Posts Tagged ‘iphone’

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) posted a series of articles today about how to use a variety of Apple gadgets. If you’ve recently received a new iPhone, iPod, or Apple computer you may be interested in one of these posts:

• So you just got your first Mac–now what?
• So you just got a MacBook–now what?
• So you just got a MacBook Pro–now what?
• So you just got an iPod touch–now what?
• So you just got an iPod nano–now what?
• So you just got an iMac–now what?
• So you just got an iPhone–now what?
• So you just got an Apple TV–now what?

Not an Apple person? No problem–there are some other articles to guide you with your new digital camera or hard drive:

• So you just got an iTunes gift card–now what?
• So you just got a digital camera–now what?
• So you just got a camcorder–now what?
• So you just got a hard drive–now what?

Got an iPhone (or iPod touch, or G1), but miss having a stylus? A company called InPlay Technologies has announced a stylus that will work with these devices, called WriteSense, to be available mid-2009. No word on price.

As a followup to last week’s post on my favorite iPhone-friendly websites (or “web apps” as I will henceforth call them), here’s a list of applications I’ve downloaded from the iTunes App Store. You can download these apps and others by opening iTunes, then selecting App Store. (Of course, it should go without saying that you’ll need an iPhone or iPod touch with the 2.0 firmware installed.) Use the Search field to locate these specific apps, if you’re interested in purchasing them yourself.

Amazon.com Mobile: (free) This is brand new; I just downloaded it 30 minutes ago. A compelling feature I want to check out is its “remember” function that allows you to snap a photo of a product and then look it up in Amazon based on that photo.

Digital Clock: ($0.99) I was in love with this for about a day, because I have a thing for clocks. I’ve yet to have a real use for it, though.

Easy Wi-Fi: ($1.99) I’ve talked about this one before. Pretty much mandatory if you want to use your iPhone on KU’s wireless network. This is also useful for accessing wireless networks at Starbucks and McDonald’s (iPhone only for these services, but iPod touches can use it to access KU’s network).

Facebook: (free) This app makes it easy to keep up-to-date with your Facebook buddies, even when you’re on the road. Useful time-killer.

iBowl: (free) Simple bowling game for the iPhone. Entertaining for awhile.

Google: (free) Google’s iPhone app’s claim to fame is its alleged ability to allow you to search via voice. I haven’t tried it yet, but I hear it’s buggy (as in, you may get results you weren’t, uh, expecting–caveat emptor).

Google Earth: (free) Google Earth. For your iPhone. Download this for the wow factor, if nothing else.

Light: (free) There are several free flashlight apps. Get one of them. All it does is turn your iPhone’s screen bright white. You’d be surprised how handy this is.

NetNewsWire: (free) This is the iPhone version of my Mac RSS reader of choice. I think I need to tweak it to make it a more effective tool for me–I probably don’t need to keep up with 200 feeds while I’m mobile.

Pandora: (free) Jim Knight turned me on to Pandora, a service to help you find new music based on music you like. The iPhone version is super-slick, and a nice alternative for when you get sick of the music already on your phone.

Recorder: ($0.99) The one thing I probably screamed for the loudest when the iPhone first came out was a voice recorder app. Now there are several to choose from; this is the one I went with.

Remote: (free) Remote lets you control iTunes, uh, remotely. That’s all well and good, I guess, but the reason I like it is I can use the iPhone’s touch keyboard to interact with my Apple TV.

Scrabble: ($7.99 for a limited time) Scrabble, for your iPhone. I’ve only played against the computer, which has been kind of on the easy side so far, but it has a networked play option as well.

SportsTap: (free) If you obsessively track sports scores, this one’s for you.

Twitterific: (free; premium version also available for $9.99) This was the first iPhone Twitter client. It does the job, but I’ve been meaning to check out some alternatives that have since come out. The free one sprinkles in an occasional ad amongst the tweets.

Voice Dialer: (free) Another brand new app; this one lets you search and call your contacts by voice. Now if only I used the phone part of my iPhone more often–

Wikipanion: (free; Plus version available for $4.99) Wikipanion gives you a nice, iPhone-friendly interface to Wikipedia. Not the only one out there, but it’s free and useful when you need to do quick lookups.

Got any iPhone apps you can’t live without? Tell us about them in the comments below.

I omitted something from my list of iPhone-friendly websites last week: Uh … Where? is another good one. If you’re like me, you never answer the phone when you don’t recognize the number. (OK, if you’re like me, you never answer the phone.) Uh … Where? can help you at least track down where the call’s coming from, so you can decide whether you want to call back or not.

I just spent some time helping Don get his iPhone up-to-date with the latest system software. This list is being compiled for him, but since I know there are a lot of new iPhones in the building (not to mention the network) I’m going to share it with you all. Today I’ll cover iPhone-enhanced websites; tomorrow I’ll cover downloadable applications for your iPhone.

These websites are enhanced to be useable with the iPhone’s limited screen real estate and the fact that your finger is your pointer (less precise than a mouse). Open them up in Safari, then to save them to your home screen press the + icon and select “Add to Home Screen.”

To start: Did you know that Hello (The Stratepedia Blog) will automatically open into an iPhone-friendly view when loaded in Mobile Safari? We’d be honored if you added us to your home screen, but if not, you at least might want to open up this post on your iPhone, then use the list below to open other sites you do want to add. Just trying to save you a little finger-typing.

Lawrence-related sites

• LJWorld Mobile: Mobile version of the Lawrence Journal-World.
• KUSports.com: KU-specific sports news from the LJW.
• Lawrence.com: Lawrence events and dining information.
• Lawrence Marketplace: Lawrence business directory.

News, Sports, and Weather

• CNN.com Mobile
• The New York Times Mobile
• ESPN Mobile Web
• The Weather Channel

Misc.

• Amazon.com
• Flickr

I know there are lots more out there, but this is what’s on my phone right now. What are your favorite iPhone-friendly websites? Share them in the comments below.

More and more people in CRL are getting iPhones (and iPod Touches)! And while it’s really nice to have wi-fi access from these devices, some wireless networks such as the one we use to connect from work make things a little difficult. Connecting to the network is one thing, but then you have to go to Safari, sign in, wait, and then, if you typed in your username and password correctly on the iPhone keyboard, be granted a connection. This has historically been such a hassle that I’ve just turned of wi-fi whenever I’m on campus.

A new iPhone application called Easy Wi-Fi makes this much simpler! If your iPhone or iPod Touch has version 2.0 or newer of the operating system (which it probably does by now), you can find this utility for $1.99 in the Application Store through iTunes. Install it on your iPhone/iPod Touch and then follow the instructions it provides to add your network of choice. Enter your username and password one time, then Easy Wi-Fi remembers the settings to make the connection in the future. It took me about three minutes to get up and running.

This has seriously made my iPhone much more useful at work and on campus. Thanks very much to Gail Tiemann for sharing this utility with me.

Steve Wang and Yan Sun, faculty at Nottingham University, have developed a wonderful example of educational content formatted especially for delivery through Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. You can visit the BioCourseware site through a regular web browser to get a feel for the general interface–big buttons designed to be touched, not clicked; a clean, easy-to-use interface; and even multimedia support (check out the virtual yeast cell for some nice multimedia).

If you can, though, check out the site on an iPhone or iPod touch. In particular, take a look at the periodic table–hold your device in portrait layout and you’ll see the elements in a list. Rotate to landscape layout and the interface automatically switches to an interactive periodic table, in the format you learned in high school. There’s also a couple of dictionaries, a calculator to figure out cal concentration (which, according to what I just looked up, is a measure of “how many solutes are needed to get the target concentration”), and an HTML reference to boot. This all fits in your pocket–how many pockets would you need to fit all of these resources in print form?

The neatest thing about this, from our perspective, is that Dr. Wang is using technology we use every day to develop the Stratepedia web applications, and since they’re web-based they’re easy to deploy and keep up-to-date. The mobile web is to a point where it’s a viable means to deliver instruction–how might we put it to use?

(By the way, I read about this on iThinkEd, a nice blog about using iPhones in higher education.)

The problem I was having last week with the custom iPhone view for this site has been resolved! For those of you without an iPhone, here’s a rough example of what you’re missing, courtesy of the iPhoney Mobile Safari simulator.

Also, just so you know–video clips from this site don’t work on an iPhone due to its lack of support for Flash. Someday we’re going to get around to converting our clips to QuickTime for better portability.

Unfortunately, the modification we were using to produce an iPhone-specific version of this site doesn’t play well with the new look we installed last week. I’ve disabled the fancy iPhone version for now until I figure out a workaround. No worries, as you can still view the site with Mobile Safari just fine. Also, I have a feeling I’m the only one this affects–so no harm, no foul.

As you may know, I’ve been an iPhone user since a couple of days after their big release last summer (no, I didn’t camp out for it; I strolled into an Apple Store a couple of days later and they had plenty in stock). Of course, one of the first things I began thinking about was how to put it into use in SIM and education in general. A particularly nice feature is that a savvy web programmer can develop sites and applications designed to work on the iPhone’s smaller screen and touch-friendly controls–this puts mobile application development within the reach of what we do at CRL.

Anyway, last week I worked on a small school project in which we explored the merit of iPhones in education. This is still a new topic, so there’s not really any published literature on it, but we found some like-minded souls in our search. Abiliene Christian University, a small, private school in Texas, is leading the way. They have an excellent blog called iThinkEd where their findings.

Yesterday, ACU announced they will begin handing iPhones out for free to incoming freshmen, beginning this fall. Students will be able to “receive homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their professors’ offices, and check their meal and account balances” via web-based applications developed by the school.

This is going to be a great model for what we want to do in terms of Stratepedia and the mobile web. Imagine feeding data into Dossier from the back of a classroom by quietly tap-tap-tapping an iPhone screen, or accessing on-demand video models anytime. We’re pretty excited to see what we can start rolling out.

If you’re interested in mobile uses of the Internet in general or the iPhone in particular, the ACU initiative will be a project to keep an eye on (tip: check out Amber’s RSS tutorial, then add iThinkEd’s feed to your feed reader).

Got any other iPhone questions or mobile web services you’d like to see Stratepedia provide? Leave a comment below!