April 19, 2013, 11:00 am
By Erin E. Templeton
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…
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April 1, 2013, 11:00 am
By Prof. Hacker
[This is a guest post by J. Michael Duvall, an associate professor of English at the College of Charleston, where he teaches American Literature. You can find him online at his website and follow him on Twitter @duvalljm]
BrowZine is a free app — by Third Iron — for accessing and reading content from academic journals on the iPad (with versions for other tablets being developed). The app allows users to
- select academic journals from a “shelf” display (see Figure 1.),
- browse complete journal issues,
- read individual articles,
- collect favorite journals on a shelf of one’s own,
- save favorite articles,
- and perform additional tasks with journal content.
A service, rather than an app, as Third Iron prefers to think of it, Browzine emphasizes perusing or thumbing through and reading of academic journals, rather than searching or marking up texts….
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March 29, 2013, 11:00 am
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 …
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March 21, 2013, 11:00 am
By Brian Croxall
Two and a half years ago, George posted a review of Pear Note, “a $40 Mac-only software application from Useful Fruit designed specifically for taking notes while watching a presentation.” Now, you could arguably do that with a text editor or even Word. So what makes Pear Note special is that it records the presentation’s audio while you’re typing notes, and afterwards you can click on a portion of your notes and hear the audio that was happening right as you typed those notes. So if you can’t quite figure out the context of what you’ve written down, you can suddenly hear it all again.
It’s recapturing this context that has made Pear Note pretty integral to my work. In my alt-ac position, I’m in a lot of meetings and I run a lot of meetings. Having Pear Note makes it a lot easier to write those post-meeting emails to the whole team or to review what everyone agreed to, three months …
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March 19, 2013, 8:00 am
By Brian Croxall
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, …
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February 28, 2013, 11:00 am
By Ryan Cordell
If you keep up with tech journalism at all, you may have heard about the new Mailbox app for iOS, which has garnered significant buzz lately as a forward-thinking email client for the mobile age. The app’s website promises to help users “put email in its place”: “We redesigned the inbox to make email light, fast, and mobile-friendly. Quickly swipe messages to your archive or trash. Scan an entire conversation at once with chat-like organization. Snooze emails until later with the tap of a button. It’s a whole new inbox.”
I managed to get an invitation to the service last week (which is in very limited beta—more on their waitlist later) and have been using it over the weekend. I wanted to write up my initial impressions, with a more detailed post to come.
There are many things I like very much about Mailbox:
- Mailbox’s UI is truly gorgeous. Mailbox feels like a modern email…
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February 26, 2013, 11:00 am
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 …
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February 22, 2013, 11:00 am
By Adeline Koh
One of the most frustrating things about sending documents by email is processing signatures. For many of us, this often means printing out documents, signing them and then scanning them–a painfully slow process. Some of us may use applications such as GoodReader and iAnnotate to sign documents directly from mobile devices, but they can often be overkill for a simple signature.
I’ve been really impressed so far by a new app called HelloSign, which allows you to sign documents directly from your Gmail account.
(more…)
November 29, 2012, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
The research organizer and reference manager Zotero is one of ProfHacker’s favorite tools. I’ve shown how ZotPad allows you to access your saved sources and PDFs on your iPad, but there’s one key functionality that ZotPad doesn’t (yet) provide: saving citations to Zotero from your iPad.
Enter the Zotero Bookmarklet.
The Zotero Bookmarklet can be added to almost any modern browser—including Safari on the iPad or iPhone—and it allows you to save a source to your Zotero library, as long as the Zotero web service recognizes that source. In other words, the Zotero Bookmarklet works well with common research databases, electronic journals, and new sources, while it’s not likely to recognize regular blogs and random websites.
Installation of bookmarklets on iOS browsers is tricky, but this is the essential process (adapted from the official Zotero documentation):
- …
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November 1, 2012, 1:12 pm
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…
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