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.)

The end of the beginning?

Good-bye Web 2.0, hello Social Media. This story from Mashable is about how the second term has now become more popular than the first, so Web 2.0 as a term is probably on its way out. Has Web 2.0 itself actually become established now? This blog was about exploring bits and pieces of it, and now I take many of those bits and pieces for granted. Cloud computing still falls apart at inconvenient times, but I'm relying on it to get through grad school. Not only could I find my new address through Google Maps, but it showed me the building itself at street level, where I could turn my focus around and see my neighbors. My heart and my book collection belong to Library Thing. Now that I finally have high-speed Internet, YouTube is no longer terra incognita.

But through all this, social media reigns. Just about everything I read on the Web offers me options for sharing with others, via Facebook, Twitter, or a dillion other sites. I've got an idea of what many of my friends did for the holidays because they posted to Facebook. The sites I shop from want me to be their fan on Facebook or follow them on Twitter. Welcome to the mainstreaming of social media.