Arranged Delirium

I’m teaching mobile app development next term. There are actually dozens of development platforms to pick from and I’ll admit it’s been hard to narrow down the list. I’ve worked with Appcelerator, Played with PhoneGap, and even explored the reintroduction of Dreamweaver as options. Another set of tools that I keep coming back to is appMobi XDK. Its an IDE from appMobi that let you employ both the PhoneGap and AppMobi’s API’s, which in conjunction with what you already know about HTML 5, CSS, and javascript, makes for a fairly straight-forward and compelling development platform for new developers (i.e. students). The emulator is quite nice too, making this a nice tool for developing once for many platforms regardless of OS. There’s an infoworld article that summs it up pretty well - you can access it here, after an annoying ad (click the upper right-hand corner to skip).

Shawn Blanc has a blog post up on the potential value of MobileMe. Its a bit long unless you are interested in the topic, but insightful. (MobileMe of course, is Apple’s ill-titled mobile sync service.) MobileMe is something I’ve been using for years - which is why I have a .mac address - but I still struggle to define in terms of value. It is something I haven’t found to be particularly useful aside from syncing email and calendars. Truthfully, Dropbox does a much better job of syncing files between machines - so there’s no way I’m going back to the MobileMe iDisk service at this point.

Really - if you don’t have a Dropbox account, you need to get one. Do it now. This means you.

So, I am in essence maintaining the service due to the number of devices I have, email sync, and a handy calendar publishing feature. All things that I could do in other ways if I had time to set it up. I guess I’m paying for convenience, but its a steep price at this point. And without some additional value coming from somewhere - its only a matter of time until I abandon it…

If you are interested in photography - or interested in the future of publishing - you might be interested in Lights, Camera, Capture! at the iTunes Store. This is a book/DVD combo that you can buy from Amazon for $29. But you can also get the content for $9.99 by purchasing it as an app for your iPad.

This title is a very nice, basic introduction to lighting for photography (useful for filmmaking as well) and the nature of the app medium is that it combines the text and DVD video into one package. I actually think its much better than the book/DVD combo and a good example of how this type of publication is better than the traditional media it replaces. More often than not, I prefer to read the physical hard-copy of a text. But in this case, I prefer the app since it conveniently places the relevant video content immediately within the context of the text itself. That means I actually access it - when I have DVD content associated with a text, I rarely access it. After all, that would require me to:

1. Find said disc
2. Goto computer
3. Wait for optical media to load (uugh.)
4. Try to remember what I was wanting to watch and why

Its too much of a cognitive break - and its the reason why combined media have never been effective (aside from marketing purposes). Another nice thing about it is its portability. If I’m shooting in the field, I’m not going to want to take several books, a laptop, and the corresponding media. I can just take my camera and iPad.

I’ve been working with iOS 4.2 and I have to say - it’s a nice update. I’ve been especially pleased with multitasking and folders. The ability to print will be nice, but it’s not much of an issue for me. As for folders, well, I’ve been too lazy to cull my collection of apps, so this makes for a nice, convenient way to stay organized. But multitasking? I believe I stated earlier on this blog that I wouldn’t miss it. So, to quote Gob:

“I’ve made a huge mistake.”

Multitasking is marvelous. I was wrong to think it was not a drawback previously. In my defense, I think this is likely due to the fact that I use the tablet so much more than I’d originally anticipated - and as I get closer to ditching my laptop, I find myself wanting more functionality from the tablet.