Tag: iphone

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Recently I’ve been doing a bit of stop motion animation, cpd for staff and in the classroom. Using a variety of software: SAM animation, FrameByFrame and I Can Animate. Recently I spotted iMotion for the iPhone. This app makes stop motion and time laps videos on your iphone. It will export via email or to your photo library. It seems to work fine on an iPhone g3 without the S.

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The app can record on click or automatically at intervals, I’ve tried both and it seems easier to use auto. It is quite hard to keep the iPhone still when clicking. setting it to 10 second delay gives you time to move your cast about. A good mount for the iPhone would help. Maybe a gorrilapod?

iMotion give you options to save in different sizes: 80 x 170, 160 x 214 or 320 x 247 and exports to mp4 or a set of images. There is an option to publish on the iMotion blog where you can see some more examples.

While I would not think of getting iPhones to use in class just for the ability to animate, it could be a useful feature if you are already using iPhones in class. especially at the price of 59p

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Slftalk Screen

I’ve had a bit of time to think about David Noble and my experiment at the Scottish Learning festival. I blogged about the preparation and have been thinking about the actual event for a while.

SLFtalk was an experiment for using posterous to aggregate short audio reports from mobile devices at the Scottish Learning festival.

Over the 2 days of the festival and with a couple of late entries we had 29 posts to SLFtalk from a dozen people. There was a wide range of type of poster and content. We had fairly recently qualified classroom teachers and HMI. The content went from recording of segments of seminars through interviews to reflection. Many of the posts have had more than 400 views. Most of the hits came from the time of the festival and just after.

We had offered several routes into audio publishing and most were used:

  • 15 boos tagged slftalk using audioboo by 5 people
  • 12 files posted directly to posterous by 6 people
  • 2 recordings made on the gabcast.com channel by 2 folk

Obviously all of the the audioboos were made using an iPhone, the posts to posterous were made with several different devices; iphones, a HTC Touch Diamond and desktops.

For myself I intended to use the iPhome Voice Memos app, and just email it in. But I ran over the 2 minutes limit for mailing memos so ended up transferring the audio to my macbook, converting to mp3 (cutting down file size) and posting via email. I think I was the only person using a computer rather than a phone.

No one took us up on the offer to borrow mp4 recorders, Joe Dale did use his iRiver to chat to me at the end of the 2 days and later sent me the file to post to the site.

I think it was well worth offering multiple ways of posting, although audioboo was the most popular, if we had just used that several contributors could not join in.

Technically everything seem to work out fine, the main thing I would change is the way the gabcasts and audioboos were posted to the site. basically I just used the posterous API to send the url of the audio to posterous. This meant that the recording were not enclosed in the RSS feed. I have made a few tests and worked out a workaround, if an actual html link in sent to posterous, eg <a href="path_to_audio_file">Listen</a> and we use feedburner to provide the RSS, feedburner will produce an rss feed with all of the enclosures. The file would also play on an iphone.

From a organisational and technical point of view I really enjoyed working with David on this wee project, but the thing I enjoyed most was listening to the audio, given the background noise and less than ideal recording conditions I was surprised at how engaging they were, there is something special about listening to the human voice with all the extra information the signal carries over reading a text.

I think we may have discovered an interesting an powerful addition to our community communication toolkit and hope this concept can be taken forward and more widely used. I would be interested in hearing more from others who used or listen to the podcasts and getting ideas of how to improve the system.

Posted via email from John’s posterous

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Adecon 09

At the weekend I was down at the ADE conference in Liverpool. I drove (was driven down) on Saturday morning with Ian and Ann, colleagues from North Lan.

Saturday kicked off with an intro by Jim Elder, a side screen was displaying Adecon09 – twazzup and we were encouraged to tweet during the conference. Jim handed over to apple’s John Hickey do gave the Key Education Message from Apple. He touched on a lot of things, the challenges and changes facing Education, not surprisingly his slides were minimal and powerful/ He touched on the fact that many aspects of apple design were driven or suited to the Education market before going on to talk about he changes in Education, and the need for thinking ahead and being ready for change. The demand for skills has changes, learners now need creativity and innovation and to be able to communicate and collaborate.

John spoke about the skills and standards of young people showing a 10 year old video blogger with bags of confidence and editing skills. He spoke about how you people understand elements of video editing and demnmand a certain standard from themselves. I am not sure this holds for all the learners I know, just as a good reader may not be a writer, a consumer of film may not know or understand much about editing. Some of the tweeters were sad that books were losing out as a source of information. I was struck with the parallels with what Derek Robertson spoke about at the Scottish Learning Festival (blogged) and I am still of the opinion that there is a place for all types of communication.

After lunch we broke into ‘stage’ groups to discuss the mornings presentations and look at the ADE online community. Later in the afternoon there was the “The Golden Nugget” session, we again broke into groups and everyone had a chance to talk about some piece of tech or learning for 3 minutes, the groups voted and the best were shown to the whole conference, a light-hearted vote lead to he winner getting a new nano. My group saw some nice things, geo tagging from Adam Burt, comic life as frames for picture in picture movies, and a lovely wee tip for getting 4 frame animated gifs out of Photobooth. I talked about SLFtalk and posterous which Ian described as very interesting but completely incomprehensible, so I guess I might have gone a little quickly. The overall winner showed an iphone game SmackTalk which seemed to make a gunnipig talk:

SmackTalk! is a voice-altering app that features an animated guinea pig, puppy, kitten, and chihuahua that repeat what you say in high-pitched Squeaky voices, or low-pitched Freaky voices

I’ve been gathering links to some of the nuggets from other rooms from the twitter feed, but I hope someone in each room collected them and will share it.

Although the competition was good fun I am not sure if I like that or the splitting up of the groups to different rooms as much as all in together. I am sure I’ve missed some great ideas.

This is a twitter search to get all the links: #adecon09 since:2009-10-02 until:2009-10-05 filter:links – Twitter Search from the conference tweets.

Saturday evening was dinner and karaoke, hard to speak, but I had a few interesting discussions, including one with arch geotagger Adam Burt who kindly handed me som interesting apple scripts.

On Sunday John Hickey was back on stage, now talking about Snow Leopard Server. This was really interesting, I’ve recently started using Leopard Wiki server (here and ICT & TS Podcast) and was keen to find out what was new. Quite a lot as it turns out.

Wiki Server 2 has had quite a few features added, it is now optimised for iphone/touch which fits well with the mobile anywhere/anytime learning message we are getting. The other big feature is the addition of QuickLook. If you have a mac with leopard or snow leopard you are probably used to Quicklook, select a file in the finder and hit the spacebar, you get a preview of the document, many formats are supported including MS doc, powerpoint, movie, audio, images and most apple app files. When this was announce I though it would just be some sort of lightbox effect for images, but was surprised to find out it will let users with a recent browser preview all sorts of files including MS documents even if they do not have a copy of the application need to open the file.

Podcast Producer 2, podcast producer is a server setup to process media and post it to podcasts on a wiki server in all sorts of interesting ways. It can add an introduction to movies, process media for different platforms, submit to itunes and more. Mac come with an application Podcast Capture for submitting, or recording and submitting, media to Podcast Producer. Podcast Capture now has a web version allowing Windows pcs to submit podcasts to the server.. Podcast Producer is controlled by xml workflows, I did a bit of editing and modifying these at a very simple level and struggled quite a bit. Podcast Producer 2 now comes with a Visual workflow creator, no more xml.

Acuade 09

Finally we heard from Bill Rankin and George Saltsman of Abilene Christian University in Texas. They took us through some changes in learning and distribution of information, Miles Berry summarised nicely on twitter:

#adecon09 Problem in the middle ages was accessing information, problem in the print age was finding information. Problem now filtering?

They then explained that ACU provides iphone or ipod touch to all freshmans in 2009. iPhone_first – Abilene Christian University. They had a lot of analysis to show the positive effects of the devices so far and showed their mobile platform: ACU provides iphone or ipod touch to all freshmans 2009. They provide a web based app: ACU

This was a really exciting presentation and I’ve not really started to digest all of the information of which there is a lot online: ACU Connected: Mobile Learning. I believe that the slides, which were beautiful as well as informative will be made available.

That pretty much wrapped up the conference, the major drawback being the fact that I didn’t have enough conversations, looking back over the twitter stream I realise I missed a lot of chances, next time I’ll take another body;-).

As well as twittering I published ADE Conference photos, Ade conference 1 (audio) and ADEcon09 Sunday (audio too) on my posterous. Im using adecon09 as a tag on Delicious, hopefully others will too. I am following the tags on various services.

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picPosterous is a photo and video publishing app for the iPhone.

Picposterous 0Picposterous 1

At first glance I could not see the advantage of using this rather than the iPhone’s mail application, and neither could TechCrunch but a tweet or two from Sachin, one of posterous’s founders both put me on the right track and gave further evidence that the posterous guys never sleep.

The idea of the applcation is that during an event (or day or meal or whatever) you take photos and post to posterous. The difference is that you can continue to add images to the post after the first image is posted. This will certainly make it a useful application. Instead of waiting until the end of an event you can snap and post without crating a series of posts. picPosterous will also queue up the photos and post then when it can. You can quit the app and it will try to post again the next time you open it.

Lock28posterousscreen

So the app is a lot more useful than I first thought. A couple of drawbacks/limitations: the only text you can post is the title and the media is limited to pictures and video (on a newer phone than mine). The auto post feature, which I have turned on for twitter, flickr and a test blog only posts the first photo, which makes sense for twitter but if I used posterous as a means of posting to flickr I’d probably want the whole album being added.

All in all a handy addition to ways of posting stuff online if not a whole solution I think I’ll be using picPosterous regularly.

I also imagine that if the development of posterous itself is any indication the application will be upgraded and improved regularly. Posterous itself has had an incredible rate of feature addition. The founders are very responsive to any suggestion for improvement making it the most exciting blogging platfrom out there.

Aside, I used Camera Genius for iPhone as a replacement for Night Camera for Anti-shake stabilization. night Camera didn’t make the upgrade to the 3.0 version of the iPhone software. Unfortunately Camera Genius doesn’t seem to take photos with location exif data so posterous does not get to produce a nice wee map.

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Yest another mapping/iphone post. This might not seem like education but I consider the mapping of walks etc. a sort of trial for possible Teaching and learning activities. At Sandaig I was always interested in blogging trips (Sandaig Netherlands 2008 or Glencoe 06 for example). I am interested in trying to get pupils and groups to tell stories in different ways, audio, text, pictures and video adding location into the mix seems like a good idea. This week i was talking to some of the instructors at Kilbowie Residential Outdoor Centre Oban discussing some of the potential for adding some more ict into their mix through Glow.

On Friday I was going for a walk and decided to try a few different ways of recording the walk centred around the iPhone.

WalkMapBenDonich

As usual I recorded a gpx file and took some photos with the phone for A Mapped Walk

I also took other pictures with my camera and geotagged them once I got home with gpicsync suggested by Dan Stucke in a comment here. gpicsync is a visual front end to exiftool that I’ve mentioned before and works well, unfortunately my iPhone battery gave up early as I was using lots of apps, but a few were mapped by Flickr. The rest taken on the way bak down are untagged.

At the top of the hill i decided to try audioBoo. I love the way Audioboo combines a picture, the audio and a wee map and is simple to use. Unfortunately I didn’t have a good enough signal to post the boo from the hill.

Posterousimgaudio

Instead I turned to posterous. The really good thing about posterous on the iphone is that because it used email you don’t need a signal, the mail app will just wait until it gets one and sends the mail. I found this out on my holiday this year when I seemed to get an occasional signal overnight, making posterous the easiest way to blog.
I’ve also found out how to combine images and audio in an email from the iPhone and because posterous now geo locates your post if there is a location in the exif data of any images posted you get the same effect as audioboo. See Ben Donich – John’s posterous.

The trick is, take a photo, switch to the camera roll and click the share/mail icon. choose the picture and copy it (This will work with several images). Then open up the Voice memos app, recods some audio and then mail it. You can paste the image(s) into your mail and send.

Lifecastingicon

The last thing I tried was the lifecasting app iTunes url, this allows you to choose some photos and then record a narration over a slideshow of the images. The result can be uploaded to youtube or downloaded to your desktop as a m4v file (the app like many others acts like a wee server and puts up a webpage with the movies to download.)

Lifecasting works fairly well, the fact you cannot mail the file is a pity. The other problem is that the slides are shown for a fixed length of time, the example below is the longest, so you have to fit your audio to the show. I did duplicate a couple of images to give myself longer to talk. If the slides could be set to last the length of the audio and you could use mail or the metaweblogAPI to upload them this would be a great app for mobile learning.

lifecasting Example

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I’ve downloaded a couple of other slideshow apps to investigate (at the vast expense of 59 pence each and will try them out whenever I can find them and have a bit of time).

Them ore I use my iPhone the more I believe that a device of this sort has a real place in the classroom for creating the sort of thing I used to use digital cameras, videos, imovie, garage bands and a blog for; the types of activity listed by Margaret Vass in her recent post on Learning, Teaching and ICT » Digital Storytelling ….. and ePortfolios?. We might need to wait a wee while the the right combination of price and feature set but it is getting more interesting every week.

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Bogle

I am just back from a weeks holiday. While I was away I had just about no connectivity. I had packed my laptop and iphone, but there was not internet access I could find and I had to walk about a mile to a nearby cliff top to get a mobile signal!

I gave up on following RSS, twitter and getting email and left the laptop shut. I did do a bit of photo blogging from my phone to my posterous account, and this worked very well.

The new iphone software allows you to mail up to 5 photos instead of just one, posterous makes pretty galleries of sets of photos. The mail app on the iphone allows you to create mails and then will send them later whenever you get a signal, this turns out to be a great feature in comparison with other iphone blogging applications.

The results are on John’s posterous, photos from my camera rather than iPhone were uploaded to flickr when I got back.

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Since my last walk map post I’ve made a bit of progress. I am now using Trails an iPhone app that:

allows you to record, import and export tracks onto your iPhone.

Trailsscreen

Trails is really nice, it records and show position and altitude. It also allows you to cache map tiles when you have a good connection to use later on a walk.
You can zoom in quite close and it has already been handy in finding out I was going the wrong way in the mist.

Trails allows you to email a track in both kml and gpx format. Clicking the kml file opens the trail in GoogleEarth.

I’ve been using GPSPhotoLinker a free app to add geotags to photos using the gpx track from Trails. Once you have dome that they will be mapped by flickr.

I’ve then been using .SuperCard to read the data from the photos and the gpx track and produce an xml file and set of resized photos. The xml files can be used with the google maps api to show the track and photos on a google map.

I’ve started to put together some webpages to list and show the maps: Mapped Walks.

Walklist tn

The idea is to end up with a SuperCard project that cuts out some of the steps, it would take in photos and gpx file and upload resized photos and xml file to the web. I just need a bit of time to write and test the scripts.

I have managed to add an mp3 player to some of the google bubbles on one map that plays sound recorded on my phone. The aim is to have pictures, audio video and text. The maps now also have links in the bubbles that take you from one to the next in the correct order, I think this could be come an interesting way to tell a story that travels through space and time.

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Every Trail

I decided to try a new approach to plotting photos on a map today and use EveryTrail which according to the site:

With this geotracking application, you can record your movements, take geotagged photos, make notes and immediately upload it all to EveryTrail, the leading online community for travel storytelling

The weather was not very nice so i just went a short way from home to the Kilpatrick hills. I started walking and took some photos with EveryTrails as I went, it seemed a smooth and well crafted application. After about 20 minutes I decided I could not remember if I had locked the car to turned around to check. I clicked stop and save in the app and as I was looking at the field to fill in the application quit. On opening it nothing was saved.

On restarting the walk I reverted to using SnailTrail (this application seems to have vanished from the store.)

SnailTrail just lets you save a list of waypoints and email them to yourself. I sure a simple SuperCard project to create the kml file from the list and the photos exif data. I’ve uploaded the the kml file which will open in google earth and imported it into google maps.

googlemapscreenshot

I noticed a strange thing when working with the photos, the ones taken in portrait seemed to have lost their exif data. I drag the photos from iPhoto onto my SuperCard project to get the exif data (Via the exiftags commandline app), it seems when iPhoto rotates the images according to the camera’s instructions it loses the exif data. however if you export the files via iPhoto’s file menu you can check a box to include location and the exif data is in the exported files.

Update 2 March 2009 I was trying to incorporate mp3 sound in the kml file but the object tag is not shown by google maps (it is by earth) so I’ve experimented with the maps API and have markers with pictures and sound: Mapped walk which has some potential I think.

Tracker

I had a very pleasant location experience this week. I had been trying the iPhone app Tracker to ftp a small webpage with my location to the web (example target=”new”), I was then parsing out the data with php to produce a static google map (example). Then the application was upgraded and the structure of the html file was improved, this of course broke my script. I then emailed the developer Stefan Welebny and asked him if he could have an option just to upload the basic information to a text file. Much to my surprise he wrote back and then updated the application. It now will send the information as parameters to a webpage, in my case a php file. at the moment my file just writes that information out to a text file but I hope to soon be able to record my location to a list and then do other things with it. As I understand it Tracker will send its position every 20 seconds so I could use it by turning the app on for a few seconds to record a location.

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Yep it is another iPhone post. For the last 3 weeks I’ve been spending two forty-five minute periods on the train almost every weekday and I have been finding the iPhone very useful. I’ve downloaded several games but as expected I’ve not really spent much time playing them, I just do not seem to be a gamer of any sort. This is what I have been using it for:

Listening to podcasts: mostly booruch so far, I’ll be adding a few more subscriptions and listening to podcasts more often; I lost the habit a while back but this is a good opportunity to pick it up again.

Mail I only have one account synced with my phone, but I’ve been able to deal with quite a few emails on the go and keep up with a couple of lists.

RSS feeds: I use NetNewsWire on my home mac, one at work and my iPhone. The app syncs beautifully between the clients. NetNewsWire’s interface is famous and the iPhone app lives up to its bigger brothers reputation. It is simple and easy to use. Rather than just read posts I tend to use the Add to Clippings feature this results in the posts ‘clipped’ being added to the clippings folder in the desktop application the next time it is synced. This is a great feature that I hope to exploit even more. A while back I used to post a regular set of link to interesting blog posts to the Masterclass forum, I’d collect posts in NetNewWire’s clipping folder and then get the links out via appleScript to add a few comments before posting them. I am hoping to start doing something similar soon. Collecting suitable links on the train will help. I usually sync NetNewsWire on the phone before leaving home or the office but syncing on the move is reasonably quick. Another useful feature of NetNewsWire is that you can delete feeds from the phone and specify that they will still be synced to your desktop, this means I don’t clog the iPhone app with really busy feeds.

Twitter: there are various views on the utility of twitter, I put it squarely into the useful pile (maybe a venn diagram with silly and fun would be better). On the desktop I’ve used Twitterrific and more recently I’ve become a TweetDeck fan. On the phone I’d settled on the add supported version of Twitterrific which has the advantage of being able to tweet locations and upload photos to twitpic and tweet that. This week I’ve been using iTweet a wonderful web app with browser and phone interfaces. Due to it being a web app and having landscape mode I am finding it better for posting tweets, unfortunately being a web app it can’t access locations or photos. Again saving for later is a useful feature, with twitter I do this by favouring tweets for later, usually ones that link to elsewhere on the web.

Video: I’ve also been watching a few videos notably the Ted Talks my attention span for watching video on my home mac is short, but I’ve found that I can settle down to watch Teds and other video content on my phone on the train.

What I do not do much of with the phone is type, twitter’s 140 characters are fine and short emails are ok, I’ve installed EasyWriter, which allows landscape emailing to help with my fat fingers. It might be useful to have some sort of wireless/bluetooth or connected keyboard the Apple wireless keyboard works on the N95 so it would be nice to have something similar on the iPhone, I could see me banging in a pile of text on the train, to be edited and corrected later on a desktop ideally a small foldable keyboard.

Another interesting app that I’ve just bought (59p) is voiceNote, this is yet another voice recorder, but what I think is its most interesting feature is it’s ability to email the audio as an mp3 file, this means it could be used for podcast by mailing the mp3 to posterous unfortunately the emails are sent via voiceNote and have voiceNote as the email address, so do not arrive on your posterous if you send them to posterous@posterous.com. What works is to send them to your phones email address and then forward to posterous, not too much trouble. The audio quality was not great when it arrived at my iPhone Podcast 2 but it is a pretty simple way to podcast, I mam not sure how well it work outside wireless range.

What I would like to see is an email app that could email, photos, audio recording and location and to be able to use that to post to posterous (it would be nice to do video too). As mentioned above the Twitterrific application can grab locations and tweet them and photos and tweet them via twitpic so it should be possible to have that sort of functionality in mail.