences. From within the preferences, set up your first display on your current OSX account (the one you normally use). This will set up your VNC server for that port to only look at that account. You will see why that matters in a bit. You will also need to choose a password to allow access to your screen:
5. Log in to one of your other accounts via the fast-user-switching. And Open up Vine Server program in that account. Then go into preferences and set up the second display. (repeat this step for as many virtualizations as you would like):
6. Download VNC Lite on your iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mocha-vnc-lite/id284984448?mt=8) and open it up. It should look like this:
7. Click Menu and then Edit Connections. Add two connections (to start, but you can add as many virtualized connections as you want). Both should have the same VNC address (your computer name on the network), but one should have 5901 and one should have 5902 in the port area. This will tell the VNC client which user to log into. You will also need to put in the passwords that you set for the vine servers:
8: Connect to one of the two connections that you just set up. If you have done everything correctly, you should be able to connect to your computer from the two accounts. Enjoy:
Now aside from this being really cool, I can think of a good number of reasons why this matters. I would like to start seeing people use mobile devices as desktop and laptop replacements both for the economic value as well as the ability to put more power in the hands of students, collaborators, and creators. I would also like to see just how efficient we can get at using the technology we have in the room before we start adding a whole bunch of requirements for 1:1 laptops in any situation. I’m interested to see where this goes. Let me know if you come up with anything great.
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