Tag Archives: apple

March 19, 2013, 8:00 am

Turn Your iPad into a Universal Shortcut Machine with Actions

If you’ve been reading my last several posts, you might have figured out that I’m kind of fanatical about keyboard shortcuts. That’s why I recently showed you how to learn your keyboard shortcuts, brainstormed new and simple twists on text expansion, and covered how to create keyboard shortcuts for ANYTHING! It turns out that my love of shortcuts isn’t restricted to the keyboard, however. Launch Center Pro is my most used app on my phone, because it lets me do everything on my iOS device with a single touch. So when I heard about a new iPad app that would let me fire off shortcuts to the computer, I was more than a little curious.

Actions bills itself as the One App to Rule Them All. But that title is a bit misleading, as it might make you think that it will control the apps on the iPad itself. Instead, Actions controls the applications on your computer. (Apple fanboy status be damned, …

February 26, 2013, 11:00 am

Launch Center Pro, or Get to Everything on Your iOS Device in One Touch

By Brian Croxall

Think, dear ProfHacker readers, with me back to the beginning of this school year: about your plans to do better in your teaching, to do better in your research, and to blog more regularly. It turns out that ProfHacker too has aspirations at times that we don’t meet completely. For instance, you might recall our podcast. After a glorious first episode that aired in 2009 featuring Merlin Mann, we took a three-year hiatus (as all rockers do) until releasing episodes two and three this past September. Believe it or not, we recorded a fourth episode. Rumor has it that Jason is still editing it in his home studio, trying to give Kevin Shields a run for his money.

In any case, at the very end of episode three (starting at 40:50), Jason mentions a new favorite app of his, Launch Center Pro and how we hadn’t reviewed it on the site yet. Well, today’s the day, and it makes a fitting follow-up …

January 19, 2012, 2:29 pm

Reflections on the Apple Education Event

By Kathleen Fitzpatrick

I had the opportunity to spend this morning with the Chronicle‘s Jeff Young, live-tweeting from the Apple Education announcement event. As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, today’s announcement included:

the release of the iBooks 2 app for iOS, which allows for rich multimedia interactive textbooks;
the launch of the Textbooks category in the iBooks store, including an already-available collection of high-school texts priced at $14.99 and under;
the release of the iBooks Author application for Mac, which allows individuals to create textbooks (and other books — a note I’ll return to shortly) with the drag-and-drop ease of other Apple applications including Keynote;
the launch of the iTunes U app for iOS, which facilitates the distribution not just of the course-oriented podcasts of iTunes U’s existing service, but of fully coordinated curricula.

It was, for a small…

August 15, 2011, 8:00 am

New Accessibility Features in Mac OS X Lion

By Cory Bohon

Apple has always made accessibility one of their top priorities when it comes to the Mac, and more recently the iPhone and iPad. As a Mac user would come to expect, when Mac OS X Lion was recently released, there were a few new accessibility features that made the upgrade process even better for users with motor, visual, and hearing impairments.

In Mac OS X Lion, Apple has added over 11 new features that allow individuals with disabilities to use their computers more easily.

Built-in Voices
VoiceOver (Apple’s built-in screen reader) now includes new built-in voices that can speak 22 different languages: Arabic, English, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish (Spain), Swedish, Turkish, Cantonese, Mandarin (China), and Mandarin (Taiwan).

In addition, …

June 7, 2011, 8:08 am

The iWork Suite on Your iPhone and iPod Touch

By Jason B. Jones

Last week, in advance of the WWDC keynote, Apple announced that its suite of mobile iWork products (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote), which had been available on the iPad since launch, would now be universal apps that work on the iPhone and iPod Touch as well. (To be precise: on the most recent two versions of each of those devices, when they are running iOS 4.2.8 or later.)

After the keynote, it’s now clear that these apps are designed to show off the way iCloud will store and push (not sync) data to devices. As demonstrated in the keynote, the idea is that a document saved to iCloud would instantly be available on all your devices, ready for use.

There are two pretty different questions that emerge around the apps: how do they work now, and how will they work with iCloud?

Right now, the apps are impressive. The interface is attractive, …

April 12, 2011, 11:00 am

Reading Adobe Digital Editions on your iOS Device

By Brian Croxall

If you’re anything like me, you use your mobile devices to get a lot of reading done. I use Read It Later (yes, I’m mentioning it again) on my iPod Touch and iPad to time shift a lot of the interesting web pages that I find online throughout a day’s work. I’ve used both GoodReader (which Ethan has written about previously) and more recently iAnnotatePDF (Jason covered it) to read and annotate scholarly articles, as well as Word documents. And when I feel like it, I’ve got the Kindle app, iBooks, and others that allow me to read something that is both scholarly and fun. So reading isn’t all that hard on my iOS devices…except for one type of text: Adobe Digital Editions.

Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) are PDFs that have digital rights management (DRM) that restrict how the files can be used. DRM is used to prevent piracy, determine the length of time for a library loan, and more….