Tag: apple

  • Apple’s iBooks Author, Interactive Textbooks, and All That Jazz

    Below is an article that I wrote for MacTalk a few weeks ago. Thought I’d post it up here for posterity. Published without pictures unlike the MacTalk version.

    Alternatively, Apple’s latest foray into the big bad world of education (and why it matters).

    I’ve now had the whole weekend to think about what Apple’s education event means. Somewhere between the new Star Wars MMO, some epic rounds of Battlefield 3, and something that I’m calling “general internet procrastination”, I’ve thought about the implications for the education sector that this event has wrought.

    As a quick recap, Apple released iBooks Author for the Mac alongside a plan to shake up the textbook industry as we know it (also featuring the iPad, iTunes U, and a few big-name publishers). There are those that think Apple don’t care about pros anymore, but Apple’s education event held in New York was proof enough that (and perhaps now more than ever), Apple cares about education.

    What happens when you can’t see the forest for the trees?
    Before we get into the meat of what all this really means for the future of education as we know it, I’d like to dispel a few misconceptions about iBooks Author that seem to have cropped up.

    Firstly, there’s a few people getting caught up in the iBooks Author EULA, and how it apparently (depending on your preferred interpretation) dictates, totalitarian-style, what you can and cannot do with the app. Specifically, people have their underpants in a twist over the fact that books created using iBooks Author can only be sold via Apple; the question is, is that actually so unreasonable? Some say the whole situation draws certain parallels to the similar iOS/Mac app and Xcode equivalent, but others still say that’s different because Xcode doesn’t attempt to dictate what you can and cannot do with output from that app — iBooks Author, on the other hand, does. If we’re being really pedantic, there are even those that liken the iBooks Author EULA terms to what would happen if Adobe said you could only use files originating from Photoshop in a certain way. Those people are pretty far off the mark.

    Let’s get one thing clear: Apple isn’t taking your copyright away.

    Your content that you put into the app is still your content, you still retain full copyright of whatever material you put into an iBook, and pigs still don’t fly. Frankly, I think the whole “iBooks Author is telling me what I can and can’t do with files I produce using the app” is just a cry from those who are overly concerned about proprietary software and certain usage scenarios. Yes, Apple should probably open up iBooks Author (and iBooks themselves) to an iOS-like enterprise implementation, where books can be distributed internally in a company without having first been published to a public iBookstore. For the moment though, selling your iBooks through the iBookstore just means that you’ll get many more eyeballs on your content than if try to hawk it yourself. It’s also important to note at this point in time that you’re still very much permitted to give your work away for free — Apple aren’t preventing you from sticking your iBooks Author-produced iBook up on your website somewhere and letting it people download it for free. No, I guess the message from Apple here is that iBooks created using iBooks Author are much like iOS apps you create using Xcode: feel free to do other things with your iBook, but if you want to sell it, your best chance of success lies in the iBookstore.

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  • Graphing Calculator Story

    I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn’t ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive. We worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Greg had unlimited energy and a perfectionist’s attention to detail. He usually stayed behind closed doors programming all day, while I spent much of my time talking with other engineers. Since I had asked him to help as a personal favor, I had to keep pace with him. Thanks to an uncurtained east-facing window in my bedroom, I woke with the dawn and usually arrived ten minutes before Greg did. He would think I had been working for hours and feel obliged to work late to stay on par. I in turn felt obliged to stay as late as he did. This feedback loop created an ever-increasing spiral of productivity.

    via Graphing Calculator Story.

    Possibly my favourite Apple-related story, ever.

  • Stay hungry, stay foolish.

    Still hard to believe he’s gone.

    This post part of Blogtober 2011, just a little thing of mine where I (attempt to) post something up on my blog every day in October 2011.

  • Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner with Android — Part Deux

     

    In my previous post in the series, I detailed a few of the more user-facing things about Android, like app management, music syncing, and so on. In this post, I intend to talk more about some of the finer points of things like text selection, general usability, and finally wrap it up at the end with a few choice sentences about Android as a whole and how it compares to other mobile platforms. If the previous post was about a 3 (not quite computer illiterate and yet not quite your average nerd) on the Benny Ling official scale of nerdery, this post is about a 6 or a 7 (getting up there). Not to mention it’s fairly long… You have been warned!

    You want to talk about fragmentation? Okay, let’s talk about fragmentation. Fragmentation isn’t an issue. Geeks like us might like to harp on the fact that everything (apps-wise) doesn’t run on, everything (hardware-wise), or that some apps are restricted to certain regions, or that different versions run on different devices, but the fact of the matter is, fragmentation isn’t an issue for most end users. I say “most”, because if you’re one of the unlucky few who has chosen either the cheapest Android phone you could find, or somehow gotten stuck with a manufacturer notorious for releasing updates very slowly, or even worse, not at all, then, then, fragmentation might be an issue. You can hardly blame Google for your fragmentation issues though, as it’s up to manufacturers to release updates for their phones, which also makes it super-easy for them to drop support in way of software updates for a particular phone. Exactly why I would only ever buy an Android phone either from the Nexus series (as you’re guaranteed software updates, it being the flagship Android phone at any given time)), or from HTC, or any of the other big players (Samsung just manages to sneak in here) — any other manufacturer is a crapshoot. I mean, sure you can put the latest ROM or whatever from XDA Developers on your Motorola Milestone, but do you really want to learn about bootloaders, custom restore images, and all that kind of stuff? Perhaps if you’re a geek, otherwise, probably not.

    First seen in iOS, there’s a rather nice visual feedback effect to let you know when you have reached the end of a long list, or scrolled to the bottom of a webpage. The UI “bounces” to let you know there’s no more content, the scrollbar appears for a second to do the same, and you can go about your merry business. Android 2.3 brings a similar sort of effect, only instead of a UI bounce, you see a nice flash or orange whenever you reach the end of a scrollable section. It’s pretty nicely done — as you drag more and more away from the edge, you get more and more visual feedback (but only the very edge is tinted with orange, the rest is a semi-transparent white that builds upon the orange effect).

    The funny thing is, I can only think of the Windows Phone 7 accent colour whenever I see these orange flashes. Orange is a good colour choice as it manages to stand out against pretty much everything, but it would have been nice if we had a choice of colours to choose from; I’m guessing that their particular implementation of this kinda of visual feedback means that basically any colour will be visible against the background. As it stands, the orange is used lots of other places, too — like when the spacebar can autocorrect a word for you, there’s a orange line that appears on it (more on text entry a little later), and even punctuation keys and suggested words use this orange colour. It’s not bad, but it could have been better. Continue Reading

  • One More Thing…

    What’s the word for that moment when you realise that the work you do is appreciated by many, many people all across Australia?

    Yeah, that.

    This weekend was nothing short of amazing, all thanks to a little site called MacTalk.

    Back in 2007, I joined a little site called MacTalk. Fast forward a couple of years, a few thousand posts, and many internet arguments later, and I come across a little post by then-overseer and hater of pants, decryption, asking for volunteer writers for some news posts. I put my hand up.

    The rest is turtles all the way down.

    This weekend was basically the culmination of all that; a dinner with most of the people who have contributed to MacTalk in some way, those who have silently decimated the not-so-silent spam, those who have kept things ticking over behind the scenes, and those who have written articles, reviewed products, or gotten on their perennial soapbox and given a few thousand listeners an earful about how non-developers shouldn’t be using beta releases on the podcast, past and present.

    There were a few people missing, but by and large, most of the big players where there and a fantastic time was had by all. Putting faces to online personas is always good fun, even if it can be a little daunting at first. Once you get over that initial awkwardness of “hey, do I follow you on Twitter? What’s your name on the forums?”, then it’s apples, ladies and gentlemen, apples — which is lucky, because that’s pretty much what MacTalk is about (Apple, Inc).

    At some point during the night, there was a thing where had to go around the table and tell everyone about ourselves — our Twitter or MacTalk usernames, what we did, and so on.

    Some people were known simply by name or by reputation, others had to describe their role in MacTalk a little more. When it came around to me, I simply said “I’m Benny, and I write the news”.

    Cue thunderous applause.

    In all seriousness, I was kind of taken aback. Stunned, that people recognised me, just from what I had done. Little did I realise how far my daily news posts reached. Little did I know that people actually recognised —nay, applauded — my work.

    This isn’t just me being naive, it’s a genuine realisation of the culmination of hours of early morning (and some not-so-early) news posts over last two years. It’s me realising that podcast topics which were formed off the words I had written, it’s about me realising that “whoa, people actually read this stuff — and they like it!” Me realising that the words I type into one of those new-fangled computers actually has some sort of impact.

    One comment (from Chrome, I believe): “everyone sets their clock from Greenwich Mean Time, but Greenwich set their time from [me]”.

    There’s nothing quite like the feeling of being appreciated and recognised for your work, which, I guess, was really the whole point of that night; everyone in that room had contributed in some way, shape, or form to MacTalk over the past few years.

    This morning I considered writing a piece on Steve Jobs (you know, seeing as he stepped down as CEO) as a sort of editorial on MacTalk (like all the cool kids are doing), but as I thought about what I would write about, I couldn’t think of anything. Seriously, not a thing — not because there wasn’t anything to say, but because anything I wrote about would be so, so, insubstantial compared to the big picture.

    And yet it’s times like the above, when I was applauded for simply saying my name and what I do, that make it all worth it.

    Thanks guys 🙂

  • New Shiny! Welcome, Hermione!

    This is is somewhat of a follow-on to my previous post about the farewell of my old MacBook. Read that too, if you want.

    Yeah, that Hermione. As in Hermione Granger? As in Hermoine Jean Granger, one of the very best witches in the Harry Potter series? Who is played by the stunning Emma Watson in real life? Yeah, the one and the same.

    I’ve blogged about this before, but any geek worth their salt has changed the hostname for the computers. Those geeks that really know what they’re doing even have themes for their names, and it just so happens that I have Harry Potter-related names for all my computers (I don’t think you can change the hostname on an Xbox 360, otherwise I totally would). Say what you want about the Harry Potter theme, just don’t go downplaying the impact it has had on my generation; so much so that (my potentially very naive self thinks) it’s really quite comparable to even Pokemon in terms of global impact and how much money has been spent on associated merchandise…

    Anyway, sectumsempra was the old name of my old white MacBook, named after the seemingly-harmless spell in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince that turned out to be not-so-harmless. In the most tangential of ways the real sectumsempra has a similar story to my old white MacBook, but that’s for another time. Severus (yes, that Severus, as in Severus Snape) is the name of my ultra-powerful gaming rig. i7 930, EVGA X58, GTX 480, Vertex 2 SSD, 6TB of internal storage. Like I said, pretty powerful stuff. It’s hooked up to a Dell U2711 for the most part, except when it needs to pull LAN duty when it gets the pixels of a tiny 20″ to push.

    Previous computers me or my family have owned have taken on such names as Fawkes (after the phoenix), Protego (the spell), and Sonorous (also the spell). They all have stories behind their names, but that’s definitely for another time.

    Which brings us to Hermione.

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Computers are like a bicycle for our minds.