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I’ve updated a work mackbook to the new Lion OS and thought I’d post about a couple of interesting things. I posted them to google+1 as a wee experiment and am repeating them here.

Fiona A Scottish Voice in Lion

You can download extra voices from the speech system preference pane. Fiona is a Scots one and quite nice. The speech seems pretty nice to me. Even without upgrading to lion you can select text and send it to itunes as synthetic speech using the service menu. You can also, as I did for the e use applescript to save an aiff file of synthetic speech. I’d I’ve not used this in teaching, but could think of a few way that it might be useful…

Dictionary Access

I frequently access the dictionary on mac os by holding command-control-d over a work, it pops up a wee box showing the dictionary definition. In Lion you double click with 3 fingers and the box is a bit nicer:

QuickTime Pro in Lion

After installing Lion I was disappointed to find the QT pro had vanished from my Utilities folder (Where it was moved by Snow Leopard). Tried to download and install from Apple but got the wrong installer. This is the right one. After the install QT picked up my pro registration key.

The New version of QuickTime X has improved over its Snow Leopard version but still lacks some of Quicktime 7’s features. I was very relieved to find out you could install the old one again. QT 7 can be used for quick & dirty editing and does some things 2 that I can’t do any other way (without buying & learning some other piece of software).

1. I’ve been playing with google+ for a bout a week. Simple and straightforward to use, the main dislike is the difficulty of getting information out of it at the moment. No RSS. I was hoping just to be able to pull the 3 lion post in here, or at least embed the video, but I needed to re-upload them to vimeo. ↩

2.For example you can have a movie with more than one picture in picture movie added to it. You can’t do this from iMovie which is limited to 1 but you can do it quite quickly with QT 7 pro. for example the end of this movie. QT7 also is very applescriptable, many of the features are missing fro QT X’s AppleScript dictionary. I’ve made a few quick scripts that have really sped this up. ↩

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With more open tools it is easy to gather, mix and redistribute information, blogs, wiki updates, podcasts, flickr, del.icio.us etc. can all be mashed with existing tools or a bit of scripting. Facebook seems exclusive rather than inclusive, closed rather than open. I am happy to vist but I would not want to live there.

Or am I missing something?

via johnjohnston.info

I posted this originally in 2007: Facebook – John’s World Wide Wall Display getting something of the same feeling about Google Plus but perhaps it is early days.

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Swiffy converts Flash SWF files to HTML5, allowing you to reuse Flash content on devices without a Flash player (such as iPhones and iPads).

Swiffy currently supports a subset of SWF 8 and ActionScript 2.0, and the output works in all Webkit browsers such as Chrome and Mobile Safari. If possible, exporting your Flash animation as a SWF 5 file might give better results.

Google Swiffy looks good, support extends to flash five. Here is a swiffy animation created with Google Swiffy the original flash file, made by my daughter 11 or so years ago when she was in primary school is on the sam page, I can’t tell the difference.

Swiffy output and flash source

Works on an iPad, Safari, webkit, chrome, firefox on my mac.

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River Tales

I am listening so some great pupil podcasts on Mr O’D’s class posterous pupils take on the role of a river and tell their life story:
Rachael does Rivers and
Kyle and the Nile for example. They show, in my opinion, the power of mashing up subjects and reinforce for me the value of podcasting and the voice.

Regular Gems

The User Outcomes section of Doug’s new Synechism Ltd. blog is turning up some nice stuff, this week’s gem for mac users is One Thing Well A weblog about simple, useful software.

UK Sound Map

I didn’t realise that the great UK Sound Map project was limited to a year and read:

The final date for uploads to the UK Soundmap is Friday 24 June, 2011. No new recordings will be added after then, but the UK Soundmap will remain online and you’ll still be able to listen to its collection of sounds.

I really meant to add a boo from work yesterday but got caught up in other things. There is a fair racket as the school, behind which I work, is being renovated. I had a good time contributing to the map and felt quite sad to learn it had finished. Visit the SoundMap and enjoy listening to sounds.

Listening to more podcasts

I’ve been listening to more podcasts recently thanks to Instacast. I’ve removed podcasts from the iPod app of my phone and don’t sync them via itunes anymore. Instacast allows you to build subscriptions (I imported from the iPod app before stopping the sync) and download episodes without being tied to a computer in a much simpler way than the ipod app. I can now sync my podcasts at the office before the drive home, rather than noticing that I had forgotten to sync my phone from my computer at home.

Instacast allows you to see the episodes you have downloaded, and also stream new ones. This can lead to a hammering of your data allowance.

I am presuming that with iOS 5 that apple will have some sort of similar setup too. It is certainly the way I want to go with mobile stuff.

The interface of instacast is nice, very minimal, although the text is a wee bit too small for my eyes at any distance. Well worth £1.19 even if Applce come up with something as good in iOS 5.

Islay high School

Joe Wilson blogs about Islay High School a reminder of all the great work going on there over the past few years. Good to be reminded that it is not the tech:

Beyond the technology they timetable 3rd to 6th year together – which leads to a great community feel in the senior school. This allows for personalised timetables over 3 or 4 years – this gives learners a large range of academic and vocational options and allows some to really stretch themselves – a few 5th years have achieved Advanced Highers.

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A while back I bought a ‘Gorillapod Gorillamobile Style Tripod for iPhone 4’ from eBay, for about a tenner.

iphone tripod

This works very well, and has now survived a few walks and being stuffed in pockets, bags and rucksacs.

Iphone Tripod 2

The seller I bought it from does not seem to have any left but Tripod iPhone 4 search on eBay UK turned up a few similar items.

Here is a pretty steady video shot using the device.

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Rain

One of the things I’ve been trying to keep up with (and failing) in my RSS reader is Digital Storytelling | We jam econo

Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known as ds106) is an open, online course that will begin on January 10th, 2011. This course is free to anyone who wants to take it…

About ds106 | Digital Storytelling

I’ve been following mostly through bavatuesdays the blog of Jim Groom.

As an aside I first blogged about Jim a few years ago, pointing to the marvellous Welcome to the People’s Republic of Non-Programistan which seems to have vanished and The Party Line which is still there.

One of the things that the ds106 folk have been doing is creating animated gifs from very short sections of movies. I am still not sure if I see the whole point of this, but it becomes a very addictive process. Recently Jim posted: Creating Animated GIFs with MPEG Streamclip and GIMP and pointed to another tutorial Better Animated GIF Tutorial for PS CS4 « Bionic Teaching. This got me playing and thinking a wee bit on a rainy weekend.

I’ve not got Photoshop and have seldom opened GIMP, but was creating animated gifs just last week for a blog post. I used Gifsicle which is a command line application to create animated gifs and works very well indeed on OSX (and is available for lots of other platforms) Gifsicle is © Eddie Kohler.

I am only using a very few of the many gifsicle options here, you can see all of its features on the Gifsicle Man Page

I wanted to speed up my workflow playflow for messing about in this way and though of SuperCard, my favourite mac application. I’ve used SuperCard to create a simple application (mac only) that will, load a Quicktime compatible movie, grab a short selection of frames, and create an animated gif with a few mouse clicks. The SuperCard bit grabs the frames and then used the gifsicle app (which it contains) to create animated gifs.

I’ve tested the application only briefly on a few different macs (10.4, 10.5 & 10.6 or tiger, Leopard and mostly Snow Leopard) and it seem to work. On the old G4 10.4 machine there is a wee bit of lag grabbing the frames, but it works out ok.

Here is a screencast:

You can download Movie2Gif from my dropbox, it is a rainy afternoon project miles away from a polished bit of software but might be useful/fun for someone.

If you Movie2Gif and give it a try, let me know how you get on, if it gets any positive feedback I’ll do a bit to improve it. Please send any suggestions, bugs etc to me.

Hump Catch

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iTimeLapse

There are a horde of time lapse apps on the Apple iOS app store now. A while back I tested iMotion – Stop motion animation for iPhone and I’ve downloaded a few more.

Yesterday I noticed iTimeLapse had an update, listed in the fixes was – General crashy-ness fixed which sounded good and I decided to give it another try.

I set up my phone on the windowsill pointing at the trees and sky across the road. There is a choice of resolutions I choose 1280×960. I set the app to take a picture every 30 seconds and set it going. It seemed to be taking picture faster than that so I stopped, reset and started a few times (I even forced quit the app). Eventually I just let it do its own thing. After an hour or so it had taken 1333 images (Which the app tells me takes up 1339 mb on my phone) so I do not think that the Snap Interval is accurate/working! However the resulting video worked out fine.

On stopping the app you then have to render the video, my first attempt at one of the higher resolution settings failed, producing a block video, I tried again at a more sensible 640x 480 and this worked. The video was then watchable on my iPhone.

There are several export options, I tried the Vimeo option, which took a while but worked well and the Local WiFi Sharing.

I am a fan of a few other apps which have Local WiFi Sharing. Most apps that do this have a screen which shows an address to be typed into a browser, usually an IP address, although some support using bonjour in Safari. iTimeLapse does something different it show a link to TapShare.org with a 3 figure number. You visit TapShare on your desktop, type in the 3 figure number and that opens the local iP. TapShare is a service which offers this small utility to generate a 24 hour shortcode which can redirect to your local IP via an API which iOS developers can use. Being nosy I checked Safari and bonjour works too:

Leading to a webpage to download video:

iTimeLapse Safari

This video was 46MB in size and didn’t make it through my mail system to posterous, a quick export fromQuicktime, iphone setting, shrunk it to 9MB which upload fairly quickly: Evening Sky

Here is the Vimeo version:

I am sure this could be a useful app to use in the classroom for easily generating time lapse movies & animations.

I’ve illustrated this post with some screenshots, glued together in an animated gif, to save some screen space, please let me know if you think it is useful or annoying.

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On Thursday evening I was lucky enough to be in conversation with Gillian Penny, Dan Bowen, John Johnston and Fraser Speirs as part of the Edutalkr series. Iain Hallahan kept the conversation organised as chairperson and David Noble did the background tech.

You can hear the discussion on Edutalk:

EDUtalkr online panel discussions about Scottish education #7: The practicalities of using iPods and iPads in the classroom – EDUtalk

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The practicalities of using iPods and iPads in classrooms. 

Chairperson:

  •   Iain Hallahan (@don_iain) 

Panelists:

     1. Fraser Speirs @fraserspeirs

     2. John Johnston @johnjohnston

     3. Gillian Penny @gillpenny

     4. Dan Bowen @dan_bowen  –  tbc

Areas for discussion:

  1. Network connectivity & IT support   
  2. iTunes account management & licensing issues 
  3. Authority/Department/Cluster/School policies on usage
  4. Is there a way to suggest changes to Apple? What might these suggestions be?  
via edutalkr.pbworks.com

This week I’ll be taking part in this online audio panel. Thanks to Iain Hallahan (@don_iain) for putting me forward. I am looking forward to hearing what the other panellists will be saying.

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Blogsy is a new iPad blog editor that has a lot of useful features. It allow you to blog photos from Flickr and a couple of other photo sites, video from YouTube and also to load a webpage and drag images into the post.

You type in a code view:

And then swipe to a preview combined with some text formatting and the drag and drop interface. You swipe again to go back to the code view. The text formatting works in both views.

You can also use the built in browser to add links to as well as photos from other sites.

A wee problem is that the app doesn’t upload photos to your blog but hotlinks the ones dragged in. This might give problems if the image is removed and also does not attribute the images in any way.

Blogsy works with wordpress.com, self hosted wordpress blogs and blogger ones. I could not get it to work with my pivot blog although pivot supports the MetaWeblogAPI. 

I am going to try to post this to a wordpress and blogger blogs using the settings (a couple of test blogs). I got an error trying to post to blogger. Since the HTML links to images and is nice & clean I’ll post it to My World Wide Wall Display blog by copying the HTML and pasting into Safari. Pivot’s mobile interface is nice

. 

If Glow blogs get the metaweblogAPI sorted out this could be a useful app for class blogging in Scotland.

Update: pasting works in a glow blog too, but the wordpress backend is not optimised for mobile (at least in the glow version) as pivot is.