23 Mobile Things #23: Evaluate 23 Mobile Things

And here we are at the end of the program, looking back over the whole five-month odyssey. What comes to mind?

• The app world is no more stable than any other bit of the Internet. Since I blogged about Cloud On, Zite, and Springpad, Microsoft Office has come up with an app of their own, Zite has been absorbed by Flipboard, and Springpad went bankrupt, leaving people to export their stuff to Evernote. (See? I said it wasn't all that much different than Evernote!)
• I can't say as my attitudes towards mobile devices and apps have changed all that much. I liked them in January; I like them now. Only I like a few more apps than I used to, and now I know I don't like Pinterest.
• For all that blogging has a social aspect to it, I found it difficult to connect with others during this program, except for the friends I have in real life who were also participating. Even looking over just the blogs listed in Metronet, the number was overwhelming. Except for the people who chose to use badges, there was no way to tell by looking who was thoroughly participating in the program and who had petered out after the first few Things. And even if I'd known, I didn't feel like I had a lot of time and energy to look at other people's blogs. Once I'd gotten an app, worked with it, and written it up, I was all 23-Mobile-Thinged out and wanted to go do something else, not read more stuff about it. Plus, well, the posts one writes about an app aren't really the kind that provoke discussion and socializing.
• The only thing that surprised me was that I ended up liking Instagram enough that I'm still using it. I'm not completely used to it yet, but that takes time.
• Favorite Things: Hobbies (absolutely no pressure to think of a professional use for the apps, and I think I'll like that knitting app I found), Sharing Photos (Instagram, for the reasons I've already mentioned), Discovering Apps (more!).
• Not-so-favorite Things: Content Saving and Sharing (Pinterest is so darn scattered), Audio, and Keeping Up (it results in information overload).
• I'm not sure how the program could be improved. Heck, I would never have managed to come up with a program this good on my own. Maybe some way to both encourage reading other people's blogs and making doing so easier. No, I don't know how that would work, although the badges were a good start, because they let me know of blogs that were being kept up. But there are people who were fully participating who didn't want to bother with the badges, so that's not a perfect solution.
• Yes, I'd be likely to participate in another program like this.
• A one-word summary of the experience? Stimulating.

It was a good program overall, although again, I left most of the posts until the last minute and then nearly burned out working on them (Procrastination R Us). I learned a lot and generally enjoyed myself, that last bit of which can't be said for all continuing education programs. Thank you, program organizers!

23 Mobile Things #22: Discovering Apps

Ah, "discovering apps." Because what I need after this program is more apps. ;) Unable to decide, I looked at both Quixey and Apps Gone Free. It was clear pretty soon in that while they're both intended to help you find new apps, they go about that in two different ways.

Quixey

Quixey greets you with a search box. If you can't think of what to put in it, it has sample searches to get you started, ranging from pretty general to pretty specific ("prepare for fishing"), or you can browse through several categories. You can also just take your chances and see what's trending. This is the site you want to visit when you know what you want—or at least have a general idea of what that would be—and need a better way to search for it than Apple. I thought the interface was attractive and pretty easy to navigate (although searching and browsing looked an awful lot alike), but after 21 Things worth of apps, I was having trouble thinking of anything new to get, so even with their sample searches, it was a bit hard to find anything I wanted to try. But I eventually thought to look at calendar/task apps and happily ran off with another two—Schedule Planner and Planner Plus—to try, in addition to the one I already use. Whee!

Apps Gone Free

Use this app when you're in the mood for spontaneity and surprise. I installed this app and looked at today's free apps. Nothing called. Okay, I was safe. I'd just look at yesterday's selection…well, one thing led to another, and I came out of that with a curious app called Strange Rain that just, um, rains in your device, accompanied by music and sometimes words, plus Spendbook, a finance tracking app for my iPhone that I'll probably use for three days and then forget about. This app promises to help me overload both my tablet and my phone with interesting but not terribly useful apps ("app glut"). But I'll have fun the entire time!

23 Mobile Things #21: Free-for-all

Okay, Planets may not be the most super-spiffy fantasticalest app ever, but it's pretty good for what it is: a introductory astronomy app. Planets' main feature is to show you the sky in 2D and 3D versions. In Sky 2D, you see the sky as it appears above you at your time and location. The planets above the horizon are shown against a background of constellations, and the moon is shown in whatever phase it's in.

It's the Sky 3D view where Planets really comes into its own. It starts out just showing you the 3D version of the 2D view, as seen facing south.

But then you can drag the view around to look in any direction, including below the horizon. Click the "Visibility" button in the upper right corner, and you'll see the sky as if you could see X-rays, microwave radiation, radio waves, gamma rays, or hydrogen ɑ (whatever that is).

You can also look at a chart of which planets are visible when, or see each planet close up and revolving (watch Venus and Uranus revolve east-to-west!).

The app doesn't explain much: you'll have to research the planets on your own (perhaps at your library!) to learn more about what it is you're seeing. But for some good interactive visuals about what the solar system looks like from here, Planets is a great introductory app.

23 Mobile Things #20: Games

I was working my way down the list, beginning to wonder if I'd have to go and find a game app I liked, and then I got to W, which is where the word games were hanging out: Word Abacus, WordCollapse, and Word Wrap. This is the kind of game I like…so I took all three.

Word Abacus

It has a pleasant-looking interface, and the game is easy to understand. But I got bored within a couple of minutes. There's no pressure here, not until you get to Level 3 and the "red letters," and even so, they're not that much of a challenge. Plus, there seem to be some problems with the app itself. One reviewer complained that some of the letters didn't respond when they touched them unless they practically pounded on their iPad, and I found the same to be true of my copy. Not worth the effort, and I've already deleted it.

WordCollapse

I liked this one more. It's more challenging knowing there's a right way to work the puzzle and having to figure out what that is. However, word searches don't hold my interest long, so I can only play a few games, and then I go off to see what other games I have loaded onto the iPad. I'm annoyed that when you finish a game, the app goes straight into the next game instead of pausing and letting you okay the next game. I don't want to play it all afternoon!

Word Warp

My favorite of the three. I've met variations of this one before: it's kind of like Boggle. I could wish I had longer than two minutes to find all the words, but then, the pressure does make the game more interesting. And with each game limited to two minutes, you can play one or two when you have a tiny bit of spare time, but each game has a definite stopping point to it, unlike the other two. This is the one most likely to stay on my iPad after I finish this post.

 

23 Mobile Things #19: Hobbies

I figured this was a week to go off and find an app on my own. I just don't know enough about any of the hobbies for the suggested apps to know if the apps are any good or not. And since it had been a while since I'd looked for knitting apps, this seemed a good opportunity. I limited myself to free apps, since that's what we've been looking at so far, and I found a promising one called knitCompanion. (Which would work well for crochet too.)

For the past several years, I've been using PDF patterns rather than print copies. I've usually uploaded them to Evernote, which lets me write notes around my pattern and is available through all my devices and my desktop computer. But to annotate the pattern itself in Evernote, I'd have to subscribe to their premium service, which I wouldn't use enough to justify the expense. So I was happy to try a more knit-centric app.

I'm impressed by how much knitCompanion offers, even with the limited, free version. It connects to Dropbox, so that you can access patterns that aren't stored on your tablet to save space. There's a basic annotation ability: I can highlight text or add comments in a pop-up note. The highlighting is a bit awkward to do—I'd prefer just to swipe a finger along the desired text, but knitCompanion makes me shrink a box around it. But at least I can highlight text. (Take that, Evernote!) 

Those features are still pretty generic and would work for any PDF, but knitCompanion also had knitting-specific features. I was thrilled to see multiple knit counters, useful for when your pattern instructs you to "inc 1 st each end of every 4th row 18 times." The app lets you highlight the row you're working on, whether it's in a chart or written out. If you knit or crochet, you know how valuable this is. If you don't, let me just say that rows of pattern shorthand begin to look an awful lot alike after a while. I can see that upgrading would add more useful tools (and take away the ads), but unlike many free apps, this one isn't so limited as to be essentially useless. This app is definitely worth a closer look from knitters and crocheters.

23 Mobile Things #18: Education

As the description promised, there were more apps than usual for this Thing, so I looked at two of them: Advanced English Dictionary and Thesaurus and artCircles.

Advanced English Dictionary and Thesaurus

I've been meaning to get a thesaurus app for a while now, so this app called out to me. I was glad to see that it could be used offline; if it could only be used online, there was no point in installing it because I could just look words up through Google or something. The dictionary part is serviceable enough. Whoever designed this app seems to have been more interested in breadth of vocabulary rather than depth, though. There are many obscure terms included, and it'll be a great vocabulary builder for me, but the definitions I read were pretty basic. There were no discussions of usage either, so if you don't already know a certain term is considered offensive, this app isn't going to warn you.

I thought this was less successful as a thesaurus app. For each word, AEDT lists hyponyms, hypernyms, and meronyms, if any. First, I had to find out what hyponyms, hypernyms, and meronyms were—gee, good thing it's a dictionary app—and I got the feeling the makers of the app were showing off their vocabulary more than making a user-friendly tool. But as someone raised on the classic Roget's Thesaurus, with its emphasis on the subtleties of meaning, I didn't find this useful. I suppose the AEDT is giving me synonyms, but a good thesaurus gives you antonyms as well, and I wasn't having much luck finding them in this app.

I should mention the games. This app plays a mean game of hangman; I may keep it around just for that feature. I have no innate skill at Word Scramble, it seems. The word of the day is "Malpighia glabra," the botanical name for the barbados cherry, which I cannot imagine using again after I finish this sentence, but it was interesting. You know, as long as I use this app for everything except what it says it was designed for, I'll be fine. But I still want a decent thesaurus app.

artCircles

I got a bad feeling about this app when the splash screen announced, "Take a spin through artCircles to discover and shop a world of art." Shop?

The organizational scheme for the art is based on what will sell it. I don't know all that much about paintings, but cataloging and classification are my favorite library skills, so seeing how this was put together had interest for me in its own right. For instance, it would never have occurred to me to group paintings by what will look good in the nursery, the living room, the kitchen. Or by adjectives: quirky, mysterious, understated, ethereal. (They do have a scheme based on art movements, just in case you like to look at art organized in a traditional fashion.) But whoever designed the app wants to sell paintings, not give you an art education, so there isn't much help in taking what you see in this app and applying it to a painting you might see in a friend's house or at a museum. It's a fun app for a few minutes amusement, and it may be useful if you like their stock and are interested in buying something, but it's not generally useful.

23 Mobile Things #17: Connecting to Community

I glanced through the long list of possible apps for this Thing and latched onto Saint Paul Connect because it was the only one centered on St. Paul. I'm delighted this was listed, because it was exactly what I was looking for without knowing I was looking for it.

I spend a lot of time waiting at bus stops and walking around St. Paul, which puts me in a good position to notice burned out streetlights, walk/don't walk lights, and so on. (Admittedly, I don't tend to notice potholes unless they're in the middle of a pedestrian crosswalk.) But reporting them has always been a bit tricky because I have to remember to do so when I'm at a computer, and then remember where the problem was and how best to describe it. With this app, I can report a problem right then and there, and even take a picture of it, if that would help, and I bet the phone can tell the city exactly where the problem is. Majorly cool.

Apparently some things get fixed more quickly than others. I know that in the past, when I've reported a burned-out streetlight, it's been fixed within 24 hours. Judging from this app, though, the potholes are going to be with us for a while. But it won't be from ignorance of their existence: there are some dedicated pothole observers in this area. I tapped on every red pin you see here, and each one of them is a complaint about a pothole, some confirmed by as many as eight people (who all have this app? am I the last person in St. Paul to have heard of it?). I think some of these potholes have been fixed by now, though, so I'm wondering how often the city updates its information.

I foresee getting a lot of use out of this app. Although I probably still won't be much good at noticing potholes.

23 Mobile Things #16: Audio

It's a toss-up as to whether audio or video is the more alien world to me. I mean, at least I'd heard of Vine before I got to Thing #14, and I had an idea of how it worked which turned out to be vague but accurate. I didn't even recognize the names any of the apps listed for this Thing. I ended up choosing Audioboo because the name is cute. (This is maybe not what its designers intended.)

This was still yet another Really Easy App to Use. I'm glad it didn't force me to create an account; I feel like I'm leaving a trail of abandoned accounts behind me. Making my own recording was easy to do. I've owned my iPad since 2011, and I think Audioboo is the first app that's ever used the microphone. I couldn't think of anything profound or witty to say, but my random sentences came out clear and easy to understand.—okay, that might be more due to the quality of the iPad's microphone than anything Audioboo does. I see the description of Audioboo says that you can record up to three minutes of audio. I saw Boos that were much longer than that. Does downloading or posting recordings gives you more time?

This isn't an app I see myself using either personally or professionally. I don't listen to audiobooks and I think I've tried all of one podcast in my life. I'm just not attracted to pure audio. Professionally, well, maybe there's something we could say, but our library is only really oriented to Twitter right now, and there aren't any plans at present for adding in more social media. Although this seems like it might be more useful to us than a six-second video.

23 Mobile Things #15: Infographics

I decided to see what Infographics Hub could do. Now I'm used to infographics accompanying text articles. Sometimes there isn't much more to the article than Hey, look at this cool infographic of this interesting phenomenon, but usually there's something. It had never occurred to me that you could gather infographics, separate them from their parent articles (if any), and read them one after another like articles in a magazine, but that's exactly what Infographics Hub does. Now there are an awful lot of infographics out there, but Infographics Hub allows you to filter them by category, which makes the flood more manageable. Choose your favorite topics, sit back, and enjoy the data presentation.

As it turns out, I like reading an infographic every now and then. Reading one after another is overwhelming, even in just one subject area. Approach them with caution if you plan to use them in a professional project, because the sources are listed inconsistently. Some infographics list their sources clearly at the bottom, which is good, but some had no sources listed whatsoever. I see the infographics are introduced with a bit of text, but I couldn't tell if that was from the parent article or something Infographics Hub added. For one (apparently sourceless) infographic, the accompanying blurb states, "They wanted to share the top advantages of asynchronous eLearning so below is their infographic that shows those advantages." Nothing says who "they" are, and unfortunately the ad at the bottom of the app cut off the last line of the infographic, so I hope there wasn't a grand conclusion down there.

If you want to see a lot of infographics and get ideas of what to include in your own, this would be a fine app. If you want to use the infographics themselves, just be alert to which ones provide sources and which do not. And if you want to make your own, you'll need a different app altogether. But as a free source of infographics, Infographics Hub does well enough.

23 Mobile Things #14: Videos

Vine: Instagram for videos, right? It certainly looks a lot like Instagram in how the app is laid out, and when you add in the captioning, hashtags, ability to like videos, and so on, the differences seem almost nonexistent. It's hard to believe they're owned by different companies.

This was another easy app to use. I appreciated the micro-tutorial that Vine supplied: having the instructions right there on the screen while I made the video was so right that it was brilliant. A strong word, I know, but I've had too many experiences of trying to click back and forth between tabs or find my place in a set of printed instructions to not praise this. Now if only I could find something more video-worthy than six seconds of my ceiling fan. Ooh, I know: a montage of all my ceiling fans in operation! (No?) But if I wanted to inflict that on the Vine-osphere, Vine has made it simplicity itself to create that video.

I wasn't all that impressed by the videos Vine sent my way. Most of them were only half a step up from animated GIFs, and even the ones that were funny stopped being so after the third showing—which, you know, was only 18 seconds after I first laid eyes on the video. (Okay, the video of the irate chicken pecking the smartphone camera was above average. Given how many likes it had, much of Vine thought so too.) It turns out that almost none of my friends have made the leap to Vine, so I don't know what kinds of videos people I share interests with would make. 

No, I don't see us using this at work. I did click through Sajorenna's links on how libraries are using Vine. Some were more appealing than others. I thought the video of the 3D printer in action was probably going to entice more patrons than the video that just showed various shots of books shelved in the stacks. Books don't move; perhaps "plain" old photos would have been the better medium than video. Like all social media, you need to have a plan before you throw your library onto Vine.

Personal use? Well, at first I thought I'd drop Vine the minute I got this post written, but now I'm thinking I may stick around, see if I can find interesting videos without Vine's "help," and try to think of interesting topics to cover in six seconds. 

And film my Oscar-winning video of ceiling fans.

23 Mobile Things #13: Presentations

Through my life, I've mostly been able to avoid making presentations, at least until grad school when I was finally forced to get the hang of PowerPoint. So I was less than enthusiastic to see this topic on the agenda. I chose Deck Slideshow Presentations simply because it was the first app listed (I have such high-falutin' selection criteria).

Okay, this was lots easier than wrestling PowerPoint. There was an outline for five slides or so, and all I had to do was type in a little bit of text. Really, it was like making five related tweets in a row (indeed, like Twitter, Deck will cut you off if your text goes on too long on any one slide). I added a quick chart, just to see what that was like, and again, it was surprisingly easy. I tried my presentation with a few themes. I think the limited number would be a problem if I were using Deck with any frequency, but for just a test presentation, the free themes were fine. The animations were certainly more interesting than anything I've done with PowerPoint, and they didn't give me vertigo the way Prezi sometimes can. Even though my text was within Deck's limits on each slide, I noticed that I lost the last word or two on my longer slides with some animations: hopefully the Deck people will fix this in later releases.

Personal or professional use? Not much, which is too bad given how easy this app was to use. I don't make presentations in my personal life and don't need to at this point in my professional life. Since we have Microsoft Office and an abundance of desktop computers at work, I think anyone who needs to make a presentation will use PowerPoint (except for the coworker who likes Prezi—how do you think I learned it makes me dizzy?). But should I ever need to make a presentation on the go, with only a tablet to work with, I would be quite likely to choose this app first.

23 Mobile Things #12: Books, Books, & More Books

I first heard about Wattpad late last year, when reading Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, but the description in the book hadn't really given me a good sense of how the site worked—something about a social network of readers and writers, fanfics and self-published works. Now I had an excuse to look at it closely.

The Wattpad app itself is easy to use: install, set up an account, choose a few favorite genres, and start reading. Mind you, the app started off by recommending books in genres like Romance and Adventure that I had specifically not listed as ones I'm interested in. (This probably won't be your go-to app for reader's advisory.) I hadn't realized that Wattpad had out-of-copyright classics as well as modern writing—I may finally get around to reading "The Picture of Dorian Gray." If you're comfortable reading on a tablet (I haven't tried Wattpad's iPhone app yet), you'll be fine reading things on Wattpad. The font is clear and navigation is intuitive.

Wattpad is a social network as well as a reading app, which will take some getting used to on my part. I mean, Amazon is sort of trying to promote social reading by giving you the option of making your Kindle notes and highlighting public, but Wattpad goes far beyond this (perhaps this is why Amazon acquired Goodreads). Naturally, the app offers you the standard option of inviting your friends from other social networks to come join you. I'm guessing that if I did have friends on Wattpad, the news feed would be showing me what they're up to, and not just Wattpad's recommendations for what to read next. But I'm used to this sort of thing from being on LibraryThing and Goodreads. What I'm not accustomed to is social networking practically written into the text itself. The book I chose was peppered with comment counts (this is the part that's sort of like the Kindle option of seeing what other readers have highlighted). Intrigued, I clicked through on a few of them. Some comments were about how much the readers were enjoying the book, some were asking for clarification on one point or another, some were offering editorial advice. The author was participating in the discussion at points, which has the potential to be really interesting. But I also found the discussions distracting, because I had to stop reading the book itself to read the comments. It's like trying to listen to the commentary on a DVD and watch it simultaneously—I have to commit to one or the other, not both. And completely unlike LibraryThing, Goodreads, or Kindle, Wattpad invites you to write your own stories. One tap on the Create icon, and a blank screen with keyboard appears: no obstacles between you and the muse. Whoa.

Okay, this is another app I'll be hanging onto for a while to explore further. Unfortunately, Wattpad hasn't solved the problem of how to find the good stories in these millions of self-published works, and it'll probably take me a while before I trip over one on my own. Not surprisingly, I can't see any use for this app in a law library. If someone wanted to read fanfiction, Wattpad can certainly deliver it to them. Do patrons ask to read self-published works that aren't fanfics? I'd think that reading the library's e-books might be more satisfying simply because most of them will have been edited at some point in the publication process. Of course, if the patron wants the social networking experience while reading, then they're probably going to want something like Wattpad, or maybe Goodreads or LibraryThing. (Yes, the perennial question: What do patrons want?)

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Another free source of fanfiction is Archive of Our Own (AO3). This isn't an app, but the site can be bookmarked on a tablet or smartphone. It has a much better search engine than Wattpad, allowing you to specify precisely what you're looking for. Membership is required to comment on works or create your own, but you don't need to be a member to read the stories.

23 Mobile Things #11: Library & Reference

I've been using the St. Paul Public Library's mobile app for a few years now. It seems to have gotten a new color scheme in the past few days: nicer to look at aesthetically, and easier to read. I mainly use it for the catalog, to see if the library owns a specific book I want, usually one that I've thought of when I'm out and about and realize that I could pick up if it's available. The mobile catalog isn't designed for browsing; you can search by title or author, but that's it. I pulled up a record and clicked on one of its subject headings to see if that would take me anywhere, but no. One of the app's options is a button to take you to the main catalog, which is good, although that would be more useful on a tablet. On my phone, I could tell I was looking at the catalog, but it would have taken a lot of zooming in and out to make use of it (I'm feeling seasick at the very thought).

But, okay, for this Thing, I should probably look at all those other button in the app, the ones I usually don't use.

• My Account: Indeed, that's what this is. Oh, and I can use this to renew the one book I have out. Nifty.
• Library Locator: A good idea, especially if you're out and about and are struck by a need to visit the closest branch of the library. It needs to be tweaked for focus, though. It asked if it could use my location, then listed every branch, without any indication of which ones I was the closest to.
• Ask A Librarian: Ooh, lots of options, and two of them ("Email Us" and "Call Us") can be done with just a click through my phone. Excellent! Too bad I don't have anything to ask a librarian right now, or I could test the system more thoroughly.
• E-books and Audiobooks Available Now: OverDrive, 3M Cloud Library, and OneClickdigital, all there and ready for me to access them. You'd need to know exactly what book you want, or you'd drain your phone's battery scrolling through endless lists trying to find something, but if you do, this is a convenient way to pick up more reading material when you're away from home and your library.
• New Books for Adults, Teens, Kids: Yes, that's what they are. Again, one can search the list rather than scroll.
• BookLook @ ISBN search: This lets you scan the barcode of a book in a bookstore or that a friend is reading, or whatever, and tells you whether or not the library has it. A great idea, although the results can be confusing. I got a hit for the book I test-scanned, but then it said no copies were available and didn't let me reserve one. I'm guessing this means all the copies were lost or stolen. If that's the case, please don't get my hopes up by telling me the library owns the book.
• Research: Databases. Got it.
• Events & Classes: Exactly.
• Metrowide Calendar: Events and classes at other Twin Cities libraries, I think.
• Facebook Connect with us: Find them on Facebook...
• Follow us on Twitter @stpaullibrary: ...and Twitter.
• Metrowide Libraries: Locations of the branches of other Twin Cities libraries. Wait...it can tell me I'm 4.7 miles from the Hosmer Library (Hennepin County Library), but it can't tell me which branch of my own library is closest with the Library Locator?! Luckily, the St. Paul Public Library is listed here too, so now I can see which branch I'm currently closest to. Sheesh.

Lots of services in a fairly simple app. I really must use this more.

23 Mobile Things #10: Sharing Photos

For this Thing, I tackled Instagram. I knew I knew at least one person who uses Instagram; I couldn't think of anyone who uses Snapchat. Besides, I don't need my pictures to self-destruct in five seconds.

Instagram has been pretty easy to set up and to use. As it turned out, I know 22 people on Instagram, although it looks like only three of them use it with any regularity. This may be another one of the social media sites that people sign up for out of curiosity and then never get into the habit of using. But this gave me a good start for people to follow, and a few of the 22 have even followed me back. Oh, my soaring popularity!

What little I knew of Instagram before signing up had left me wondering what the point was. It's hard for me not to think of it as visual Twitter—that is, if you created Twitter, but you had people post a photo instead of  a sentence or two, you'd have Instagram. And hey, there are a lot of people out there who are just as visual as they are verbal, or more so, and maybe that was all there was to it. So I hadn't figured I needed to join, because I like Twitter, and the few times I've wanted to post pictures, it's been easy to do. It's not as easy to post photos to Facebook, but it's not horrendously complicated either. But yeah, I can see now that it's just that much easier to do so through Instagram: take the photo, edit it, add captions and commentary, and direct it to Twitter, Facebook, and/or other destinations, all from within the Instagram app.

I'm happy to say that Instagram has motivated me to use my phone camera more. I still plan to take most of the pictures for my blogs with my digital camera, because I want them to be higher quality, but Instagram encourages quick pics to be shared on impulse with friends, which is perfect for the phone camera. And since I finally have a phone camera that can take decent pictures without a lot of fuss, using Instagram is more feasible than it was in the past. So I'm liking it much more than I thought I would, and I'm leaning towards continuing to use it after I've finished this post. But I'm still a bit concerned about that overlap. How many more general social media networks can the world support, anyway? Perhaps Instagram is different enough from Facebook and Twitter by dint of its photos-first focus to survive and thrive. We'll see.

Professionally, this is another app/service I can't see much use for. Everything I've read says that currently Instagram is hot with teenagers and college students, an age range not known for using law libraries. Indeed, a libraries-and-social-media webinar I attended last year stated bluntly that if teenagers weren't a major patron group for your library, don't bother getting your library on Instagram. Of course, if Instagram is one of the social media networks that endures, its users will age. Some of them will eventually become first law students, then lawyers, and then maybe we'll use it to reach them then [insert evil cackle here].

23 Mobile Things #9: Taking & Editing Photos

I do not use my tablet and smartphone for everything, at least not yet. When it comes to photos, I'm more likely to export them to a desktop computer and edit them with Photoshop Elements rather than try to fix a photo that I can barely see on a tiny screen. And since I do edit photos a lot, I decided to try Color Splurge for this Thing's post, just for a change.

Color Splurge makes photos look dramatic, or makes dramatic photos, or something like that. I could see using it to create a library poster or two, highlighting key elements by coloring them. You'd have to use it sparingly though, because it's such a distinctive look. Even two posters in a row featuring this technique would probably give your patrons the impression that you and your staff only had one design idea. I'm not sure how much use there would be for Color Splurge's color change tools, at least not for library posters. I don't know, maybe if you were playing off of "roses are red, violets are blue" and wanted a photo of red violets or blue roses or something—beyond that, my professional imagination fails me. But I can think of reasons to use it personally. For one thing, I often want to knit a sweater in some other color than the one pictured in the pattern. With this, I could recolor the photo and check out how it looks before committing myself to anything.

Color Splurge itself was fairly easy to use. The instructional video saved me a lot of guesswork, but the ads are obnoxious. (Also, the video needs updating. Where was that reset button the narrator referred to?) It was a bit tricky getting the color and the gray to be where I wanted them to be. I have better control of my fingers than trying to "paint" with a mouse or trackball, but my fingertips are less than precise when working at such a small scale. It was certainly easier using this app on a tablet than a smartphone—having said that, I'll add that I did these two pictures on the iPhone. It wasn't all that hard after I remembered I had a stylus and used it. Although Color Splurge may have been overkill for these pictures. The reason I took them in the first place was because they were the only spots of color in otherwise dormant lawns and bushes; all Color Splurge did was change brown to gray.

Leaves!

Really, there are tiny purple flowers in there somewhere.

23 Mobile Things #8: Social Media Management Tools

You know, I'd sort of forgotten that the point of HootSuite is to manage multiple social media accounts. I suspect this is because my social media accounts don't need much managing. While I'm on several social networking sites, I'm on many of them for some other reason than socializing. (Usually databases.) Of the ones I use for socializing, I've only linked Facebook and Twitter to HootSuite. I imagine disaster is inevitable if I connect LinkedIn to anything I use in my personal life.

In general, I should probably use HootSuite more, especially for Facebook. When I first started using it, its bare-bones interface just didn't do it for me aesthetically. But nowadays, Facebook has gotten more and more cluttered with ads that I can pretty much ignore in HootSuite. Worse, its insistance on wanting to show me "top stories" is annoying as all get-out. Even when I switch to showing most recent stories first, it keeps asking me if I wouldn't really prefer top stories, and every few days it switches back to top stories on its own. HootSuite's default is chronological order. I may learn to love that bare-bones interface after all.

But merely reading Twitter and Facebook is standard. Social media management tools need to do more, and HootSuite does. I like that HootSuite lets you post to Twitter and Facebook simultaneously, although I don't use this feature all that much. This might be a more useful feature if I wanted to post the same stuff to three or more social networks, but it's not that much effort to post something in one network, and then copy and paste it to the other. And I don't often post the same things to Twitter and Facebook. There's some overlap between the two, of course, but not that much, and what I want to say to friends (Facebook) is rarely what I want to say to strangers (Twitter). But when I have used this feature, it's been easy to use.

Another selling point for me is that HootSuite has analytics. I love analytics: charts! graphs! trends! It's too bad that my social media life is so unexciting that the analytics don't show much, but the point is that they could. And it would be really neat to look at, I'm sure. I need to go do something interesting online so that I have cool analytics to admire.

HootSuite also lets you write status updates and tweets ahead of time and schedule them for later posting. I've probably used this feature more than any other. It's such a sensible feature that I keep being mildly surprised that neither Twitter nor Facebook has added it to their services. I haven't gotten the hang of AutoSchedule yet, but I'm in no rush—again, I probably don't have enough to say to justify its use.

I don't see myself using HootSuite professionally any time soon. I don't work with my library's social media, and we only have a Twitter account anyway. You don't need a social media management tool when you barely have any social media to manage. But it's been useful personally and I plan to keep using it for the foreseeable future.

23 Mobile Things #7: Content Saving & Sharing

In the interests of continued learning, being open to new experiences, and needing something to write about for this Thing, I joined Pinterest. I can't say as it has won me over yet, although I haven't deleted my account either.

Okay, so Pinterest is still yet another way to save information. Saving information is a good and wonderful thing, but I don't need zillions of ways to do so, any more than I need three digital personal assistants, because then I have to remember which service is storing which bit of information. If I were more primarily visual, though, Pinterest might be my favorite information saver. The pictures are the focus and there's very little text involved. I could see using it if I were collecting ideas for a visual project, like how to redecorate a room, remodel my kitchen, or plan a wedding. But generally, I save things for the text more than the graphics, and I find Evernote or even Springpad better for that. Also, I think Pinterest is just messy. Faced with a screen of small pictures and little text, I can't find a focal point on the page and I mostly just want to click away from it, not use it. This is a service in desperate need of more white space.

Like Zite and Springpad, Pinterest wants to send new ideas my way. Since signing up, I've been getting regular emails from Pinterest encouraging me to follow some boards and find more things to pin. I'm becoming increasingly curious about what this says about people generally. Do we feel we don't know enough? Are falling behind somehow and need to catch up? Are just really curious about what the people we follow are up to? Anyway, even though this doesn't interest me, I'm sure it's a fine feature for those who want to take advantage of it.

I don't see myself using Pinterest professionally in the near future. I work at a law library: the kind of library infamous for having lots of books that look exactly alike. With Pinterest's visual emphasis, I don't know what exactly we could show off. An entire board devoted to books with tan covers and red and black stripes on the spines—ooh! :)

in-between thing: microsoft office app for ipad

Last night, a mere day after writing up Mobile Thing #6,  I learned that Microsoft is releasing a version of Office for the iPad, which was confirmed this morning: Microsoft to Offer Office for iPad, Maybe a Bit Late. At first I was relieved that I wouldn't have to see if CloudOn fixes its problems. What better to play with Office than Office itself? Then I saw the catch: read all the documents you want for free, but if you want to make any, you'll have to subscribe to Office 365: $100/year.

You know how I said I'd given up on accessing Office documents on my iPad? You can still consider it given up.

23 Mobile Things #6: Creating & Editing Docs

I'd pretty much given up on the idea of ever working with Microsoft Office programs on my iPad. Even when "tablet" meant "iPad," Microsoft didn't make Office tablet-friendly. Now there are Android and Windows tablets out there as well, and the few rumors I'd ever heard that there was going to be an Office suite of apps for iOS have died. But the end result is that I don't use Office nearly as much as I used to personally. I still use it at work, yes, but that might have a lot to do with the fact that we hardly use tablets or smartphones for work at my library.

I decided to try CloudOn. I loaded it onto the iPad weeks ago, and then promptly ignored it. Remember how I said I barely use Office anymore? I didn't need to write anything, so I had nothing to test CloudOn with! But I finally sat down and created a document and can now report my findings.

Good

If you can use Microsoft Word—and why would you be doing this if you couldn't?—you can use CloudOn. The app's mini-tour when you first log in was enough to get going. The app emulated Word successfully: not as visually attractive as Word itself is, but everything was clearly labeled and was where I expected it to be. The app saved my test document to Dropbox without a hitch, and I was then able to pull it up in Word itself without error messages or mangled text.

Bad

The lag was maddening. Type a few words rapidly, look up, and realize that none of them have appeared on the screen. Wait...wait...there they are! Resume typing. Wait again. GAH! This is why I don't use Google Docs; it has the same infuriating delay between keystroke and letter appearance. I watch the screen as I compose, and if the words don't show up, I lose track of what I'm typing.

The second problem was a glitch. I'm guessing there's a conflict in the app somewhere between what's pretending to be Word's spell-checker and Auto-correct. (I have this same issue when I try to email stuff from Twitterrific through the iOS mail app.) What happened was that whenever a possibly misspelled word popped up, the first letter or two of the correction would be duplicated. For instance, when it tried to replace something I'd typed with "things," what appeared on the screen was "tthings." What excellent motivation to never, ever mistype a word! Because if you do, and this glitch happens, and you have to go back and manually correct the error…

…the third problem kicks in. You know how to move the cursor in iOS, you touch the screen where you want it to move to? And if you're slightly off, you roll your finger a bit to one side or the other to reposition the cursor? Well, that signals to CloudOn that you want the Word feature where you highlight something and a box with the most common formatting options appears. Which it did. Which meant that I couldn't see the cursor to see if it was in the right place for me to backspace and erase the offending duplicated letters. GAH!²

All in all

This is an app with potential. It's got some problems, but fix them, and this app will come in handy. Like I said, we still use Microsoft Office at work, and if I found myself away from work but needing to access our documents and spreadsheets, this would do a good job. At this point, I'll probably still compose simple documents in Evernote if I have to, but fix those glitches, and this will give Evernote some good competition.

23 Mobile Things #5: Notetaking

This Thing was the first I'd heard of Springpad, although a quick peek around the web shows that it's got a devoted following. Almost every article I found about it mentioned Evernote as well, confirming my suspicion that there's a lot of overlap between the two. Lifehacker swears that the two services are growing apart and that some of their staff use both, but in different ways. I am not yet convinced. Or rather, yes, I get that they're not identical. I just don't see that Springpad does enough differently than Evernote that you would need to have one if you already had the other.

Springpad and I got off to an awkward start. I set up my account on my desktop computer and managed to forget the password by the time I got to the iPad to sync the app. No problem: I'll just reset the password, right? Wrong. The app had a "Forgot your password?" link, but when I clicked it, the display just sort of slid to the lower right, partly vanished, and didn't do a thing about letting me in. I had to wait until I could get back to a desktop computer to fix it. And as it turns out, you have to have access to a desktop computer to reset it even if the app is working; you're not allowed to reset it from the app. A security measure, I suppose, but it feels clunky. How will this work for people who don't have ready access to a desktop?

Once I got in, things were much more fun. I think Springpad is more welcoming than Evernote was. Having categories like Books or Movies gave me ideas about what to start saving. It took me months to get into Evernote (a common experience) because I couldn't figure out where to start. But those same categories feel a bit limiting as well. I see I can make up my own notebooks outside of the categories, but it's not as obvious. Springpad has more visual appeal than Evernote. It's not entirely an Evernote wannabe, I've decided—more like the love child of Evernote and Pinterest. And the bit where you can follow other people's notes adds a dash of Delicious. I can see the appeal of looking though other people's notes, although I balk at letting them see mine. Lifehacker says you can "use Springpad as your new personal assistant." I'm resisting giggling at this: my iPad already has Google Now on it, trying to be a personal assistant, and if I had a more modern iPad, I'd have Siri as well. My iPhone is modern enough to support all three of them. How many artificial personal assistants does one person need, anyway?

Despite it being a "notetaking" app, I don't think Springpad is as good at letting you create your own content (like taking notes during a presentation) as Evernote. It seems more oriented towards saving things you find online as well as finding related online things that you might like to know about as well. I may need to come up with a project of some sort to test that out thoroughly. Evernote is certainly meant to save things, but I don't see it as a finding tool. I'm going to keep Springpad on my various devices for the time being because it's going to take a few months to really get a feel for it. Based on what I've done with it so far, I think it would be good for people who find Evernote more than they need (or want to deal with). It looks like its forte would be in researching for personal projects. For a professional project or complicated personal project, I would be more likely to recommend Evernote.

23 Mobile Things #4: Keeping Up

I first encountered Zite back in those dark days when we learned that Google Reader was shutting down and that we'd need to find other ways to read our RSS feeds. As Google Reader had done pretty much everything I'd needed an RSS reader to do, I wasn't thrilled. It's one thing to go off and explore new apps in a spirit of curiosity, quite another to be forced to find an adequate substitute for something you were satisfied with. So admittedly, I wasn't in the best frame of mind when I tested Zite back then, and it wasn't the one I settled on. Instead, I chose Feedly, which went and redesigned itself to be more like Google Reader, incorporating the features I'd liked about Google Reader.

But time has passed, and if I was no longer feeling pressured to move to Zite, maybe I'd like it more. Perhaps they'd added something I'd like; apps are always being redesigned. Plus, it made sense to continue working with something I had some familiarity with rather than install still yet another app for this Thing. This time around, I've decided that even though Zite does have some good features, it's not enough to persuade me to switch.

One of Zite's strengths is its system for finding new reading material based on what you liked and didn't like of what you've already read. You vote on stories, mark topics as favorites: it was simple to figure out and intuitive to do. I want to make it clear that I think that's a great feature, just not what I personally am looking for in an RSS reader at this time. I already have a number of blogs and other sources that I follow, and I'm so far behind on reading them that I will never catch up (ack!). On top of that, friends and strangers are constantly posting interesting articles to Facebook and Twitter. I can't keep up with all that—I don't want my RSS reader finding even more stuff for me to fall behind on! (Feedly has this feature as well. It's not as easy to use, as I recall, but since I don't use it, that's not a problem.)

And then there's the magazine-style layout: "You'll get all the benefit of our powerful technology wrapped in a beautiful design that is a joy to pick up every day." I'm sure many people love it, but I find it a chaotic mess, and it mostly leaves me wanting to shut the app down rather than read anything. Feedly also has a magazine layout—that's probably the default—but it wasn't difficult to switch it to a list of article titles, grouped by the categories I chose. If there's a way to do that in Zite, easy or hard, I have yet to find it. I like Feedly's mass deletion feature, where I can swipe and mark an entire page as read. Or I can just swipe over individual stories, leaving others for later. And Feedly syncs with a website I can access from my desktop computer, for those times when I have a few minutes to read at my desk. Not Zite.

Which sums up my feelings overall: not Zite. Blog post written, I'm off to delete it from my iPad. Again.

23 Mobile Things #3: Utilities

Since I use the iPad and the iPhone differently, I decided to write about different apps for each of them. For two devices that have so much in common, there are many apps that are far more useful on the one than the other.

Something Old

I've had Google Search for probably almost the entire life of my iPad, and I use it, but it's never been the most successful app in the collection. For one thing, this is one of the slowest apps to boot. Tap the icon and it pops up instantly, but then leaves you staring at its splash screen for a noticeable length of time while it (presumably) gets everything ready for you. On top of that, its primary function is superfluous. You can easily search Google just by typing your search terms into the address bar in either Safari or Chrome, so why keep a separate app around just for searching?

The people at Google not being known for idiocy, they've no doubt figured all this out themselves, which is why this app is trying to become my personal assistant. (I have an iPad 2, so there'll be no competition from Siri.) I just switched on the Google Now feature two days ago to try it out. The problem is, my life is too boring for it. It has been eager for me to tell it to remind me to do something, like leave on time for an appointment—but I have nothing scheduled for the next six days. I don't follow sports, so it can't tell me my favorite teams' latest scores. I have no plans to fly anywhere in the foreseeable future, so upcoming flight departure times won't do me any good. Yes, it's telling me what the weather is like, but I have…oh, let's not count how many weather apps I have on the iPad. Suffice it to say I don't need Google to tell me that. The poor thing has been reduced to telling me that something I ordered has been shipped (it's been reading my email), and is hinting that I would get better suggestions if only I would turn on my Search History. I'm sure I would, but now we're into privacy concerns, and I don't know as I want my Search History on. I have this irrational need to apologize to this app for not letting it really show me how wonderful it could be.

Something New

My choice for the iPhone was RedLaser Barcode & QR Scanner. Even with my old phone, I'd been meaning to get a barcode/QR scanner, although I kept never getting around to it. Some utilities are more crucial than others, and a barcode scanner seems pretty high on the crucial list. I remember visiting the History Center a couple of years ago when they were having their "1968" exhibit, and you could get more information about the various displays by scanning their QR codes—except that I couldn't. :(

So anyway, new phone, new app. Sitting at my desk, I wanted to test the app. The first barcode at hand was on a ball of yarn.

I wasn't sure what I would get if I scanned it, since I wasn't asking the app to do anything. Would it even recognize the barcode as such?

Indeed it did. It figured out the yarn was from Berroco and what the UPC was, although that seems to be the extent of it. I'll spare you photos of the book I scanned next, but this was more successful: a photo of the cover art and a list of comparative prices around the Web. (Amazon.com noticeably absent from said list.) I am now resisting the urge to scan every barcode in the apartment. I don't need to know how much I overpaid for the box of cereal I'm currently enjoying.

23 Mobile Things #2: Mobile Device Tips

My first fun Apple device was my 2009 iPod Touch*, which I think means I've been dealing with iOS since version 3. By now, I know the routine. The new version of iOS comes out. I wait for a couple of weeks, so that the early adopters can find all the bugs for me. After installation comes the fun part: trying to figure out what it can do (and sometimes what it can no longer do—hey, I liked some of those old iOS 3 wallpapers that vanished in later versions). So this evening, armed with iPad and iPhone, I settled in to see what iOS 7 was capable of.

I started with the tips on maximizing battery life. Other tips may be useful, amusing, or irrelevant: battery life is nonnegotiable. No, won't be using Air Drop: shut it off. No, not using Bluetooth: off. I already knew to turn on Reduce Motion to turn off the annoying parallax motion for the wallpaper, but reading about it reminded me how annoying the whole idea was: why yes, I want nothing more than to spend some of my precious battery charge so that the wallpaper can twitch slightly. And hey, by turning off some of the more deeply buried features in Settings, not only do you increase your battery life, you increase your privacy as well. Win-win!

After the thrill of wringing out more battery life, the other tips paled in comparison. I will probably go back and study the camera tips later. I'm way too used to the camera in my old smartphone, which was barely adequate for even the most rudimentary photography; I basically got conditioned to not think of the phone camera as an option. I have a digital camera which I prefer to use, but I don't carry it with me routinely, and now that I have a better phone camera at hand, I may actually start using it. I use the Gmail app, so tips on using the native Mail app don't do me much good. Just before getting to this Thing, I'd found the iPhone's flashlight. I like the idea, and it wasn't a bad amount of light for such a little device. But will I remember that the phone is a flashlight when I desperately need to see something? (The phone is a flashlight. The phone is a camera. The phone is a computer. The phone is trying to be a personal assistant. The phone almost never gets to be a phone, poor thing.)

Let's see, what else do I know in the way of tips? Well, you can split the iPad's keyboard in two to make it easier to type with your thumbs, if you're used to that from your phone. I'm not, and my hands are small enough that I can use the horizontal keyboard normally. Plus, an iPad weighs noticeably more than a phone, and holding it like a phone is problematic. But you can split the keyboard by putting two fingers on it and pulling it "apart;" reverse that to reassemble it. More generally useful: tap the very top of the screen when you're in an app to scroll to the top of a feed (like Twitter, Facebook, or a blog) rather than manually scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. And my aging eyes like the fact that you can adjust the font size (Settings > General > Text Size or Accessibility), but the feature isn't implemented by all apps yet, so it's more of a wish than a reality.

Learning the tips and tricks for each iteration of iOS is productive and sometimes fun. But after four rounds of this, I find myself wishing the whole process was more intutive…which is supposed to be one of Apple's strong points, right?

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*Which I still use. It's more or less permanently installed in my audio system, since the battery no longer holds a charge, but it works just fine for my music and Pandora.

23 Mobile Things #1: Blogging & Registering

Write a blog post for Thing 1 telling us what you hope to get out of the program, says the first prompt for this latest version of 23 Things on a Stick. Expanded horizons, I answer.

When I participated in the original version of this program, I was comfortable using computers, but I wasn't all that adventurous. I spent most of my time online doing basic web-surfing and email, and I still spent a lot of my computer time offline, working with Microsoft Word. I participated in a number of mailing lists and I had a wee bit of experience dealing with Usenet. I knew there were things like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter in the world, but I wasn't sure what they were, and no one I knew used them, so there was nobody to ask. Oh, and the whole blogging thing: why would you write whatever came to mind and make it public—and why on earth would anyone be interested? What I got out of 23 Things on a Stick was encouragement to try all these things. It was difficult for me to play with something if I couldn't see a practical reason to do so, and the program itself was such a reason: play with this and tell everyone what you thought of it and what your experience was like. And although I almost never used it as such, I thought of it as a support group: if I had a problem with one of the Things, I could read other people's experiences of it and see if that helped.

In the end, what I got was a much bigger online world. I had been introduced to Facebook and Twitter, and I still participate actively on both today. Okay, it took a while to decide I liked Twitter, but no one said I had to adopt everything instantly, and I only managed to stay on the MySpace site for about two minutes before fleeing it forever. My mailing lists have been replaced with Facebook groups and friendships. I miss the in-depth discussions, but on the other hand, I feel as if I have a much better sense of the other members as people. And it turned out I liked blogging and ended up starting several different personal blogs—and as you can see, I never took this one down.

So what do I want from 23 Mobile Things? The same thing: a bigger world. I'm still not the most adventurous soul in the world, although I love my mobile toys (iPad and iPhone). I tend to look for variations on the apps I already have, and despite all of Apple's exhortations of There's an app for that! I rarely think to look for anything completely new to me. I'm hoping to be introduced to totally new apps, to apps that help me do what I still have to do on my desktop computer, and to apps that maybe I don't need but that my friends will find useful. And above all, I hope to learn really interesting things. (Or Things. Whatever.)