doubleTwist is a good-looking software package that can manage your media (music, photos, video, podcasts) so that it can be accessed by your mobile device (Android, Palm, BlackBerry, etc). If someone wants the media skills of an iPod with the flexibility of an open platform, this might be the killer app.
As I look to transition from my BlackBerry to likely an Android-based phone, this might be just what I need.
This is a somewhat surprising upgrade path for Wordpress, but I guess I'll have to do it at some point. Just not sure I'm ready for the "nonce_salt" step yet. Maybe on the long weekend...
Sample images.
Microsoft has a program call AutoCollage that will take a folder of images and make a collage for you. I can't say I find the results all that breathtakingly beautiful, but the tool seems highly functional. 30 day trial, $19.95 to buy.
A Little More About The Project
21 APRIL 2010 by maxwell
Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy. We call these computers ‘seeds’. A seed is owned by you, hosted by you, or on a rented server. Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your facebook profile, tweets, anything. We are designing an easily extendable plugin framework for Diaspora, so that whenever newfangled content gets invented, it will be automagically integrated into every seed.
Now that you have your information in your seed, it will connect to every service you used to have for you. For example, your seed will keep pulling tweets and you will still be able to see your Facebook newsfeed. In fact, Diaspora will make those services better! Upload an image to Flickr and your seed can automatically generate a tweet from the caption and link. Social networking will just get better when you have control over your data.
A seed will not just be all your existing networks put together, though. Decentralizing lets us reconstruct our “social graphs” so that they belong to us. Our real social lives do not have central managers, and our virtual lives do not need them. Friend another seed and the two of you can synchronize over a direct and secure connection instead of through a superfluous hub. Encryption (privacy nerds: we’re using GPG) will ensure that no matter what kind of content is being transferred, you can share privately. Eventually, today’s hubs could be almost entirely replaced by a decentralized network of truly personal websites.
Stay tuned for more updates on updates, and be sure to check out our Kickstarter!
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I thought there was some real potential here. I gave them a small amount of cash to help out, I think you should, too.
So, to kick things off with a bang, our friends at Prezi have very generously agreed to provide all STAR Discovery Educators with a free Educator Pro account for a year (normally $59).
All you have to do to get your free Educator Pro account from Prezi is visit this page on the new DEN online community website, log in and complete the form.
I'm a big fan of Prezi and the Pro account is definitely worth it as it gives you the offline editor, which is key! I purchased mine a while ago, but I wanted to pass it along to my educator friends.
via nytimes.com
The New York Times put out We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint talking about how military commanders are spending inordinate amounts of time making and watching PowerPoint presentations. Anyone who knows me well knows I hate PowerPoints, usually because they're done so poorly. Now and then I've seen a great one, but there's something about the structure of the tool and the way in which we're teaching people to use it that drives me crazy.
I was struck by the fact that Bumiller (article author) missed referencing Edward Tufte's The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, which is the best $7 you'll ever spend if you use PowerPoint or any other digital presentation tool. Tufte makes it clear how the tool itself can lead you to present data in unhelpful, and in NASA's case, dangerous, ways. I have an old blog post titled, Is PowerPoint a Waste of Time for Teachers that became relevant for me again after reading the Times' article.
Do you use PowerPoint? How do you differ from the military use? Do you use it with your students? How do you get them to learn what a bullet point even means? Too many questions, too little time.
The App Store is for Suckers
by Jonathan Stark
Submitting (pun intended) to the App Store is for suckers.
Do you really want to:
- Give up 30% of your profit?
- Learn Objective-C?
- Endure approval delays, rejections, and yanks?
- Navigate labyrinthian code signing issues?
- etc…The cheapest, easiest, fastest way for folks to get in on the mobile gold rush is to build killer web apps. Web apps can access location data, utilize client-side SQL databases, and even run offline.
In addition to side-stepping the App Store minefield, web apps run on more than 100 mobile handsets with zero modification.
And on desktops.
And on the iPad.
And on anything else that has a reasonably modern web browser; which will likely include everything from sewing machines to cereal boxes in the next few years.
The App Store paradigm (Apple and others) is an out-dated business model based on scarcity, middlemen, and control. It is newspapers. It is travel agents. It is used car salesmen.
The world has moved on. Don’t get suckered.
I love this commentary by Jonathan Stark on developing iPhone apps. I've sort of known that I wanted a web app for our school for a while. Athletics schedules, blog posts, access to our Moodle server, etc. But then I couldn't figure out if we should develop for BlackBerry or iPhones (and what about the Palm Pre!), but then this post just made it all clear.
Closed models = bad. Didn't the Internet teach us anything?
A great list of applications that are free for your Mac! I use most of them, but have a few I need to install/download. Hence the post so I can remember to do so. Any others you would add to the list?
