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My iPad for Meetings Experience

Dower — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 04:38:24 +0000

I just wanted to jot down some quick thoughts on the iPad tonight before going to bed.
Today, I attempted to use it in some of my meetings today, so off I went to my meeting, iPad in hand. I was determined to use it like how I used to use my Compaq 2710p Tablet PC. My replacements for my Penable stylus and Microsoft One-Note was my Pogo and PenUltimate.

The result? sadly disappointing. I won’t sugar coat, the Pogo just doesn’t hack it in comparison to my nice Penable pen. Now, I won’t say that the Compaq 2710p is perfect, on the contrary, the tracking sometimes is a bit off on the corners, but overall, my 2710p and One-Note was a killer combo. PenUltimate is a nice tool, but I feel like I’m back in kindergarten finger painting large scrawling notes because my Pogo won’t track that well (maybe because of my Zagg), and at times I need to resort to my fat finger, and I’m just wasn’t happy with the results…

The Pogo, because of the soft tip, had to be mushed onto the screen almost to the metal body for it to start tracking, and because of the tackiness of my Zagg screen protector the Pogo just dragged along the surface, so it felt like painting on fly paper. The other issue was my writing/drawing style, I can’t speak for everyone, but when I learned how to write in school my hand was on the page while holding my pen. Well, I can’t do that with the iPad, as soon as my hand rested on the touch surface, a touch was registered, resulting in scribbles where my hand started to rest. So, I had to use the Pogo like a Chinese calligraphy brush, hovering over the screen. The result was an even more unreadable mess. Ditching my Pogo was a little better, at least the tracking was better, but I just can’t write with my finger. Alas, I gave up on Penultimate and went to Pages, since Penultimate doesn’t accept typing. Once in Pages, I flipped the iPad into Landscape mode, locked the rotation and sat it on the desk flat to type meeting notes; a much better experience. It did take a little getting used to the slightly different arrangement of keys on the iPad keyboard, but I was able to type pretty quickly.

So my experience with my iPad in meetings didn’t go as nicely as I wanted. Doodling in boredom in Sketchbook Pro and taking notes in PenUltimate with my Pogo just didn’t work as nicely as the same combination found in my Penable TabletPC’s. The iPad’s form factor and battery life is so incredible, but it REALLY needs a stylus, even if it’s an optional accessory… Not having one just seems like such a travesty!

Big Nerd Ranch Day 03

Dower — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 03:44:30 +0000

Today ends Day three of the Big Nerd Ranch. Mark finished his overview of Objective-C and now it was Joe’s turn to take us into iPhone development. Our first appication was a simple quiz application that served as an introduction to using Xcode’s Window Based Application template, Interface Builder, and deploying an application to our iPhone. It wasn’t anything fancy, we had an NSArray of 3 questions and answers that populated labels on the screen when one of two buttons were pressed. We went over the necessity for good memory management again, which is critical because unlike other environments (like your pc or mac desktop) there is no automatic garbage collection.

From the quiz application we continued onto building an application that utilized Apple’s CoreLocation library to pull our GPS location and learn about delegates. It was quite interesting, the only thing I can equate delegation to is setting up an event listener, or an ajax call. Where, once the delegate is setup to run, it will go about doing it’s task and report back when it’s completed it’s task without the need to constantly poll or ask for a request completion. Lastly, we continued onto an introduction to CoreGraphics, where we learned about Views and made a simple application that used CoreGraphics to draw shapes on the screen, add text and establish a ScrollView, which allowed for panning and zooming of the window.

It was a large amount of content to cram into a day, but it was very exciting to see the pieces of our hard work over the past few days come together.

Big Nerd Ranch Day 02

Dower — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 01:45:39 +0000

Day 2 comes to an end. Mark finished teaching us about Objective-C. It was alot of material today. Much more about objects, inheritance, subclassing, Categories, Memory Management and Protocols to name just a few. The topic of Memory Management was very helpful, and all along Mark has been showing us how the areas of memory are reserved and used as our applications run, this is essential knowledge, since the iPhone lacks any garbage collection capability, and after going through this, I have a much better understanding of this topic now. The topics of Categories, Delegates, and Protocols were not quite as clear. Protocol’s I seem to understand, but the Categories and Delegates, I understand the concept, but executing them is a little hard to follow.

Our nature hike was a good one today, we went down to an old mill on the property, it was actually a much harder hike than yesterday, since the terrain was a little more rugged. But it was enjoyable, and got the blood flowing.

Mark left today, and it will be our next instructor Joe’s turn, and tomorrow we start building actual iPhone applications. All I can say is that having gone through the Objective-C course, I’m much better prepared to tackle iPhone development because now i can better understand the syntax of the language, and understand why things are written the way they are.

Big Nerd Ranch Day 01

Dower — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 02:49:33 +0000

Today ends Day One of the Seven Day boot camp. Today was an intensive review of C, and an introduction to Objective-C. For me, it was a great class. Mark, our instructor did a great job explaining the topic. We started off slow, with variables, then going into loops, functions, structures, enumerations, and moving onto extending the C language and an introduction to Objective-C and object oriented programming. All at the same time building up our familiarity with XCode. It was a large amount of data to absorb, and even though there are similarities to Java and Actionscript, Objective-C definitely has it’s quirks to get used to. Having met many of the class members already over meals, it was good to see how much of a diverse group we have. There are some that have never programmed before, others haven’t in a long time, and some that come from different programming backgrounds. A few own their own company, and others work for companies like Adobe. We even have someone from Apple, who is one of their Genius technicians. I’m definitely enjoying the environment. It’s nice to be in a place that isn’t an office building. The nature walk in the afternoon was great, it really got the blood flowing and got me out of my oncoming food coma.

Tomorrow will be more hardcore Object Oriented programming in Objective-C. I know most of the concepts of OOP, but application in Objective-C is different than know about OOP.

Big Nerd Ranch Day 00

Dower — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 02:48:17 +0000

I arrived in Atlanta without issue today. The flight was a little bumpy due to turbulance, but otherwise was smooth. It was a long walk to the baggage collection area in the airport. Once I got my bag, I waited for the shuttle bus to arrive. I had to wait for the 5pm shuttle, because my flight got me in at 2:30pm, missing the first shuttle. While waiting, I met 6 other Nerd’s there, and it was a pleasent bus ride (about 50 minutes) to the Banning Mills Resort.

The resort is out in the woods, and is a very pleasant country setting, probably the nicest place I’ve been to for training. Once checked into our rooms, we met for dinner with the others that had come with the 2pm shuttle. It was nice getting to know some of the people that I will be training with. They’re a pretty good bunch, all with varying backgrounds, most have not done any Objective-C programming before. But that will change tomorrow. Tomorrow morning, we begin the 2 day workshop of Objective-C! It should be a good class, and I’m looking forward to it.

Full iPhone Immersion!

Dower — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 04:40:03 +0000

I’ve decided to dedicate myself to the Apple iPhone/iPod Touch. I think there’s a place for me in this market, so I’m headed to the Big Nerd Ranch for some serious training! Tomorrow, I’m off for 7 Days to learn all I can about this device, and become more familiar with it than any other device I’ve owned to date. I’ll write about how the bootcamp and my time goes.

Tomorrow, I’m off to Atlanta!

So, is the iPhone Nirvana in My Pocket?

Dower — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 04:35:52 +0000

Hmm, that title is ripe for some horrible comments… But seriously, It’s been almost 4 weeks now, so is it perfect? Does it live up to my exacting standards?

Almost. It’s probably the best smartphone I’ve owned to date. But with that comes some drawbacks for me (you know I had to find something). My only real peeve is having to completely surrender the way I do things with my pocket devices to the way that Apple wants me to use it, but that’s really what Apple is all about isn’t it? It’s there way or the high way.

My negatives really aren’t around the phone itself, but more the software/os. Apple really locks you down to one machine. They’re world is revolves around you owning one machine to do everything, and that’s it. As soon as you cross this boundry to say a mixed environment or mulitple machines, it all goes to hell. Handling the syncing of applications and all data on my iPhone is enough example of this. I like plugging in my device to multiple machines, my PC, my iMac at home, and my Macbook Pro. But trying to keep things sync’d properly without accidentally wiping my data off my phone can be challenging. I’ve already lost my songs, playlists and apps on more than one occasion now, because iTunes decided that hey, I’m supposed to sync, and hey this computer doesn’t have these songs, so I’ll just wipe them off the iPhone.

The problem here could just be that I’m just not well educated on the nuances of managing iPhone (iPod Touch too) data on multiple machines. But I was really annoyed that I couldn’t get my playlists of my iPod Touch to my iPhone…

The other area of annoyance is the lack of customization with the sounds on your phone. I like that I could taylor my own sounds on my WinMo Phone, but I’m sort of stuck with what Apple has given me for SMS sounds and email sounds. Luckily they let you make your own ringtones… Once again, this is minor, but I had to point it out.

If Apple can make it easier to manage with multiple machines (or if someone can show me a good way to do this and still manage to keep my sync’d data), and let me change all the system sounds, I would consider this perfect (until I find the next thing that bugs me).