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Apple Software & Mac Hardware news

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Apple’s iPad Textbooks: Everything You Need to Know About iBooks 2 (Updating Live)
Steve Jobs wanted to do to education what he did for music, phones and tablet computers. Apple's new textbooks was his Next Big Thing (or one of them). They want to change the way students access education material with their new iBooks 2. This is what they're doing.
Apple—and most teachers—thinks that schools "need a reset." According to Phil Schiller, who is presenting this now in New York City's Guggenheim museum, they can't fix it, but they can help. Apple believes that current books are not good enough: too big and heavy, not durable or interactive. That's why they are coming out with iBooks 2.
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Interactive graphics and built-in videos: The new textbooks—and any iBook 2-compatible book I guess—would be able to use all the features that any application can use. Instead of just text and photos, they will include multitouch, video and interactive objects. Thumbnail navigation: You would be able to go through books using a visual index, with thumbnails marking the sections of the book.
Custom glossary: They also include a feature similar to the current iBook's dictionary, in which you will access each textbook's custom glossary by highlighting words.
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Quizzes and review questions: Another cool feature that I'm sure students will love are the instant quizzes built-in into the textbooks. The quizzes and review questions are built right into each book. Study cards: This is another really neat feature. The app will automatically turn your highlights and notes into study cards. This will also be useful for any kinds of research, if it's available for every book through the iBooks 2 application. The current iBook highlighting and note taking is very limited when it's time to review whatever notes you took. Their study cards, which are like virtual paper study cards, will help a lot here.
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Also, Apple has separated iTunesU into its own standalone app, and have merged its look and feel somewhat with what they do in iBooks.

I subscribed to one of the featured courses from Yale - CHLD 350, Autism and Related Disorders. It's a topic I've wanted to learn more about since I've married into a family with an autistic son. My brother-in-law is an adult now, but he needs constant care. One day, my wife and I will probably become his caretakers. It's also possible that when we have our own children that we may have one with autism.

I've never quite followed through on educating myself, but maybe this is the way to do it. Looking through, it seems much more easy to follow the course and follow through with each step than it was when the format was more like podcasts. Should be interesting to give it a try.
 
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BuckBackHome;2097242; said:
I just picked up my first smartphone and it sure is a learning curve. Picked up the Razr. Cool device, now I just need to figure out how the damn thing works.
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Cool. Figuring out all the stuff it can do is half the fun of having one if you ask me.

The Apple threads probably won't get you too far though. There are a couple of Android related threads around here though - I'd check those out if you haven't done so already. I'm sure there's a lot of good info there, and there's a handful of people who contribute to those threads that really seem to know their stuff.
 
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BuckeyeMac;2118113; said:
Who uses iCloud? Do you like it? What don't you like? Is it easy to use?

We would have both mine and my wife's iPhones on one account. Will that get confusing?
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I use it.

It's not like Dropbox or most other cloud options. It's meant to work in the background and remain mostly invisible. You just use your other regular apps and it just works.

Here are the ways that I use iCloud:

  • I use it to backup my contacts. I used to have it sync with Google Contacts, but Google never correctly handled my caller ID photos so any time I'd restore or get a new phone or something like that I'd have to go into Contacts on my phone and redo them all.
  • I use Find My iPhone, which has come in handy once before to help me figure out that I forgot my phone in my office on one occasion. It allows you to go on the web and do a remote lock and wipe of your phone if it's lost or stolen.
  • I use it to back up my device's settings wirelessly. There is a setting that well have your device back itself up to your iCloud account as often as every 24 hours, provided that it is plugged in to a charger and is connected to a WiFi network. Given that both of my devices are almost always on WiFi, I get pretty frequent backups without having to do anything on my own.
  • It also works for automatically syncing some apps between devices. If I add something to my to-do list in Reminders on my iPhone, it shows up on that same list on my iPad automatically. If I subcribe to a new podcast in Instacast on my iPad, it shows up on my iPhone when I open the app there. If I play five levels on Qvoid on one device, the next time I open it on the other device it picks up where I left off instead of me having to play the same levels over again on the second device. This is where the real genius of iCloud is, though it hasn't spread to too many of the leading third party apps yet. Hopefully that will happen more in the next year or so.
All of this stuff is done automatically in the background. I don't have to remember to push a button or keep things organized, it just does it.


Other areas where it may be useful, but I haven't tried:

  • It does documents, but I don't use iWork at the office or on my personal laptop, and I'm already highly integrated with Dropbox for this.
  • It does mail and calendars, but I didn't see a compelling reason to switch from my combination of Gmail/Google Calendars/Microsoft Exchange
  • There's that whole iTunes Match thing, but it doesn't do streaming, I don't buy from iTunes and I'm too anal about my music collection to bother with the cloud at this point.
I haven't tried having multiple users on one account. My wife and I use separate ones. I use about 80% of the free storage on my own, so that probably wouldn't work out too well for us. I could see where it would be beneficial though - if you wanted to collaborate on a to-do list or a document or something like that. If you plan to use it for contacts or mail or calendars though it would probably become a mess. If you're using one account for the benefit of being able to share app purchases, there's probably a way to continue doing that while using separate accounts for iCloud purposes. You can probably find more information on how that might work by searching some of the major iOS blogs or boards.
 
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jwinslow;2120038; said:
iPhone Smuggling in China - YouTube
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The funny, well maybe no so funny, thing is that Hong Kong got all their iphones from here in Singapore. Every phone sold here, from the guy who sells you the cheap sim card, to M1/Singtel/Starhub all sell globally unlocked phones. So when apple announced that the first asian country to get the Iphone 4S was Singapore, yet they were releasing the "unlocked" version 60 days later all of asia knew that it would be immediately available for cheaper here, thus, even now, there's a 6 month wait on a 4S.
 
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Here's what's been announced so far today:

  • iOS 5.1 going live. Sounds like mostly bugfixes.
  • iWork, iMovie & GarageBand updated
  • iPhoto released for iPad 2+, iPhone 4+
  • new iPad with Retina display, spec bumps for camera & processor, starts at $499
  • iPad 2 16GB is sticking around, price cut to $399
  • voice dictation coming to iPad (similar to iPhone 4S) seems likely to be exclusive to the new model which is slightly disappointing for me as an iPad 2 user. (iPad 2 and iPhone 4S use the same processor, so keeping this feature away from iPad 2 is classic planned obsolescence by Apple, plain and simple.)
 
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