Week Cal: The Slightly Better iPhone Calendar

Sometimes it is the little things that make a big difference.  I have always been slightly disappointed by the standard iPhone calendar app (Calendar).  I usually use the List display because it takes up the least room (meaning I can see several days forward) and so it allows me to schedule a meeting without having to click thru several days worth of calendar.  But the List display shows only the start time for my meetings and other events.  It's hard to schedule meetings when you're not sure if your other meetings are only 60 minutes or possibly as long as 90 or 120 minutes.

So it's a little thing, but I have discovered Week Cal, an iPhone app (the iPad version isn't available at the moment), and Week Cal's List view shows the start time and the end time of each item.  At a glance I can see if I have time between meetings, or if I have unintentionally overlapped two meetings.  The font is a little smaller than the one used by Calendar, too, but not too small to read, so I can see a little bit further into the future without scrolling. 

Siri (again): Will Remind, Will Remind, Will Remind Me

No, not the song by Royksopp.  Now that I've had a little more time to play with Siri, I may have stumbled upon one of its most useful additions to professional productivity: the ability to remind me to do things.  Let me elaborate.

iOS 5 has a built-in app called Reminders.  It isn't quite "Tasks", although when you open it up, you can swipe between Completed, Tasks, and Reminders.  I'm already using a different system for tasks, so the interesting part for me here is the Reminders part.  I had a little bit of trouble getting this to work the way I wanted, until I found some online sites that explained how to configure this. 

First, in the iOS 5 Settings, you need to turn on Location Services.  They have to be on for Reminders, too.  (I also have it on for Siri.)  Then, in the Mail/Contacts/Calendars setting, you go all the way to the very bottom and set Default List to Reminders (where it syncs with the iCloud).  If you leave it set to Tasks, it will sync with your work Exchange server, but that setting didn't handle Reminders the way I wanted.

If you've gotten past all of the techie stuff so far, I'll now explain how this is going to work in practice.  You can say to Siri "Remind me to call Barbara at 5pm", and Siri will dutifully repeat this back to you (to make sure it's right).  You confirm that it is, and Siri adds the reminder to your Reminders app list.  At 5pm, your iPhone 4S beeps to remind you to call Barbara. 

Now let's get fancier.  Siri can know where certain places are (such as your home and work).  You can say "Remind me when I leave work to stop by the dry cleaners."  No matter what time you leave work, you'll get beeped when you're geographically away from the location Siri knows as your work location.  You could also have a reminder such as "Remind me when I get to work to speak to Barbara about my orientation idea". 

Suddenly, you've got time-based reminders and location-based reminders.  Just when and where you need them.  How handy is that?

Event Observer

One of the things we do occasionally is observe the traffic in the Library, trying to determine how long patrons wait for service or the room count for different areas of the Library. Even with a smart phone or tablet that has clock and timer applications, getting good data is cumbersome.

Recently I discovered an iPhone/iPad app called Event Observer, which provides the ability to time or count multiple events at once. The free version (Event Observer Lite), can record the time or count for up to four events. The for fee version, which costs a whopping $0.99, lets the user track up to 10 events.

Event Observer is an interaction analysis tool and it has made my observation tasks much easier. I've set it up to record the wait time for patrons in line at our different service points, the amount of time there weren't any patrons waiting in line, and the amount of time there weren't any patrons at the service point. All I had to do was to create the list of events (also called attributes), indicate whether I wanted to time or count the attributes, then start conducting the observation. If I want to time multiple events simultaneously, Event Observer can do that or if I want to toggle between timers, it can do that too. It is also easy to setup and use for counting the people in a room, the number of students attending instruction or library events, or anything else I'd want to count.

I just began my use of this app, but I think it's going to be a very useful addition to my little toolbox.

Keynote Remote: iPhone Control of Your iPad

A year and a half ago, when I bought my iPad, I began using it for presentations when I traveled.  I had the Keynote app, and I would create my presentations using PowerPoint on my desktop computer, then save the presentations into Dropbox, and then open them on the iPad using Keynote.  Other than fixing a few font problems, I was good to go.

Almost.

The only drawback was that, unlike with a laptop, I didn't have an easy way to control the presentation remotely.  I was essentially trapped behind the podium so that I could advance my slides.  Clearly, I needed a way to run my presentation remotely.   Then along came Keynote Remote, an app that would run on my iPhone.  By using Bluetooth, I was able to link the iPad to the iPhone, and suddenly I could see the current slide and the next slide on my iPhone screen.  Now I could walk around the front of the room, holding the iPhone, and advance my slides.  This worked with only one minor hiccup during one presentation.

Life was good. 

Then I upgraded to an iPhone 4S (from a 3GS), and upgraded my iPad to iOS 5.  And suddenly, the ability to link the iPad to the iPhone via Bluetooth went away.  At least when using Keynote Remote. 

I discovered one workaround.  By downloading and installing another pair of apps on my iPad and iPhone that communicated using Bluetooth, I was able to re-establish the Bluetooth link, and then Keynote Remote returned to the ability to communicate with Keynote using Bluetooth. 

Life is ok.  But it will be better when they fix the iOS 5/Bluetooth bug in Keynote Remote. 

Do any of you out there use Keynote on your iPad to present with?  And Keynote Remote to control the presentation?

More Siri: Turning voice into status updates

I think it's safe to say that most librarians use at least one social networking service, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google+.  But logging into those systems just to do a status update can be time consuming, especially if you're on the go and have only your phone with you and no convenient keyboard. 

But if you're an iPhone 4S user, you can use the built-in Siri personal assistant to update any of those social networks.  First, you go into each service and follow the directions to allow sending SMS message (texts) from your phone to the service.  Then, you go into your phone and update your contacts so that you have contacts named "Facebook" or "Twitter" or "LinkedIn" or "Google", with the phone number being whatever number is used by the social service for incoming text messages.

After that, all you need to do is tell Siri to "Text Facebook" (for example) following by your status update. 

Hmmm, I'm already getting some ideas on how to use this to promote library events as they are happening!

GoodReader: Mobile pdf annotation made easy

Alert: This software is only available for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.

There is a plethora (I always love using that word) of apps for reading pdf files on mobile devices. I've used iBooks, Evernote, Dropbox, Bluefire Reader, plus others. And they're all fine for just reading the file. But when I'm reading a C&RL article or an Ithaka S+R report or a white paper from an ALA committee, I like to highlight sections and make margin notes. GoodReader lets me do that and more.

GoodReader, by Good.iWare, has standard ebook reader functionality like day/night mode, bookmarks, easy navigation within a document, automatic page orientation, full text searching, and email/print functions. What makes it special is it's robust pdf annotation features.

There's highlighting, underlining, squiggly underlining, strikeout, text insertion marking, and text replacement marking - all with color wheel color selection. There's a typewriter feature that lets you add text anywhere on a page. There's also a popup note function that records your note and inserts an icon wherever you tap. The popup note can be color-coded as well and has several icons you can select from (question mark, key, edit mark, triangle or delta to name a few). Finally, there's also drawing tools to add lines, arrows, circles/ovals, and squares/rectangles, plus a freehand tool for drawing or writing. The drawing tools all let you select color, line size, and transparency.

So what else makes it special? Any annotations that are added can also be deleted. You can encrypt the file if you need that level of security. If multiple people are reviewing the same file, the current annotator's name can be set in the, wait for it, Settings. If you want to send the annotated file to someone who doesn't have GoodReader, you can flatten the pdf, which will embed the annotations into the main pdf body page. Another nice feature is that you can add your mark-ups to the existing file or created an annotated copy.

And there's more! It does pdf to text conversion. The vendor provides fairly good online documentation, which a lot of app developers don't seem to think is important. There are consistent upgrades that improve the functionality of the product and you can pull files to annotate from iCloud, Dropbox, Google Docs, SugarSync, IMAP or POP3 mail servers, WebDAV servers, or FTP/SFTP servers.

Now we know it can't be perfect… and it's not. Here are some of the cons. It's not free. But it's not exorbitantly expensive at $4.99. The iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch versions are two different applications, which is a big no-no in my book. However, I only use it on my iPad because I can't imagine trying to annotate on an iPhone/iPod Touch screen. And, as alerted above, it's not available on non-iOS mobile devices or in a desktop version.

With all of this, GoodReader has gotten very good to excellent reviews by the likes of PC Magazine, Macworld, and CNET. Why not give it a try and let us know what you think?

Siri: First impressions mean a lot

It's human nature to size up a new person in your life in the very first few minutes of meeting them for the first time.  Much the same can be said about software and online services.  But what happens when that software acts like a human being?  Let's just say that it had better deliver from the first few minutes, or you're probably not going to bother with it.  Fortunately, Siri doesn't disappoint.

If you haven't been keeping up with the latest Apple fanboy/fangirl news, then you might be excused for not yet hearing about Siri, the artificial intelligence that is part of the new iOS 5 but that so far works only on the new iPhone 4S.  I've only had my new phone since late Friday afternoon, so my experience in using Siri is somewhat limited.  But let me share a few highlights that might point toward Siri becoming a great new productivity tool.

Siri not only has the power of Nuance Communications for voice recognition (yes, the same wonderful people that have brought you Dragon Dictation software over the recent years), but also it can take apart the words you've just said and figure out what you probably meant.  If you want to read all of the funny questions that people have asked Siri (and the equally funny answers), there are plenty of other blogs out there where you can find those.  I'll focus on the slightly more serious side of Siri.  First, it definitely understands my voice, and that's with essentially no training.  I expect it will get even better with time.

Second, it has access to your location (well, if you allow it to), so it will understand what "here" means.  And that means that you can find the nearest this-or-that (restaurant, store, etc.) to where you are.  Obviously, you can also ask it for directions. 

Siri began by calling me "Andrew", but that is no surprise, since that's how I had "officially" listed myself when I bought the phone.  But I told Siri "call me Drew", and from that point forward, that's what Siri did.  (I resisted the urge to have Siri refer to me as "Lord and Master", as I aim for more subtle ways to boost my ego.)

I asked Siri to tell me what Barbara Lewis (my blog partner in crime here) had in the way of a mobile phone number, and Siri told me.  I then asked about Barbara's (no mention of "Lewis") work number, and Siri told me that, too, understanding by context which Barbara I meant.  And when I then asked for "her" email address, Siri continued to understand the context and correctly gave me that information, too.

I can use Siri to text messages for me, simply by voice (making it somewhat safer to text while driving), and to read aloud any text responses to me.  I've also set up Siri to use Twitter for me, using a little feature of Twitter where you can text Twitter and Twitter sends the text message out as a tweet. 

I'll keep you posted as to whether Siri can help my productivity by reading aloud my calendar, adding items to it, or doing similar things with my to-do list.  But if it can't do those things today, I know it's only a matter of time before it can.

Hmmm, I wonder if I can train Siri to write my blog postings for me?