Dr. Who's Reading Room

iGoogle will be retired in 16 months, on November 1, 2013. The mobile version will be retired on July 31, 2012.

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—	What’s happening to iGoogle? - Web Search Help

Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” First Impressions

I have been using Lion for about a day now, enough to note some first impressions, but not nearly organized enough to present a systematic analysis of the new OS. The bottom line: come on in, the water’s fine!

Install was slightly glitchy, but still miraculous.

Purchase was seamless from the Mac App store, and the little circular Lion icon went to the Dock with a progress bar.
The computer went to sleep during the process, and the Lion icon disappeared.
I went back to “Purchases” in the Mac App Store, and clicked the install button. A progress bar appeared indicating that it needed to finish downloading, reporting it had downloaded “3.74 Gb of 3.74 Gb.”
When that finished a screen appeared indicating the computer would begin installing after restart.
Install was supposed to take 33 minutes, and the progress bar seemed to take longer than that. (I don’t know for certain, becuase I heard that “a watched pot never boils” and decided to read some from Ten Thousand Saints.
When the machine rebooted again, I was startled to see a redesigned login screen, with circular icons splayed out across the width of the screen instead of vertically in a box in the center.
When I logged in, just about all of my familiar stuff was there. I removed from the dock the icons with white circles and slashes through them, which indicated these were written for the PowerPC architecture (Rosetta now being gone from the OS).
Setup Assistant crashed and wouldn’t run again.

I pulled up Mission Control, and was initially disappointed that the “Spaces” were no longer arrayed in a grid, but horizontally across the width of the screen. That’ll take some getting used to. Also, I don’t know the logic by which the OS adds and subtracts desktops. I do know that they are supposed to be arranged in order of usage and that behavior can be toggled off in the System preferences.
Launchpad? Meh. I think this is for when touchscreens come to MacBook Air and iMac.
Mail took at least an hour to migrate, but the reward was worth it. Spotlight took overnight to reindex.
Initially Safari looks about the same, but when one probes a little deeper, one finds the Reader and the full-screen view. I love shift-clicking links in Facebook and iGoogle to send articles to the reader to look at later. It behaves so much more intuitively than Instapaper, and I disabled that extension.
The Addressbook and iCal look like paper equivalents of each. I love the new design of each, especially the day view of iCal, which looks like the Calendar on the iPad.
I absolutely adore the new Mail interface. I love the hiding of inboxes, the message display on the left, the fuller screen preview of the message, the ability to see mail threads and previous messages from the same sender with the same title (perfect for newsletter subscriptions). The ability to preview links in Mail is also very cool. With the upgrade to Snow Leopard I lost Data Detectors in POP3 mail. This is back. I think Mail is my favorite new app.
Apart from that, my favorite new feature of the OS is the full screen view. I didn’t expect I’d like it so much. It seriously minimized distractions from whatever I might be working on at the time. While I was reading articles in the new Safari, I caught one that indicated that there were iTunes (10.4) and iWork updates (and Remote Desktop Client) that worked with the fullscreen feature. As I was working in Keynote and Pages yesterday afternoon, I found this really handy, peaceful almost. I loved that the fullscreen view of Preview arranged side-by-side the opposing pages of an article I was re-reading for class. However, I found that two-fingered scrolling on my non-MultiTouch trackpad was a little too hair-trigger and I kept skipping sets of pages.
I notice that AirPlay in the new iTunes is “smart” in that it removes the ability to select remote speakers when I’m no longer on the same wireless network.
iChat combines buddies from different networks (i.e., AIM, Facebook chat) in the same list. I have a love-hate relationship with this seamlessness. I tried to add Google chat to the list—this is goverened ultimately from the “Mail, Contacts, and Calendars” pane in System Preferences, but as my Google login is my MobileMe e-mail, it got confused. I’m not sure if this is what broke iSync, but I’ve reset everything. I probably will change my primary e-mail in Google and try again.
Mail did not detect that one of my mail servers was an Exchange server, so I had to manually add it. I get duplicate mails, but Mail dutifully combines these.
I’m writing this in ScribeFire, a browser extension. I was pleased to see it was updated and Zemanta was added (trying that out below).
I can’t get used to the new, minimal gray scrollbars.
The biggest glitch for me was that I thought two-fingered scrolling was broken. It now behaves opposite what one would expect. On a mouse with a ball or wheel, one would normally roll down to scroll down. This is how two-fingered scrolling would work on the non-Multi-Touch trackpad on my MacBook. Now it works the opposite way, the way it does on iOS devices like the iPad. One drags up to scroll down and down to scroll up. When I get confused, I put my fingers on the screen, and imagine how I would move the text to read it if it were a piece of paper, or if I was working with a touchscreen. Analsysis of Apple patent seems to indicate that they are working on an iMac-like machine with a full touch display. (What now, Schmidt?)

In conclusion, though it’s only been a day, I’m really as excited about Lion as I thought I would be. I love most how fullscreen view makes working less distracting. “Easy is hard,” was the old adage of the The Macintosh Bible. I welcome anything that can simplify our quotidian computing, even as its reach into our everyday lives extends, and social media becomes more complex.

“Breaking the norm of noninvolvement” is what urban sociologists would have called this before the age of social media. It is more common than one would think and quite necessary. Urbanites have designated places like bars and public parks where they have always gone to meet strangers, neutral territory, as it were. Activities like walking the dog also have helped. There is nothing new about this.

What is new is that the activity should be digitally mediated. What is is the meaning of needing a prop this sophisticated, as opposed to say a dog or a mug of beer? Or is it more benign to do this? We do everything else on our mobile devices, so was it a matter of time they would be used for this purpose as well?

With SXSW well under way in Austin, Texas, the servers behind apps likeBeluga, GroupMe, Kik and FastSociety must be working overtime. After all, people like talking to their friends, right?

In this same batch of apps, we’ve seen another phenomenon, though - apps that make it quicker an easier to talk to people you don’t know - and we have one big question: Do people really want to talk to strangers?

There are many delicious iPad and iPhone apps for restauranteurs described here, but Locavore caught my environmental eye.

Be a Local Hero: Getting Your Ingredients Nearby

Awareness of organic, sustainable and local food has permeated American food culture, making seasonal and sustainable ingredients an integral element of the food philosophy of many restaurants. Scelfo aims to source as many ingredients as possible within 20 miles of his restaurant. One of the first apps he ever used to support his mission was Locavore, a local food sourcing iPhone app. Locavore can be searched based on specific produce or location and also shows nearby markets and seasonal recipes. Tap on “avocados” in the fruits and vegetables list and you’ll be taken to a U.S. map showing that they are currently locally available in Florida, Hawaii and California. Swipe upward on the screen and you’ll also learn how many months are left in the season.

The Tour de France app is the only one of the lot that interests me, and I found it’s in the iTunes UK store only. Moreover, the reviews there are not complimentary. Still, the article contains a thorough enumeration and comparison of features, along with a wish list. Though I’m not a sports sociologist or even much of a fan of spectator sports, I think it’s interesting that technology is changing the character of the fan experience, and that some of my students will think so, too. Certainly sports are a way to engage students on their turf, and had I the technology (I own none of these platforms), I would use it to stay better informed. At the very least, it helps to understand why students might be coming to class sleepy in October (during baseball playoffs and the World Series) and January (football playoffs and the Superbowl).

By David Reinhardt Follow David Reinhardt on twitter on July 8th, 2010
Believe it or not, the World Cup is not the only major sports event happening this summer. There’s a host of summer regulars which have recently made their appearance in the App Store, enough to make us sit up and label it a trend.

The Tour de France, Wimbledon and The Open have all posted “official” apps for fans. Quick to pick up on a trend, I decided to have a look at these apps and determine what makes, or breaks, an app for your major sports event.

iPad Applications to Be Covered Throughout Conference

INDIANAPOLIS–Tuesday, March 9, 2010–Developers, during the past two years, have leveraged the iPhone OS to create more than 100,000 applications, from games to healthcare to social networking and beyond. Devices like the iPhone, iPod touch and the new iPad are giving techies - as well as consumers - opportunities to discover a new world of innovative, everyday technological marvels.

On April 24-25, Pearson will host the second Voices That Matter: iPhone Developers Conference, at Seattle’s Bell Harbor Int’l Conference Center. Leading industry authors and experts will join developers to share their knowledge, and participate in discussions, how-to sessions, and networking opportunities around the topic of application development. The new iPad will be an integral part of conference activities.

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Be a Local Hero: Getting Your Ingredients Nearby

iPad Applications to Be Covered Throughout Conference