Tag Archives: apps

April 19, 2013, 11:00 am

Methods for Organizing Your Apps

ProfHacker has featured several posts about various mobile apps. See for instance the Open Thread Wednesday dedicated to (y)our Favorite Weather Apps, guest author Ian MacInnes’s post on “Finding the Best iOS App for Annotation and Note-Taking,” and my previous post on GradeBook Pro to name just a few.

But once you have all of these apps, what do you do with them? Or how do you organize them so that you can access them quickly and easily? Are you someone who has a dozen different screens that you must weed through on a regular basis? Or do you have a system?

I have a system. I adopted it a year or so ago, and it has worked wonders for me. One of the reasons I was reluctant to switch to iOS in the first place was the overwhelming number of different apps available for even the simplest of tasks. Most iPhone users I knew had screen after screen of apps, with no apparent rhyme or…

March 29, 2013, 11:00 am

6 Tips for Successful Mobile Video Assignments in the Classroom

By Prof. Hacker

[This is a guest post by Ronald A Yaros, assistant professor of multimedia and mobile journalism in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. You can find out more at his homepage or on LinkedIn. Follow him on Twitter at @ryaros]

YouTube logged one trillion viewers in 2011 or about 140 views for every person on the planet. On average, 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s why it’s no surprise that instructors in many different disciplines are looking for ways to integrate mobile video into their courses. Video offers opportunities to engage students with assignments that synthesize research, communication skills and writing.

However, in the three years I’ve been teaching mobile video in a course titled “Information 3.0,” even those students who initially say they are very familiar with video later admit that they learned a lot …

November 1, 2012, 1:12 pm

Remembering More with Due and Recall for iOS

By Jason B. Jones

I will admit to a fondness for single-purpose iOS apps. I recognize that there’s a real virtue in keeping everything in text files, say, or in having one omnibus app that tracks everything in one’s life, but I have a hard time wrapping my brain around that. This morning, then, I wanted to alert folks to two new-to-me iOS apps that scratch very specific itches, Due and Recall.

Due: Reminders/Timers

There are things that I am sometimes prone to forget, but which don’t really fit into a calendar or a to-do list. One example is bringing a particular book home from campus, or vice versa. Another, more weirdly specific one is that when doing laundry, I can’t always hear the timer on the dryer, and so the whole process will get slowed down by the fact that the laundry’s just sitting around getting wrinkled. In my head, of course, I assume that the dryer is still going because I haven’t…

August 29, 2012, 8:00 am

Path: A Twenty-First Century Geotagging Journal

By Adeline Koh

Have you ever wanted to keep a digital history of where you’ve been? I found a solution to this a few months ago with Path, an interesting new application for the iPhone and Android introduced to me by my new colleague Victoria Szabo (@vszabo). Path is a free application that allows you to easily “tag” yourself, pictures, and videos at locations around the world.

The most useful thing about Path is its geotagging capabilities. When you create a “moment” on the app (which can be a photograph, thought, video, song, etc.), you have the option of pinning your thought to your geographical location. This means that even if you’re not sure where you are, with the app you’re always going to be able to find your way back to the spot where you had your moment. You can also give names to places, which you can make public. Fun names I’ve seen on Path include “The Little Yellow …

August 22, 2012, 3:00 pm

eNotations: Produce Your Own Critical Edition In Class

By Adeline Koh

Can students produce their own learning content? Cathy Davidson (@cathyndavidson) thinks so, and has been challenging educators to make this happen. Last semester I modestly attempted answer her call by asking my students to create their own annotated critical edition of a literary text. This assignment was part of a “Literary Research” seminar, a gateway course that introduces students to research methodologies for the literature major. One of its pedagogical goals is to train students to recognize how the critical reception of a text changes over time.

Towards this aim, I created an “eNotation” assignment with the help of eNotated Classics, a company that publishes both annotated critical editions by scholars and hypertext editions for class assignments. I worked with John Ashenhurst from eNotated Classics, who constructed an electronic hypertext version of our central…

August 22, 2012, 8:00 am

Working on the Go

By Prof. Hacker

[This week, GradHacker and ProfHacker writers are collaborating on a series of posts about productivity apps and systems. The 8am post every day is part of this collaboration. Today's post is by GradHacker writer Stephanie Hedge, a graduate student in the Department of English at Ball State University. Follow her on Twitter at @slhedge--@jbj.]

Starbucks is one of my favorite places in the world to work. Coffee, company, and a relaxing atmosphere help me concentrate and keep focused on my task. As it can be a pain to lug my laptop everywhere, I have a tablet, as well as a mobile phone, and I use both when working away from my desk. But working on my iPad is only useful if I have the right tools to support my workflow, and the ability to access my documents across platforms. This post provides hacks for productively managing a workflow across different…

August 21, 2012, 11:00 am

Back to School: Mac App Pack

By Ryan Cordell

As school begins I thought I would review the Mac desktop applications that I will most need during the semester. I hope my Mac-using ProfHacker colleagues will chime in with their own picks in the comments. Other posts for Windows and Linux apps will appear here in the coming weeks.
So, looking in order down my dock (which, for completeness’ sake, I will note that I organize vertically on the left side of my screen), we have:

Things: I just reiterated my love for Things in a recent post about the to-do manager’s 2.0 update. I won’t gush more. It’s a great (though pricey and by no means the only great) OS X and iOS task manager. Mac app price: $49.99
Postbox: another ProfHacker favorite. Amy reviewed Postbox, Mark discussed Postbox add-ons, and I recently announced a price-drop for the OS X Mail alternative. I love Postbox’s hotkeys for organizing mail and I love the social media …

August 20, 2012, 8:00 am

Productivity and My Menu Bar Heroes

By Prof. Hacker

[This week, GradHacker and ProfHacker writers are collaborating on a series of posts about productivity apps and systems. The 8am post every day is part of this collaboration. Today's post is by GradHacker Caitlin Holton, who is a PhD student at the University of Guelph, working on the history of masculinity in medieval Scotland. You can find out more at http://caitlinholton.com, and follow her on Twitter. --@jbj]

Have you ever organized an unconference session? Being good ~~Grad~~ProfHacker readers, I’m sure many of you have. My first was at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute this year at the University of Victoria. I proposed a session I called “Free and Cheap Apps to Improve Your Life.” For some reason, that made people laugh. For some other reason, people decided to come! The goal of the session was to think about daily tasks that could be accomplished more easily through …

August 15, 2012, 8:00 am

WhatsApp: Get Rid of Your Text Messaging Plan

By Adeline Koh

Smartphones can be expensive. And messaging plans even more so over the life of the contract. Enter a new way to reduce your monthly cellphone bill: applications that send text messages over the Internet, eliminating your need for overpriced text messages by your phone carrier.

On my trip to Asia this summer, I discovered that many of my friends in Singapore have abandoned their text messaging plans in favor of WhatsApp. WhatsApp is a cheap mobile messenger application ($0.99 in the Apple App Store) that works across multiple platforms (iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Windows Phone). Instead of sending texts via your messaging plan, WhatsApp sends them over your data plan or wifi network. You can also send multimedia messages such as photos/videos, audio notes, contacts, locations as well through the app.

In form and function, WhatsApp works similarly to Apple’s iMessage, which …

June 12, 2012, 2:11 pm

Browse Smarter with User Agent Switching

By Jason B. Jones

I have always liked the iPad’s version of Safari, and so have never bothered to explore the various alternative browsers on the App Store. But Safari does have a couple of drawbacks: it usually tries to display a site’s mobile version first, and some sites will block functionality when Mobile Safari is detected. To take just three examples: my credit union doesn’t display the required security code for login on Mobile Safari; Google Docs serves a mobile version, unless you choose otherwise; and, most frustrating for my purposes, PBWorks says that Mobile Safari doesn’t support editing online, and won’t let you edit pages at all. Since we use PBWorks for some behind-the-scenes work at ProfHacker, and I use it in most classes for my wikified class notes assignment, this was a serious limitation!