Keene on Tech

With a comfortable cash horde numbering in the tens of billions on hand, it would seem that Apple needs to go grocery shopping sometime soon, especially since Google seems to be the first one to the express checkout as the search giant snaps up just about everything thing in sight. These are not Microsoft sized companies with sometimes just one or two developers. But, smaller is better and these apps and their respective companies should be saluted for their efforts. The help make our daily computing a little better.

Here are seven apps for the Mac that are so good, Apple should really make the developers an offer and roll them into the OS. I picked these because they seem to have a good grasp of UI elements, provide good functionality and are practical for things we do everyday on computers. These are not media creation tools, just workhorse apps that help keep the wheels spinning on the silicon. With the exception of Dropbox, these are all Mac only apps. I won’t go into detail about all the features of these apps (gotta leave more to write about later!), but here is a laundry list. Feel free to add more in the comments.

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One of the frustrations with the iPhone and iPad is that Apple only lets certain apps use the video out feature to display images or video on your TV or through a projector. One app that I would love to see this enabled on is Safari, but for now we are out of luck. However, for those who are mapping fanatics and want to show off a little part of the world that interests you, there is now a iPad app that lets one project dynamic map images from the device onto a TV or a projector. Pretty cool.

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Privacy. We all want this at some point in both our physical and virtual lives. But increasingly, as the virtual world entices us to share every bit about ourselves with the world for better or worse we have to give the issue of privacy a harder look. While this post is not about the privacy matter directly, it is about an emerging trend that has a lot to do with privacy and personal information.

Photo by Travis Gray – http://flic.kr/p/9TMxP

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In the past week or two there have been some interesting thoughts posted about whether we are entering into a new era of computing where the experience is largely curated. Of course the 800 pound gorilla in this area is Apple with its iPhone/iPod Touch and now the iPad. All these devices run apps through Apple’s curated App Store which has generated lots of debate about whether this is a good thing or not. The entire computing process is mostly closed and carefully maintained by Apple. Yet, their devices and software are very popular and the company has grown enormously over the past few years because of this. And perhaps more importantly, they are really innovating in the mobile space and leading the way although Google’s Android is hot on it heals. So what is the big deal about curated computing and why should educators care?

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Museums are right up there with schools and universities as some of the great brick and morter cornerstones of our society. They literally house some of the best works and discoveries of all humankind. For the largest, their collections are immense, most which the public rarely gets to glimpse except on rare occasion. A visit to a museum is one of the great things to do in any big city. However, there is history and discovery outside the walls of museums too. In cities like London, the streets literally are paved with history. And this makes for some rich new media possibilities.

Now, you can see this London history in context using several prominent new technologies which have been pulled together by the Museum of London into their newly released iphone app, Streetmuseum. The app brings together the power of mobile smartphones, geolocation and augmented reality. These are three technology areas that register highly with NMC and its Horizon Reports.

Right now, this app is not available in the US iTunes store. I did not see any information about when it might be available stateside, but if you are in the UK or Europe you should be able to download it for free from these regional iTunes stores. To see more images from the app the CNET UK news article is here.

We may see more of this sort of effort by museums who can use the power of location to add context to their collections which, once digitized, can be applied in applications such as these beyond the walls of the museum. While not every city has the rich history of London, there would be other types of applications such as installed outdoor art that can be augmented with additional information. Such innovations can broaden the reach of a museum’s mission, help gain visitors and move these venerable institutions further down the technology road.

Keene

Gotta love e-Readers and their e-book content. Save some trees and carry a lot of content around in one lightweight device. Nice! However, there is one area of e-books that is sorely lacking and until this area gets sufficiently addressed, I can see students and faculty still giving a lukewarm handshake to the arrival of e-books. This feature is the ability to have more options and features when it comes to annotating text. But, there is a workaround of sorts…

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If you read this, chances are that you spend a good bit of your waking time online. The double edged sword of the World Wide Web brings us the world at our fingertips and also a world of distractions. Our attention is fragmented and increasingly there are many things vying for our attention online (thanks for giving me some of this!). This is something that I deal with everyday and I know many people who also feel their time and focus is splintered among the many outlets of content and information that are just a click away on the web.

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The iPad is close to appearing in hot little hands everywhere. Orders are being taken and depending on where you get your information, orders and demand are hot…or not. Whatever. It is coming soon enough.

There is no doubt that we will see some of the best iPhone app developers showing off even cooler things on the iPad but one area where it may be a sleeper hit is with mobile field scientists.

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Sometimes simple, subtle tools are the best. Things like letter openers and bottle openers come to mind. Tools so simple a caveman can use them, oh wait, that’s car insurance. Anyway, online users have a myriad options for doing a myriad different things, but one thing just about all of us do online is read something.

Reading an article on the web usually involves two things: 1) Time and 2) Looking at the text on a webpage with a lot of distracting information (like ads!). Well, the elegant programming mind of Marco Arment, who is also a lead developer for Tumblr, has created an ingenious service to both save the articles you don’t have time to read right now and to also format them in a way that makes them easy to read later. His service is called Instapaper and it’s a dandy.

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