Don't read me wrong here: I'm all for helping good causes in any way you can. When a CEO serves up food at a soup kitchen and there's no media around to catch it, that's a noble thing. It's dharma and humanitarianism at it's finest. But it's also an underuse of skillset.
CEO in the soup kitchen.
Everybody can serve soup. But the CEO has a skillset that can be better used by the charity. Donating his business and management skills could help the soup kitchen be more efficient and serve more people. Instead of this honcho doling out a few dinners, they could be the catalyst for serving thousands more. That's doing gooder.
And doing gooder is not about donating money. Not at all. Skills and ideas are so much more valuable than a few dollars. Here's an example of this and how my family wound up taking in a Bosnian war refugee for a year.
100 kids the snipers missed.
Robert Azzi is an award-winning photojournalist who often finds himself working in the middle of gunfire. While covering the war in Bosnia, he saw kids killed daily by snipers in ski masks. At a time when war seemed its most senseless, the idea struck him that if he could get the brightest young minds in Bosnia out to finish high school in peace, he could save the lives of 100 future leaders.
He called Continental Airlines and told them he didn't want a donation. He wanted a jet to make one flight from Zagreb Croatia to the US. He got a chuckle. Three days later he got an apology from the head of Continental. A tank of jet fuel would be a small donation to make for a gooder cause.
Azzi got a call from Rick Deerwester in Florence, Kentucky. Rick's church was going to take a up a collection for the kids. No, Azzi said. Don't give me money. Give me homes for 35 kids. The painless act of shoving a few bucks in a the plate turned into beds for three dozen strangers who where from a different religion, a different world and didn't speak our language.
We wound up with Senad. His house was hit by a grenade the day before he left. I also met Nadja, whose legs were almost blown off by a bomb months before and whose war diary I helped translate into English. (That's a example of gooder use of skills.)
Today Senad is personal translator for the Bosnian Minister of Defense. And Nadja Halilgegovich is known in Europe as the Bosnian Anne Frank and is an international speaker. She's stood on the same stage with Desmond Tutu and is featured in the book Architects of Peace alongside the Dalai Llama and Mother Teresa.
Azzi's act of doing gooder started with an idea. In our world where we think money is a prerequisite for making anything happen, not a cent changed hands. People played their part instead of payed their part.
May I take your photo while you're down and out?
And going gooder doesn't need to be on such a grand scale. Steve Ziegelmeyer is a freelance Art Director and Photographer. He walks Downtown every day at lunchtime and instead of avoiding eye contact with the indigent who ask for money, Zieg stops and talks. Those just looking for beer money scamper away. (Sometimes he chases them away.) But he's become close enough to the truly needy that he can pull his camera out of his bag and ask to snap a photo. For anyone else, catching a person at such a low point in their life would be taboo.
Eventually this turned into the Street Portraits project that Zieg created with Gina Weathersby. It's become very popular at local galleries and proceeds go to the City Gospel Mission, the city's oldest supporter for the indigent. Again, a simple idea and the right skills doing gooder.
What's your skill?
After almost a year in the making, I recently launched a doing gooder project called Audible Ambles. But this tale is not really about that. It's also not about starting an international Doing Gooder™ movement with a big infrastructure and soirées for wealthy benefactors. It's just a simple seed that it'd be nice for people to keep in the back of their minds. Maybe it will bloom into some good someday.
OT: Doing Gooder
Adding Words to the Spellchecker
The iPad has a built in spellchecker that used by Notes, Pages and most text editing apps. But the dictionary won't allow you to add words, so some words forever show up underlined in red. Where this really becomes inconvenient is if you misspell this word, you really can't tell.
Adding words should be available in the fall with iOS4 for iPad. In the meantime, add an entry called "Spellcheck Words" to your Contacts. In the company field, add words you want the spellchecker to ignore. Since the iPad uses names in Contacts as part of the spellcheck database, the red underline will go away.
Writing Sites for MobileMe
Seems a simple enough app: a basic html/text editor that flips to a Safari preview of the document and allows you to upload to your MobileMe account. First off, ALL the web writing apps I have tried for the iPad are unstable. Most are so buggy, Apple should not have approved them for sale in the App Store. And NONE upload to a WebDAV server like MobileMe. Everybody is trying to get fancy and ignoring the fact that users expect these apps to functions from day one.
The good news is that you CAN code HTML and upload the file to MobileMe from your iPad through a workaround. Not as easy as pushing an Upload button, but you can do it in thirty seconds. I highly recommend you get eWeb Editor. This was one of the first HTML editors for iPad and by far the most stable. It's one of the cheapest too. It has some nice features, but the beauty is that the core functions work: HTML editing with an instant preview and these reliably save.
You will also need to download the amazing GoodReader app. But it's 99 cents, so your total financial layout is small. GoodReader's structure is a little convoluted, but it does so many things you'll quickly find out that it's pretty hard to contain all that function in a menu structure. it's like a Swiss Army Knife for documents on your iPad.
The workflow for editing and uploading your code is simple: Edit and preview in eWeb Editor. Then save your code in GoodReader as an HTML doc and upload it.
• Edit in eWebEditor
• Press the Gear icon and the Copy Code to Clipboard button.
• Open GoodReader.
• Tap on the Manage Files list on the right.
• Press the New File button.
• Under My Documents on the left, tap the file called "New Text.txt".
• In the right column tap the Rename button and rename the file "index.html" or whatever the document is called you're updating on MobileMe.
• Press the Okay button.
• Press the Connect to Servers header on the right.
• Choose your iDisk from the list.
• Navigate to the folder where you want the file to go and open it.
• Slide right on the file you're replacing and press the Delete button.
• Press the Upload button and choose your file from the list.
• Press the Upload 1 File button.
Takes a lot less time than it sounds. For those who like to hand code or need to tweak code from your iDisk on an iPad, at least it works.
The iPad Studio
Though the iOS doesn't make the iPad a computer, it's been obvious since its introduction that the iPad is a game changer. The advanced touch screen allows a new control element that takes us from mouse and clunky keyboard to tactile physical control. A prime example is MultiTrack DAW from Harmonic Dog. This is almost GarageBand for the iPad. Though limited in many respects (no effects) MT is a powerful recording app that can be used for professional results in 8-24 tracks, even producing and posting results from the field directly from your iPad.
The iPad Camera Connector kit allows you to connect pro audio peripherals, taking this app into the realm of GarageBand and beyond. I have been using it with Roland's Cakewalk audio interface and Blue's Yeti microphone much to my delight. Cakewalk allows you to plug in line audio, instruments with pickups, board feeds and external mics.
I couldn't be more impressed with Blue's Yeti. Review's don't do the sound quality justice. At $149 this USB mic is one of the nicest sounding mics I have ever worked with, even competing with the legendary Rode and Neumann. The Yeti has three elements in a triangular array that gives you an amazing amount of versatility in stereo and mono recording. Admittedly the straight mono cardioid pattern sounds so sweet I will probably use it for most recording. Since it requires no preamp, the Yeti, at 100 db signal-to-noise ratio is the quietest mic I've ever heard.
The Yeti is a solid choice for use with MT since it has it's own headphone jack to monitor both the mic and your tracks. This is a necessity since the iPad can be extremely uncooperative when a mics like the Blue Mikey and the Belkin TuneTalk plugged into the connector slot. It needs to be noted that the Yeti is just about the end of its power limitations in the iPad. Some headphones cause it to drain enough power to crash the mic. My little Senneheiser earbuds killed the mic, but my big Sennheiser HD280 studio monitor cans worked fine.
The MT offers no effects and can't allow plugins, so it's vital to have a clean, crafted signal going in if you plan on mixing on the iPad. That being said you can create a multitude of delay effects in multiple tracks and then bounce the delays and original back down to one track. Though not easy as turning an effect knob, staggering tracks and adjusting volume levels is easy in MT, so you may find yourself creating more complex delay effects than you've ever imagined.
With MT you'll probably need to change your recording workflow. Often we depend on the "fix it when we mix it" philosophy when working with GarageBand. With MT you can't do that if you're planning to do the final mix right on iPad. You need to get every sound as sweet as possible coming in. But with the Yeti there's no need for EQ tweaking and with the Cakewalk you just get all you effects sounding right in the chain before they go through the interface.
There's a short learning curve to working with the MT. What's not done in an Apple-like fashion is easier. Having the controls on screen takes a lot of frustration out of recording. What used to require a lot of mouse clicks and keypresses now can be done with a few intuitive finger moves.
You can easily move tracks over to GarageBand, Logic, Audacity or ProTools by wifi for tweaking and mixing. But since you can get the same CD quality tracks right in your iPad and post them directly to Sound Cloud from within MT, you may find yourself working directly with iPad more than you think. I can see a lot of musicians doing a quick demo in the hotel of a new song or posting a live version of a song from last night's show on a fan site without ever involving a computer in the process.
Having done most of my recording on an iPhone with a TuneTalk mic and mixing in GarageBand, I'm delighted to centralize the process onto my iPad and be able to edit now with simple finger moves. Previously I depended on post tweaking, but now will switch workflow to gets stuff right going in. The lack of effects will change the sound of my final mix, but who's to say that didn't need changing? I expect my first few projects to sound substantially cleaner, but more vintage (from the days before reverb as taken for granted.)
My singles can be found here: http://wolfewithane.com
To USB or not USB.
The iPad Camera Connector kit was designed to copy images and videos from your camera, iPhone, Nano or SD card to your iPad. But it's fun plugging everything USB in just to see if it works with the iPad. I've stated specific devices here since your mileage may vary and there are no guarantees.
Serendipity
- Jump Drives Xporter Magnum 64G is a 64 Gig jump drive on steroids. (It also comes in 128 Gig.) These have enough memory to fall into the category of external hard drive. Mine connected and downloaded images and movies fine. I'm overjoyed with this, since it gives me a way to import video for Real Director and the forthcoming iMovie for iPad. Unlike external hard drives, these require no additional power. The connector supports both FAT32 and HFS+ drive formats.
- USB Microphone This one was a shocker. I figured for sure there wouldn't be enough power, but my massive G Track USB mic worked fine with RecordStudio Pro. Excellent news for those looking to use their iPads for serious audio recording. I should also note that Belkin's TuneTalk works fine. This is a great little stereo mic designed for the iPhone and plugs into the iPad's socket with no connector required. The Blue Snowflake on the other hand did not work.
The Expected
- Memory Card Reader The Camera Connector kit comes with a SD reader, but some are reporting they can plug in their compact flash reader and download images. Note that your card should be formatted in the camera, not in a computer. Video must be H.264 720p or smaller with AAC audio.
I don't use anything but the SD family. I plugged in the freebie SD reader that came with an Eye-Fi card and this worked fine for JPGs and video. I appear to have imported a WAV file too, but can't find it anywhere. - USB headset. My Logitech A0356A headset worked fine with both Skype and RecordStudio Pro.
- Keyboard The Apple standard USB keyboard draws too much power. Others have reported that some USB keys with no external USB ports built in are working.
- iPhone Plug in your iPhone or video Nano by USB and you can copy photos and video from your camera roll. IPhone 3G is not supported.
Failures
- External Hard Drive Neither my Lacie Little Disk 80G or 300G worked. There is not enough power to drive these, even though the 300G had a power cord driving it from my Air USB port. Some are reporting other external drives work when they are plugged into a power source. To me this defeats portability but might be useful for speed sake in getting files off a hard disk when at your desktop. The connector supports both FAT32 and HFS+ drive formats.
- iPod Shuffle Not supported warning. But then, I didn't expect this to work.
- USB Hub I got a "uses too much power" warning when I plugged in a GearHead 4-port portable.
I'll post updates as I plug more stuff in.
Tips.
• If the camera connector doesn't work at first, try restarting your iPad by holding Home and Sleep. Then turn off your iPad, plug in the connector, then turn it on.
• On any external media card or drive, the iPad will be looking for a folder called DCIM. Add it to the drive on your desktop and put any video or image files you want to transfer in it.
• Blue check means a file is selected for import. Green check means it's already been imported.
Review: WeatherStation
Unlike the iPhone, the iPad doesn't come with a weather app. There are many out there and some have advanced radar, hourly forecasts, etc. The problem with most of these is that they're not very viewer friendly. Adding your city is not a problem. It's that the apps are gaudy, there's too much information and the presentation visually is very confusing.
WeatherStation is pretty much what you have on the iPhone: current conditions, daily forecasts for the next five days, time, date, sunrise and sunset all on one screen. In landscape mode, switching cities is a matter of one tap and it's easy to tell which city you're looking at.
Nothing extraneous here. So unless the Weather Channel is your reality TV, this app gets you to the weather basics fast.
The search for what Search actually searches.
Search is a little frustrating on iPad. It seldom finds what you're looking for. What? You didn't know your iPad had a search? Tap your Home button. Then tap it again. Search is similar to Spotlight on Mac and finds things instantly, without even having to type a return. However...
Built in apps only.
Sadly, search only works with the built-in apps. It doesn't access the dedicated file areas of added software. So it's very useful for finding a word within a thousand Notes, but not useful for finding a word within a Pages document. Many apps have their own search. Pages can search within a document only. You'll find it in the Tool menu.
No web content.
Search will not find anything within Safari's cache. For those who feel Safari's lack of search within a document is frustrating, this can be quickly fixed with the find-in-this-page bookmarklet. This is a little JavaScript that gets stored in a Safari bookmark. When you launch this bookmark it doesn't take you to a new web page, it searches the current document and highlights the search words. Follow the instructions on the site to install.
I don't got mail?
Search can only find what's in the mail that's on your iPad. And the way iPad works is that it only stores the most current messages locally. Most are still on your server. Once Mail has searched what's on your iPad it gives you the option to continue to search your server. Note that this can take a while.
These limitations are all frustrating, but once you know them and the workarounds, you'll find yourself finding things a little easier.