01.21.04
Posted in Software, Macintosh at 10:08 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
This is just so cool, thanks for mentioning it Teal Sunglasses. This is the kind of purpose I’ve been hoping to see RSS used for; an iTunes Music Store RSS feed that lists the “New Additions” added to Apple’s iTunes music store every Tuesday. But what’s even cooler is the exceedingly clever and user-friendly way you can select the kind of music, and the feed, that you’re interested in. You can list all the new additions, the top songs, top albums, and even select specific genres for each. Very nicely done.
I’ve been trying to talk the campus libraries and books stores into broadcasting the “new titles” they acquire, and the various campus calendar systems to export to a web service users could subscribe to, ideally, one that would allow us to easily add items to our calendars. This is a good example for me to show people who don’t quite “get” web services.
Permalink
Comments off
01.16.04
Posted in Macintosh at 11:03 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
I’m still using AppleWorks, having started using it when it was still called “Tin Can,” so I was pleased to read about the 6.2.9 update. Oddly, it still hadn’t shown up in Sofware Update, two days after the release, so I downloaded it and ran the installer.
It froze, getting stuck in the “Gathering Information” stage. It stalled thus three times (the third time I let it sit for 45 minutes), and yes, I repaired permissions first. I started looking at Console logs, and noticed the Airport was doing a lot of something, though nothing but Console and the updater was running, and there was a lot of network activity, most of which I don’t understand, so I turned off my card, and forced the installer to quit. I ran it again, forgetting to turn the my card back on, and it installed. Weird. I’m not alone either. I suspect there’s something odd with the installer, not the update itself. The update does seem a bit smoother in general, and it seems to print a bit faster, and to handle printing non-Roman characters better.
Permalink
Comments off
01.11.04
Posted in Software, Macintosh, Pedagogy and Scholarship at 12:22 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
Mike Kozlowski, in this post makes an interesting distinction between Apple’s iLife applications that organize media (iTunes and iPhoto) and those that produce media, iMovie, iDVD, and now, GarageBand. He extends that distinction, effectivey, to one between consumers and producers. He goes on to point out what he thinks is an erroneous assumption on Apple’s part:
Real people never create anything; they take advantage of specialization of labor to let the really good creators&emdash;the Peter Jacksons, the Steven Spielbergs, the Beatleses, the Vanilla Ices—make all the movies and music necessary, which they then purchase/steal and need help organizing and using.
I�ve never edited a movie in my life, never mastered a video DVD, and never even considered making a multi-track music recording. Neither have you, if I might be permitted to play the odds here. By aiming its media tools at creators instead of consumers, Apple is either confusing Jobs� Pixar coworkers and celebrity friends for normal people, or deciding that its long-time 5% market-share is too big.
He also has a thoughtful followup post here. I see his thinking, but I disagree. First, I’m not sure how much time he’s actually spent with these applications; it doesn’t sound like he’s spent much. I have; not only as a user, where I use iTunes and iPhoto almost daily, but as a creator of movies in iMovie and of self-contained “projects” in iDVD. I’ll be using all of them in my teaching this quarter. I’ve also tech edited four consumer books on the iLife suite; this means reading every word as a user, and following the instructions, just as a user would. So I know the applications fairly well, and, having taught a quite a few people how to use the iLife applications, I know users pretty well too.
My students will, many of them, already have a web site. Many of them will already be blogging with Xanga, LiveJournal, or Blogger. My students take for granted that every class in the Social Sciences and Humanities they take has a class web site. They carry MP3 players, love ripping files, and have, many of them, digital cameras. All of them have ready access to computers, scanners, printers and burners in any of the computer labs on campus, and wireless access is available in most of the public areas. They don’t make the distinction between consuming and producing that Mike Kozlowski does. Sure, they listen to the latest from Black Eyed Peas, but then they want to create their own mix using just part of it to make a “new” composition. Tthese are not “musically gifted” students in the ordinary sense; they’re not musicians, but mixing, like custom playlists, are part of the way the appreciate music. They not only expect to see PowerPoint or Keynote slide shows, they produce them themselve to accompany their own presentations. They’ll make their own videos too, which they use in class. These are students who have been using computers for at least the last five years, and the wealthier ones, since grade school. Technology is part of their everyday life.
My students, or at least not most of them, aren’t particurlarly “gifted” as artists. I’m certainly not. The point of iMovie is that you don’t have to be Steven Spielberg— you don’t even need to have a video camera. An enormous number of people, including me, use iMovie’s “Ken Burns” effect to make movies from stills. I use the caption tools to add text tracks to non-English audio. And iPhoto does more than just categorize your photos; it lets you edit them, even improve them, and produce web pages and slide shows, without typing a line of code. I use iPhoto quite often to create web pages of ancient artifacts for my students, quickly, easily, and efficiently, without typing a tag. Yes, I could create the same pages by hand, but I don’t have to. iPhoto allows me to use my time in other ways. I’ll use iDVD to create a disk students can take home to review or to the library, with the slide shows QuickTime movies and web pages I’ve used in teaching nicely oranzed via navigational menus, so they can look at them and respond on their blogs.
iLife is used by ordinary people outside of education, too. My brother and I are creating CDs now for our parents, with family images on them, and slide shows of the birds and wildlife he photographs. We’re using iPhoto to burn the CDs and make movies. Soon, we’ll be sending them DVDs since it’s easier for my mother and father to see the pictures and movies on TV than on her lap top. My brothers-in-law both send my mother-in-law digital video they’ve made, on CD, on the Web, (via .Mac) and on DVD. I can see using GarageBand to add soundtracks to home movies or slide shows, and especially, for teaching about the underlying rhetorical structures of music. People who don’t have the physical skills for music performance can, with GarageBand, still learn about and make music. The point of the “producer” aspects of iLife is that iLife makes creation possible for the “ordinary.” When the basic limit of skill (not talent, but the skill or craft) is lowered the way iLife lowers it, ordinary people can create. That’s the key; it’s creation for the rest of us. Sure, we’re not Spielberg or Johnn Meyer, but we do have a creative spark, an impetus, and a desire to share. That’s the underlying concept, and it’s the one Apple is capitalizing on. The fact that the suite works together, that the hardware is easy to set up to use the software, will actually sell the hardware.
It’s kind of like when Apple first started showing postscript laser printers and their output to traditional cold type printers. First, the printers said it was crap; then they found out how inexpensively (comparatively) the crap was to produce, and how easily the pages were set and printed, and then they said, essentially, it’s pretty good crap, where do I get it? And remember how at first desktop publishing and naive users meant “throw every font you’ve got on the page”? But peoplel learned; that’s going to happenn with digital art too. People will learn; the truly talented will move on, from iPhoto to PhotoShop, from iMovie to FinalCut Pro, and then they’ll burn a DVD one off, and get it mastered, and a new indie film will be available for the rest of us.
That’s pretty cool.
Permalink
Comments off
01.07.04
Posted in Macintosh, Conferences, Pedagogy and Scholarship at 10:19 am by Lisa Spangenberg
We stayed home this year; Michael’s book isn’t out yet, and I start teaching next week, and realllly want to finish a few chapters first, so we watched the keynote from home. And one of the most impressive things was the fact that we could. We’re on DSL, but we sat in front of a 12 inch dual USB iBooks, and thanks to Akamai and Apple, and the magic of QuickTime and MPEG4, it was pretty much like watching TV. Not a single real drop out, and you know, we can’t even say that about cable. I noticed Steve Jobs said that there were over 60K viewers watching the stream, and over a 100 countries. Pretty cool. I could teach like that, if I could also interact with my students via iChat AV.
I’m happy about the new G5 servers and new Xserv RAID boxes; I’d like to play with one of each. But the iLife ‘04 news is very good, and not just because it might mean more work for me on books. I’m very happy Apple kept the price down; $49.00 is a steal, even for just one of the iLife apps; at $49.00 for all five, that’s less then $10.00 each, as the spouse points out. The educational price, $29.00, is a price students can afford, and the family package (install iLife ‘04 on up to five family members computers) at $79.00 is a fantastic deal. I very much want to play with GarageBand. I can see lots of potential for teaching music theory and music appreciation with it. It’s often difficult for non-musicians to understand the underlying structures of a piece of music, the way melody, harmony and rhythm work together, or the way sound from several instruments is “layered.” GarageBand could help with that in several ways, not the least of which would be to have students make their own compositions; nothing explains better than creating some music yourself.
I’m also pleased about the mini iPod; it looks very good, I love the form factor, and the solid state controls, which mean fewer moving parts to wear out. I can see lots of uses for the mini iPod in education (heck I use my first generation one all the time). Get a few mini iPods at the campus library to be used for language lab work, for instance, or to be used for music listening classes, or poetry and drama, or listening to lectures again. You’d want to tag them internally so students wouldn’t forget to give them back, but that’s easy to do. I want to hold a mini iPod in my hand though; that’s the real test. It’d be nice if they came in black . . .
Permalink
Comments off
01.05.04
Posted in Copyright at 9:22 am by Lisa Spangenberg
So said Steve Jobs in a recent Rolling Stone interview, in which he says some of the smartest things I’ve seen anywhere about copyright. According to Steve Jobs:
If copyright dies, if patents die, if the protection of intellectual property is eroded, then people will stop investing. That hurts everyone. People need to have the incentive that if they invest and succeed, they can make a fair profit. Otherwise they’ll stop investing. But on another level entirely, it’s just wrong to steal. Or, let’s put it another way: it is corrosive to one’s character to steal.
Permalink
Comments off
01.04.04
Posted in Macintosh at 9:05 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
Despite the apparent media frenzy about iPod battery life and the Neistat brother’s web site about their battery woes, my iPod is doing fine, thanks. My husband and I bought each other original 5 gig iPods for our wedding anniversaries back in November of 2001. We’re both still using them regularly. My iPod is good for about six hours before it needs charging, less than when it was new, but it’s had a lot of use in the more than two years I’ve had it. I back up files to it, connect it to our stereo, use in teaching, and when I walk around town, or campus, or ride the bus. You’d think, given the media’s foaming at the mouth-and-rubbing-their-hands-with glee that everybody was unhappy.
I also find it more than a little distressing that no one seems worried that the QuickTime movies at their site show the Neistat brothers vandalizing some rather expensive bill boards. I sympathize with their dismay about their batteries, and, apparently Apple did too, since it offered both a battery replacement service and AppleCare for iPods, before the Neistat’s contacted Apple. Vandalism is not acceptable, no matter how angry one might be; it’s still wanton destruction. Much better to follow Apple’s iPod battery careand use tips, and use the information in this well written iPod battery FAQ.
Permalink
Comments off
Posted in Development, Rant at 4:22 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
Bear with me while I engage in a controlled rant.
One of the more trying aspects of shopping this past holiday season was that, for one reason or another, I had to do most of it via the web. That’s not a problem, I shop a lot on the web anyway. But I kept being thwarted by sites that didn’t like Safari, and in each case, a quick look at the source revealed why: the site developers were targetting Internet Explorer, and Windows, exclusively, down to coding for bugs in I.E.
The other Really Annoying Web Experience has to do with commerce sites built using Flash. Now, I don’t hate Flash, I like Flash, really I do, both the silly sorts of Flash sites, and the appropriate uses of Flash to build attractive interactive, even instructional sites, or to make report layouts built from a database attractive and naviagable. But sites like this and this, that use Flash to reproduce a printed catalog are both annoying and stupid. At the opposite extreme are easy to use, well-organized user-centric online stores like Amazon, and Lands End.
Permalink
Comments off
