Fraser SpeirsBloghttp://speirs.org/blog/2013-05-06T10:58:09ZSquarespaceThe iOS 7 Power User Challengehttp://speirs.org/blog/2013/5/6/the-ios-7-power-user-challenge.htmlFraser Speirs2013-05-06T08:25:21Z2013-05-06T08:25:21ZThat the growth in iOS has been phenomenal hardly needs to be stated any more. To people like me, though, who have been Apple users since the Mac Classic, it's been an amazing ride.

In 2008, after the launch of the iPhone 3G, I wrote:

If you haven't got it already, it's time to move your head to this place: iPhone OS is Apple's mainstream platform for 2012 and beyond.

That's the world we now live in.

I am and have always been obsessed with software. While the media obsess over new hardware, I've always been far more interested in the capabilities of software. Better hardware - generally - just saves me time. A faster iPad will be great, but what shall we do with it?

What iOS Hath Wrought

Three times in my career, Apple has shipped software that conventional wisdom said basically couldn't be done. The first was the Carbon layer of Mac OS X: most of the Mac toolbox running on a preemptively multitasking, protected memory Unix kernel. The second was Rosetta: PowerPC apps running unmodified and, for the most part, perfectly well on Intel processors.

iOS was the third. Conventional wisdom said that you couldn't possibly get a desktop OS running on a phone. Conventional wisdom said that you couldn't get rid of a user-visible filesystem. Conventional wisdom said you couldn't require all software on the platform to come through a first-party app store.

Right now, just before WWDC 2013, I think it's important to take time to appreciate exactly what iOS has achieved.

iOS broke the tyranny of the hierarchical filesystem as a user interface. A concept so complex that possibly the majority of computer users never achieved any level of real competence in its use. A far larger proportion certainly never achieved any kind of mastery.

iOS turned the purchase and installation of third-party software from a great opportunity to destroy your computer into something that people do for fun. People of very low technical ability are now perfectly safely and competently administering their own computers. This is a revelation and, in my opinion, a big part of the IT backlash against iOS.

iOS solved the virus problem. The conventional wisdom of the PC years was that Windows got viruses because it was vastly more popular than the Mac. In the post-PC years, we have hundreds of millions of people using iOS and, so far as I know, zero viruses.

There are other achievements I could list, but the point is that iOS broke through a lot of conventional wisdom about how computers should appear and operate.

The State of the iOS Union

If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth — and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago. - Steve Jobs, February 1996

So where are we today with iOS? We have a powerful mobile operating system with excellent APIs that enable a broad range of powerful applications to be developed. Despite that, some of the fundamental design choices in iOS are limiting the growth of the platform.

The chart that I use to explain the appropriate deployment of smartphones, iPads and desktop computers uses two axes: task duration and task complexity.

iOS does a wonderful job in the lower-left corner of the chart. Right now, though, I think iOS needs to attack the upper-right corner of this chart. There is an opportunity to completely eliminate the desktop computer for some and drastically reduce its importance for many more.

What does such an attack look like? Well, there are various sources of complexity in the use of a computer for a task and some of them still either overwhelm iOS or simply become too awkward to tolerate.

Let's look at some of them.

Moving Data and Documents Between Apps

One source of complexity is having to use multiple tools to achieve the result you want. On the desktop, the common transport for doing this is the filesystem: save a file from one app, open it in another. iOS needs to support the user in that task without breaking the filesystem abstraction that has been so valuable in making iOS approachable for less technical users.

The current mechanism of "Open In...", which allows an app to copy a file to another app, is enabling some decent workflows but has the drawback of littering each app's sandbox with a copy of the file. It's also difficult to move large files this way.

If I want to take a PDF stored in Evernote, edit it with PDF Expert and save a modified version back into the same Evernote note, I simply can't do it today. The fact that so many iOS apps have built in direct support for Dropbox is testament to how weak the Dropbox app itself is. This is no criticism of Dropbox; they're doing all they can, given the design of iOS sandboxing.

This also applies to chunks of data that are not files: URLs, strings, photos. A great recent example: I like to use Flipboard and Flipboard recently introduced a new feature where you can create "magazines" from web pages. I normally use Instapaper for caching stuff to read that passes by on Twitter, which I read with Tweetbot. Tweetbot supports a few read later services, including Instapaper, Pocket and Pinboard. It doesn't support Flipboard, and there's nothing I can do to make it support posting links to Flipboard apart from begging the Tweetbot developers to add it. The burden of inter-app integration should lie with the destination app, not the originating app.

If iOS had a generalised "send this piece of data to apps that claim to handle it" service - yes, like Android does - all the work to allow posting a link to Flipboard from Tweetbot would be in the hands of Flipboard and not Tweetbot. Similarly, the common workflow of saving an image to the Camera Roll and later extracting it in another app leaves behind data detritus that could be avoided if direct communication were easier.

Moving Data and Documents Between Devices

The TL;DR of this section is: iOS should support AirDrop, and it should be available as an "Open In..." target. Moving data between two iOS devices without using a Dropbox-like service, email or, worse, a Mac has always been annoying. Apps like iFiles leverage Open In... to work around the problem but, again, you end up with a copy of your data in iFiles' sandbox as well as the originating app.

There is another compelling argument for supporting WiFi Direct: Apple TV. The challenge of mass deployment of Apple TV on networks are well documented. What if a future Apple TV could receive AirPlay streams without the need to even be on the network? That would be a Very Big Deal.

Of course, this requires additional support in the WiFi chipsets built into iOS devices but there's no inherent reason it can't quickly become a standard capability.

Dealing with Big Personal Data

One of the bigger limitations of iOS has always been that, every so often, you'll try and do something that's "too big" for an iOS device to do. As the hardware itself becomes more powerful, these situations grow fewer but they still remain. In particular, they tend to persist in areas that involve handling a large chunk of data.

Examples include: trying to import a video from the Camera Roll into an app, opening a large Keynote file, applying a complex set of adjustments in iPhoto. Using Open In... can sometimes fall over if the file is large.

To some extent, these things are hardware-dependent. As CPU, memory and storage levels increase, these issues should diminish but there are clearly some aspects of these that are OS-dependent.

More Granular iCloud Restore

iCloud backup is really great. You set it and you forget it but, increasingly, I see a need for more granular access to the backup. Restoring your entire device just to get one missing file back is quite a drastic step, particularly when you have made other changes to data on the device since the file was lost.

Right now, iCloud backup is a brilliant disaster recovery mechanism. You lose or destroy your iOS device and you can be back up and running in a very short time. What it is not, currently, is a great user-error-recovery mechanism. If you screw up, you're staring a whole-device restore in the face.

Password Management

The current situation with internet passwords on iOS is, put simply, crazy-making. I use 1Password and, short of making it my main browser, it is maddening to have to keep switching between Safari and 1Password to get logged into a site.

The fact that I have a bookmarklet on my Safari toolbar whose sole purpose is to open the current URL in 1Password tells its own story.

I don't know exactly what the solution to this is. Giving mobile Safari the ability to run extensions isn't quite enough unless those extensions can communicate with an app also installed on the system. Regardless, this is becoming highly frustrating. The entire mechanism of usernames and passwords is out of date. It'd be great if Apple could lead the way on building in platform level support for 2-factor authentication. I'm not enough of an expert on this to comment much further but this needs to get easier.

Typing Enhancements

The iOS keyboard is good, but it could be better. I haven't spent a lot of time with the alternative keyboards on other platforms but they are said to be ahead of iOS. I think more work could be done to make autocorrect more predictable.

My main complaint though is about the text selection interface. We now know from some experience with gestural interfaces that interactions requiring tap-and-hold just plain feel slow, whether they actually are or not. The iOS text selection gestures depend heavily on tap-and-hold to precisely place the insertion point loupe.

Wrist Protection APIs

I do not think that iOS needs to embed deep stylus support. Nonetheless, the are increasingly good digital ink apps for various applications: art, drawing, PDF annotation and so on.

Many of these apps have built their own wrist protection systems. Some are better than others and none of them behave exactly alike. In addition, none of them play particularly well with the iOS four-finger multitasking gestures.

Some system level mechanism for doing wrist protection alongside the multitasking gestures would go a long way to easing this problem.

Remove 50MB Limits on Cellular

Power users are often also highly mobile users. One of the main reasons I use a third-party app over the Apple Podcasts app is that, with Instacast, I can download a podcast of any size but Apple's app continues to enforce the 50MB download limit on cellular networks.

This limitation made sense in the early days of iOS, where everyone was on unlimited data connections. Today, most people are on metered connections. We pay for every byte, so we should be allowed to choose exactly how we spend those bytes.

Of course, a warning would still be useful. Some people are on metered contracts which, after a cap is reached, impose astronomical charges. Along with this change, I think a system-wide governor on mobile data usage would be useful. You can imagine, though, how Apple might be reluctant to build in such a feature and then undoubtedly face a rash of "Waah! Apple cost me thousands in data charges!" headlines every time someone doesn't understand how the feature works.

Choose Default Apps

The question of changing default apps has been a contentious one at times in the life of iOS. Until recently, I had not seen many examples of compelling replacements for Safari and Mail. Today, though, that's vastly different.

There are really good alternative browsers now, in the form of Chrome, Dolphin and others. The official Gmail app is lacking in some ways but its a perfectly good alternative for Gmail users. On the iPhone, I have been using Mailbox since the day I got to the head of the queue and would love to set it as my default mail app.

I don't think a generalised UI for changing every protocol handler in the system is necessary at this point. However taking two baby steps by allowing the user to choose their browser and mail client (and perhaps a third in choosing their maps app) would be a good start.

I would like to see some policy around preventing apps from setting themselves as default handlers. The user needs to remain in control of this.

Deeper Keyboard Support

I'm not a regular Bluetooth keyboard user but I do use one occasionally. The apparently increasing popularity of Bluetooth keyboard cases suggests that people do like to regularly use a keyboard with their iPad.

To better support this, I would like to see a few enhancements to the Bluetooth keyboard support in iOS. In particular, a method of keyboard-navigating the multitasking bar would be very welcome. I imagine this as a Command-Tab keystroke opening the bar and subsequent strokes highlighting successive apps which can be chosen by hitting return.

The Way Ahead

That's all I have for now. There are certainly more things that could be added. I have focused here specifically on the issues that are limiting deeper adoption and utilisation of the iOS platform for the 'power user'. There are certainly other concerns that a casual user or a beginner would have.

My broader point, though, is that iOS does NOT need a ground-up rethink, nor does it need to become more like our existing desktop OSes, in order to satisfy more of the needs of the power user. This conceptually small set of changes would go a long way to pushing iOS deeper into that high complexity/long duration section of my chart above.

]]>IT Does Not Love iPads, and that's a good signhttp://speirs.org/blog/2013/4/27/it-does-not-love-ipads-and-thats-a-good-sign.htmlFraser Speirs2013-04-27T12:57:20Z2013-04-27T12:57:20ZI'm not normally in the business of going full-Macalope on stupid articles about iPad. After all, there aren't enough hours in the day. Having said that, one particular article has surfaced recently that I hear is being used by at least one local authority IT team in Scotland to justify an LA-wide ban on iPads.

The article by Michelle Fredette in Campus Technology entitled "IT Does Not Love iPads" is so completely off-balance that it's almost funny - until you realise that this kind of weak thinking is actually being taken seriously.

In case you don't make it to the end, here's an executive summary of the complaints:

  • iPads come in boxes
  • App licensing works differently from Microsoft's
  • Apple TV is finicky to deploy at scale
  • You need a whole new network for iPads

The only one of these that actually makes sense is the complaint about a device (AppleTV) that is, in fact, not an iPad.

Anyway, let's get into it.

Is there a higher ed institution in the United States that has not fallen into a swoon over iPads? Some colleges hand them out by the thousands to their entire student body. Others stockpile hundreds for use by faculty, staff, and administrators, or to be checked out of the library by students. On many campuses, iPads have taken over the hearts and minds of everyone.

Let's start by using words like "swoon", "stockpile" and "hearts and minds" to get it clear from the start that all this enthusiasm for iPad is just a mass delusion. Got it?

Everyone, that is, except the IT department.

Given our decades of experience with computers that the IT department love and staff and students hate, I think this can only be considered a good sign.

These sexy tablets might be the apple of faculty and students' eyes, but for IT directors and their staffs, working with iPads in an enterprise network environment is not the stuff of a love affair.

"Sexy". As we know, Real Serious Business can only be done on thick, black computers that people don't like.

To state the problem simply: iPads are designed for consumer use, and as such, they're not set up for large-scale implementations.

I hope someone told LAUSD, who just voted to roll out a $50m, 47-school iPad program. Or McAllen School District, who already have 25,000 units in the field.

They're not even set up for two users to share the same device, much less for sharing over a network.

It's 2013 and the fact that iOS is not a multi-user operating system is still coming as a shock to some people? Also, it turns out the iPad is not a mainframe computer.

For schools making a major investment in iPads on campus, the solution is a combination of new policies and investment in third-party tools for managing the devices.

So there is a solution!

For many other institutions, though, the devices are acquired as needed, or in small batches for specific purposes. In such cases, schools don't necessarily anticipate the additional tools and administration the iOS devices can require--until IT starts bumping up against the limitations of a device that's not easily managed under the school's existing network and resource management infrastructure.

So organisations that don't bother to try and understand what they're doing tend to have a hard time?

The differences between iPad device administration and that of desktop machines or laptops are apparent at all stages of their use, beginning the moment the machines arrive on campus.

You don't even get a minute's reprieve from the awful otherness!

Take, for example, the case of Seton Hill University, a school that has distinguished itself as a forerunner in campus iPad implementations, including being named a second time as an Apple Distinguished Program. In the spring of 2010, the Greensburg, PA, school ordered 1,850 iPads in anticipation of providing them to students for the following fall term. What IT faced was a giant pallet of the devices, individually wrapped or in boxes of 10.

iPads come in boxes! Unlike the Windows PCs that come on tear-off rolls and the Android tablets that come in sheets you can cut to size!

Phil Komarny, Seton Hill's vice president for information technology and CIO, says that his staff had to take each iPad out of the box, update the operating system to the most recent version, image tag it, and put it back in the box to be ready for deployment. "There was nothing else we could do, because this device that they built is completely consumer," Komarny shrugs.

To be serious for a moment, there is something else you could do: get your reseller to do this for you. I'm only leasing 120 iPads and I've had resellers falling over themselves to help us do these chores.

If I was buying 1,850, I'd think this would be the very least a reseller could do for me.

Thomas Hoover, associate vice chancellor and CIO at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC), had a similar experience with iPads in a previous role at Pepperdine University (CA), where the IT group handed out several hundred of the devices to students, who turned them back in at the end of the year. "We'd have to manually go through and redo all the iPads," Hoover explains. "It's not like a computer device that you can configure automatically."

So once a year you had to touch every iPad once? Poor dears.

Two years after the first Seton Hill deployment, Apple brought out Apple Configurator, a free download from the Mac App Store that can be used to configure 30 devices at once. But for many campus CIOs, that's too little too late. Those with big iPad implementations tend to rely on mobile-device management (MDM) applications like MobileIron that enable enterprise-level configuration, security, and app management.

And people with big Windows implementations certainly don't have to buy any additional software or services to manage those machines, am I right?

With the iPad, app management is a whole new ballgame for IT departments familiar with licensing and managing applications in bulk for desktop or laptop machines. Rather than selecting from software options hosted on the school's network, faculty and administrators download apps from the App Store, choosing from hundreds of thousands of options. Many schools simply haven't set up a good strategy for purchasing and tracking this new approach to apps. And in lieu of a policy, faculty often download an app using their personal Apple account, and then get the university to reimburse them. (Students are generally not reimbursed for their app downloads, which are considered a "books" expense.)

If you fail to plan, etc.

More than one CIO laments that the ad hoc nature of app downloads can lead to the school purchasing the same app repeatedly, especially if it's a popular one like Numbers. Hoover describes the problem like this: "You reimburse professor A for an app, and then they leave. IT wipes out the iPad because you don't want any sensitive information from the previous person, then yeah, you're going to have to buy that app again for professor B."

Layered model deployment. It exists for a reason.

Some schools have developed workarounds to avoid repeatedly purchasing the same apps. John Haverty, assistant director of user services at Washburn University (KS), says he started to recommend that departments create a generic account for their faculty members to use. "That way, if someone does leave, that software's not going to stay with them--it's going to move on to the next person," he points out.

Again, look at the layered model but you'd probably be cheaper just eating the cost of - what - $30-50 of apps when someone leaves. After all, how often do you turn over staff? The cost of processing their employment paperwork will probably outweigh the cost of the apps they need.

Haverty raises another app-related issue for tax-exempt universities, which is the time-consuming process for getting tax reimbursements on app purchases. "We had to go ahead and make the purchase, then contact someone at Apple to provide the tax ID to get the tax reimbursed." Haverty says that often departments don't bother.

Given that tax systems haven't really caught up with the internet yet, this is hardly a surprise.

Apple has a Volume Purchasing Program for education, released in 2011, which enables educational institutions to buy apps and books in volume at discounts and tax-free. And mobile-device management providers enable schools to manage their Apple volume licensing as part of the broader MDM. Indeed, MDM solutions solve just about all the major challenges presented by Apple devices, including network access, enterprise configuration, and device and app management, as well as security requirements like the ability to remote wipe a lost or stolen device.

OH WAIT - so all this complaining was actually for nothing because solutions to these problems already exist?

Apple, in fact, recommends that enterprises use them. But for schools like Washburn that have acquired devices like iPads and apps in a more informal manner, MDMs represent a time and resource sink that they haven't yet committed to.

If you fail to plan, etc.

But even if your school works with an MDM, there's still the problem of Apple TV working within the campus enterprise. Apple's media receiver is the ideal device for mirroring iPads onto a large screen because the two devices can connect wirelessly. Even better, Apple TV is configured to receive iPad input, so content looks like it should without tweaking.

Yup, Apple TV is great but calling it "the ideal device" and pretending it is essential for an iPad deployment is a great set-up for slamming it in the next paragraph.

Apple does provide a VGA adapter that can connect iPads to televisions and monitors, but, depending on the version of your iPad, you still often have to fiddle to get it to display apps.

The VGA adapter works great - especially with the Lightning port instead of the 30-pin - and I don't know what the "fiddle to get it to display apps" thing is about. I think that's just a lie.

So Apple TV seems like a natural choice for projecting iPad content. And faculty like Apple TV for features like the ability to stream Netflix. But as UTC's Hoover says, "making Apple TV work on the campus network is an abomination on a grand scale."

An abomination on a grand scale, eh?

Hoover may be a bit hyperbolic but he's captured the zeitgeist of IT's exasperation with Apple TV, which is the subject of a July 2012 petition posted on change.org by members of the Educause Wireless Local Area Networking Constituent Group. The petition notes that while Apple has created advertising that promotes the use of Apple TV in college conference rooms, auditoriums, and laboratories, "Apple TV, AirPlay, and Bonjour technologies make it very difficult to support these scenarios on our standards-based enterprise networks."

There's no doubt Apple TV and Bonjour can be finicky at large scale - this definitely needs some work - but I guess my question is what's so wrong with using the VGA adapter if AppleTV is simply impossible.

Issues with AppleTV are tangential to whether or not you should deploy iPad and are absolutely bogus as a justification for banning iPad from your school.

To set up Apple TV, says Jeff Kell, a member of UTC's network services, "you have to enable wireless multicast/broadcast traffic. Such traffic is sent out over every access point on campus, tying up airtime." This means that in an "enterprise setting, every access point will get a copy of every device's advertisements or discoveries in the entire enterprise." Not only is this a huge waste of airtime and bandwidth, Kell says, but it is "a disaster incident waiting to happen, such as some dorm kid streaming porn onto a classroom projector."

I might be old fashioned but I think of "disaster incidents" as being a bit more serious than this. Regardless, anyone who has actually deployed an AppleTV will know that you can turn on an on-screen code that any user must enter on their device to gain access to the Apple TV. For exactly this reason.

Also: don't these massive enterprises have VLANs?

In a blog post, Matthew Libera, performing arts technology consultant at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, described the steps he took to use Apple TV in his classroom, which included creating his own network and sacrificing access to the internet on his iPad. While it was doable, Libera wrote, "there is no way in heck that I'll be able to convince any of my faculty here that this is a worthwhile undertaking."

Correct. If you have to do this, just get a VGA adapter and get on with your job. This is still nothing to do with iPad per se.

Indeed, many schools just forbid the use of Apple TV on campus. Or they turn to companies like Aruba Networks, which offers a solution for managing Apple TV and other Bonjour protocol-reliant devices in a university enterprise network. But again, this takes an investment in a third-party toolset that's generally attractive only for institutions that are all-in when it comes to iOS devices.

Banning Apple TV isn't actually that unreasonable in its current form. Still nothing to do with iPad.

All-in schools like Seton Hill say that that its iPad program would have been impossible without a major investment in a state-of-the-art network, which included replacing wiring for full campus coverage and upgrading both the wired and wireless networks. The latter, which provides campuswide 802.11n technology, was essential to support the demands of an iPad-oriented university population.

Dunno. I'd say campus-wide WiFi is essential to support the demands of any population of people born after about 1955, regardless of the computer they're using.

With the help of Enterasys network solutions, Seton Hill also revised its approach to managing the network. Now, the school handles network traffic on three virtual LANs: one for iOS devices, one for Mac OS X traffic, and a third for Windows and guest traffic. This approach streamlines network management, but also enables IT to manage network traffic at a more granular level.

OH WAIT - so there actually is a solution to these problems? I'm starting to notice a pattern in this article.

Lynn University (FL) is another iPad-committed campus that will roll out an iPad mini program to all freshman and transfer students this fall. It was able to create a robust campus network as a windfall from hosting one of the presidential debates last October. While the school had to pick up the tab for the new network, it got good deals on some of the technology from participating companies.

Note the subtle - and untrue - inference that you have to buy a new network to support an iPad program.

According to Lynn's CIO, Chris Boniforti, the school had to provide a completely new network environment for up to 6,000 media personnel attending the debate, and it had to be totally isolated from the university's network. Lynn essentially created a whole new network, roughly the size of its existing network, with the understanding that the school would bring it in to replace its aging network once the debate was over. The school estimates that process would otherwise have taken several years and pushed back its iPad mini initiative.

So Lynn got a new network faster because they hosted a presidential debate. Not clear how this is related to iPads.

For schools like Lynn and Seton Hill that have invested heavily in what Boniforti calls the Apple ecosystem, there seem to be fewer hiccups in using enterprisewide iPads. But IT directors who want to incorporate iOS products into their campus ecosystem without making such full-scale investments say they would like a little more support from Apple.

Let's be clear: what the author means here by investing heavily in the "Apple ecosystem" is actually "taking the time to understand how these devices work".

As one Educause wireless LAN constituent mused on the group's listserv: "This is where I daydream about the likes of several Apple engineers reading this list, thinking 'Gee, maybe we should consider how to make our toys work in the actual enterprise.'"

Aaaaannd there's the "toys" canard. It's amazing to me that the FAA approved American Airlines pilots to fly with toys in the cockpit.

So this article boils down to four actual complaints:

  • iPads come in boxes
  • You don't buy apps like you bought them from Microsoft
  • Apple TV is tricky to manage at scale
  • You need to buy a whole new network for your iPad program

The first complaint is just utterly bizarre. The second is true but, as the author actually points out, there are multiple existing solutions. The third complaint is the one that's actually true. Unfortunately, it's just nothing to do with iPad. The last is just false.

The entire article follows the pattern of building up small issues (and non-issues) to be insurmountable obstacles, then quietly admitting that a solution actually exists.

Using articles like this one to justify iPad bans is pathetic and embarrassing.

]]>Teaching Programming with iOS and Amazon EC2http://speirs.org/blog/2013/4/4/teaching-programming-with-ios-and-amazon-ec2.htmlFraser Speirs2013-04-04T07:46:43Z2013-04-04T07:46:43ZI just shut down the Amazon EC2 instance we've been using all school year, so I thought it was worth reflecting on. Last August, I wrote about my new approach to teaching Ruby programming on our iPads.

How did it work? In a word: perfectly.

The Server Side

Back in August, I set up an Amazon EC2 instance. I used the standard Amazon Linux AMI, and launched it in a Micro instance. For neatness, I allocated an Elastic IP Address to the instance and created a sensible DNS name for it.

The next step was to set up user accounts for each pupil. I did this manually because I could, but it's easily automatable if you needed to. Our iOS SSH client, Prompt, supports using SSH keypairs for authentication but distributing the private keys is a little fiddly so I reconfigured SSH on the server to allow password authentication.

Responsiveness of the remote server wasn't an issue at all. We used the EU West (Ireland) region for our Amazon EC2 instance so it wasn't far away from us and the interactive response was just fine. I'm not sure it would have been ideal to actually edit code in, but it was perfectly fine for running programs.

We ran into no problems with with the EC2 server at all. I set it up, it ran for over 5,000 hours of operation without a hitch and I turned it off today. All-in, it cost me £65 to run this server for the past academic year. I didn't do anything to limit the time the server ran - it was on 24x7 for the whole year. If I had automated shutting it down at, say, 10pm and relaunching it at 9am, I could have cut the cost to about £35 for the year but it's almost not worth my time to bother.

The Client Side

In my last piece, I was debating the exact combination of software to use. In the end, we settled on using Prompt for our SSH client and Textastic to edit the code.

Textastic has a really nice feature whereby, if a file was initially downloaded from a remote server, Textastic can send the file back where it came from with one tap. This really helped the overall workflow.

The idea of switching between two apps to edit and run code didn't seem to have much impact on pupils. With the multitasking gestures in use, the switch was easy enough. The biggest complaint was that, on our iPad 1s, resuming the switched-to app was slower than we would have liked. This problem will go away after our refresh.

Occasionally, Prompt wouldn't maintain the connection to the server while the pupils were editing code in Textastic. I haven't yet figured out if that's just a bug or if there's some server-side timeout happening. It wasn't a frequent enough occurrence to warrant a lot of debugging.

The Hardware

This class was the first time we had deployed Bluetooth keyboards for use with the iPad. When you're programming, you're always reaching for those weird symbols in the second and third keyboards on the iPad. Textastic does a good job of trying to help you by creating a row of five-way buttons across the top of the standard keyboard that allow quick access to a large number of symbols. The downside to this is that you lose even more screen space for seeing your code.

For these classes, I bought a number of these Bluetooth keyboards. They cost £9.16 on Amazon and they held up perfectly well for the year. They're not quite as delightful to type on as an Apple Bluetooth keyboard but they do the job just fine and none of them broke.

The Workflow

Once students complete an assignment, they have to turn in a report with some text, their source code and evidence of systematic testing of their code. We went through a few iterations of the exact workflow for this but, in the end, we settled on copying and pasting the code from Textastic and the testing runs from Prompt into Pages and presenting them in a monospaced font along with the rest of the report. The only downside to this workflow is that you lose the syntax colouring from Textastic.

This document was then emailed to me as a PDF where I could mark it digitally using PDF Expert on my iPad and return it to the students via email and archive my copy.

The Future

I'll definitely continue doing this. Given the success of this project, it's almost inconceivable that we could justify provisioning a whole computer lab for just one subject.

On a wider note, I think this milestone is emblematic of the increasing maturity of iOS. In 2010, computer programming was one of the cardinal subjects that iPad sceptics insisted it would "never" be possible to teach using an iPad. Well, guess what? Add another item to the pile of things that people said would "never" be possible in computing.

Never's a long time.

]]>Canon WU10 WiFi Scanner Adapter Reviewhttp://speirs.org/blog/2013/3/11/canon-wu10-wifi-scanner-adapter-review.htmlFraser Speirs2013-03-11T11:24:42Z2013-03-11T11:24:42ZI've been using a Canon P-150 document scanner for a couple of years now to go paperless. I've written about the process before and it's working very well for me.

In January this year, Canon introduced the WU10 WiFi adapter for the P-series scanners, along with an iOS app called Canon Capture On Touch Mobile. I couldn't find any reviews on the web, so I decided to take the plunge and buy one. Here's my take.

What It Is

The WU10 is a wifi bridge to control the Canon P-series desktop scanners. I have the P-150, now discontinued, and the WU10 also works with the current P-215 and P-208 Mobile scanners.

The WU10 is a plastic box with a USB socket and a power plug. You connect it to power and plug the scanner into the box over USB. The WU10 also contains a rechargeable battery which is charged by the mains cord but which can also power the unit itself and the scanner for mobile operation.

WiFi Setup

The WU10 has two modes of wifi operation: it can connect to your existing wifi network, or it can become its own hotspot for ad-hoc operation. The wifi mode is selected by a switch on the side of the box and you have to restart the unit before it will change modes.

To set the device up, you start it in ad-hoc mode and connect to its SSID. From there, you can connect to a web-based configuration portal on the device via its IP address and enter the SSID and password for your existing WiFi network. Switch modes, restart the device and it's on your network and ready to scan. The configuration portal supports five different WiFi network setups so you can set it up for home and work. In the portal, you can also configure WiFi settings for the device's own hotspot, including 2.4GHz channels, 20/40MHz channels and change the SSID and key that it uses.

Mac Scanning

Once you've set up the device on your network, you can immediately scan from the iOS apps - more on that later. The Mac software "CaptureOnTouch" that came with the scanner is not included or updated with the WU10. Instead, you get an additional tool called "Scanner Wireless Connection Utility" which, as far as I can tell, tricks CaptureOnTouch into thinking the scanner has been connected over USB.

To scan though the WU10 from the Mac you have to first open the Wireless Connection Utility and 'connect' the scanner over the network. At this point, CaptureOnTouch wakes up just as it would if the scanner were connected directly. It's a small inconvenience but not really any more annoying than fishing around for the USB cable at the back of your desk.

iOS Scanning

One of the main reasons for getting the WU10 is that it enables scanning directly from iOS. Canon have an app named "CaptureOnTouch Mobile" that's universal for iPhones and iPads. Although the visual design of the app is not particularly to my taste, it works really well and does exactly what you'd hope it does: you can pick a few settings, scan a document and you open it in another app. What more do you want?

CaptureOnTouch Mobile doesn't have all the settings of the Mac version, but it has more than enough to be useful. You can:

  • Choose the scanner, in case you have multiple WU10s on your network.
  • Choose colour or grayscale scanning.
  • Choose between Letter, A4 and auto-detect paper size.
  • Choose 150dpi or 300dpi resolution
  • Choose simplex, duplex or "skip blank page" scanning - the latter meaning "capture both sides and throw any blank sides away"

…and then there's a big "Scan" button, which makes it all happen.

As the document scans, you get a preview on the iPad screen and you can swipe through the pages. You also have the option of deleting individual pages from the preview if you get a mis-scan.

Once the scan is complete, you have the option of sending the document as JPEG to the Camera Roll or as PDF to another app via "Open In…". Both formats can also be emailed.

And that's really all there is to say about the Canon WU10. I'm really quite delighted with it. The app does everything it needs to do and, crucially, doesn't try to do anything more. It just scans and hands off a PDF to whatever app works for you. For me, naturally, it's usually Evernote but you can go to any app that handles PDF, such as iBooks, Explain Everything, Dropbox or a dedicated PDF app like PDF Expert.

More broadly, I find the WU10 interesting as it represents yet another step along the road of iOS doing the things that people said iOS would "never" do. You can't scan without a USB socket on board, right? Wrong.

]]>Beyond Consumption vs Creationhttp://speirs.org/blog/2013/3/4/beyond-consumption-vs-creation.htmlFraser Speirs2013-03-04T11:14:57Z2013-03-04T11:14:57ZWhen the iPad first launched, many people reached for a quick analysis that it was a device "only for content consumption". Despite time and experience having proven those people quite obviously wrong, the debate seems to persist as to what the iPad is, precisely, for.

My own opinion is that the iPad is for about 80% of all tasks you can conceivably do on a computer. I have never thought of the iPad as a distinct entity requiring a total first-principles relearning of what it means to use a computation device.

As I've written before, the question what you want to do with your computer has never had more impact on exactly the device you should buy. Therefore, it's still relevant and worthwhile to ask the question of the iPad: what are you capable of, and what are you best at? Further, as the iOS ecosystem has developed, another question: if I add these accessories to you, what can you do now?

Still, I feel that the consumption/creation split is far too simplistic a curve to grade these devices on. It recognises almost nothing about the user's task beyond whether it's an input task or an output task. There's far more subtlety that we can reach for.

I'd like to propose a more useful pair of axes on which we can place these devices - smartphones, tablets and traditional PCs - than simply consumption/creation. I've been thinking about this for some time and I think it has some usefulness.

Task Complexity vs Task Duration

I'd like to propose that we can look at the 'sweet spot' for each type of device along two axes: task complexity and task duration. Task duration is the more obvious of the two: how long of a continuous period will you be using your device for the task.

Task complexity requires a little more unpacking. When I talk of "complexity", I'm looking at a combination of factors that make a task complex:

  • The number of steps to completion
  • The extent to which you're combining data from multiple sources
  • The amount of data that is being manipulated
  • The linearity or otherwise of those steps - the less linear, the more complex the task

There may be other types of complex task that I haven't thought about. The exact specifics don't matter too much but these give you the general idea.

Given that, here's a chart of how I think about the 'sweet spot' for each type of device.

So what does this chart really say?

I place smartphones near the origin. They're good for simple tasks done for a middling duration or tasks of moderate complexity for a short period. For example gaming, which is a fairly non-complex task, can be quite acceptable on a smartphone for a reasonable amount of time. On the other hand, editing a spreadsheet on an iPhone can be done but it's not something you'd want to do for a whole day of working. Many of the most effective phone apps that take you through a series of steps do so in a very linear and directed fashion.

The iPad section of the chart has a couple of notable features: the dog-leg area at the top-left and the area at the bottom-right of the chart. Let's dig into those.

Firstly, consider tasks of maximum complexity done over any duration: the iPad doesn't reach into that area of the graph at all. That's simply because there are some tasks of sufficient complexity that the iPad cannot currently be applied to them. The reasons are varied but fall into one of three areas:

  • The hardware is not powerful enough yet. Examples here would include managing an entire high-resolution photographic library in a hypothetical "Aperture for iOS". The iPad simply doesn't have enough storage to make this possible, although the new 128GB iPad may well take a bite into some of these data-intensive tasks.
  • The software has not been written yet. An example might be doing some CAD/CAM design. Perhaps iOS doesn't offer all the APIs required for some apps yet. We can hope that iOS 7 will start to eat into some of these tasks.
  • App Store policy doesn't allow it. The classic example here is all the programming tools that we might wish to have on iOS which can't be brought wholly to iOS until policy changes.

Similarly, there are tasks of low-to-medium complexity that can be adequately performed on an iPad for long periods of time. Examples might include annotating PDF documents with some of the excellent PDF apps on iOS, or managing photos in iPhoto, composing music in GarageBand, reading iBooks and so on.

In the middle of the chart lies a broad area of tasks which are moderately complex, done for moderate amounts of time. This is where iPad excels and why it is such an excellent computer for schools. I've never argued that any current or past iOS device can "do everything" - patently, it cannot - but I do argue that it can handle 95-100% of everything a computer is typically called on to do in a school setting. The majority of our classes now use iOS exclusively, despite easy access to Mac laptops being available.

Finally, there remain several tasks for which computers are used which tablets remain unsuitable for the reasons listed above. Simply think of the apps that are missing from iPads: Final Cut Pro X, Aperture, Logic Pro, iBooks Author, Adobe Photoshop. These tasks - for now - remain the preserve of the traditional "desktop-class" PC (in which category I include laptops).

What would it take to push iPad into some of those areas? Well, the simple addition of a hardware keyboard can extend the duration that many people can use their iPad for.

Taking another step into the PC's territory may also call for something I've never really discussed before: a larger iPad. It's possible that a 13" or 15" iPad with 128GB of storage might open up entirely new categories of application to be built for iOS.

You can see that, with the iPad mini pushing down towards smartphone territory and the 128GB iPad enabling a certain number of data-intensive use cases, the reach of the iPad is growing. I hope that, in time to come, future versions of iOS will enable software supporting tasks of greater complexity to be built.

I think that task complexity vs duration is a much more useful framework in which to place smartphones, iPad and traditional PCs. There may be other areas of comparison - for example the physical context of use - but I strongly believe that we have to move beyond simplistic arguments about consumption and creation.

]]>The Refresh: The Devicehttp://speirs.org/blog/2013/1/22/the-refresh-the-device.htmlFraser Speirs2013-01-22T14:02:17Z2013-01-22T14:02:17ZIn the last piece, I explained my thinking on the platform we're choosing for our refresh. We're sticking with iOS, not just because we're already on iOS but because I don't see compelling reasons to switch to any other platform.

A few people got in touch to ask why I hadn't considered Chromebooks in my analysis. There are a few reasons. I know there are several "Chromebooks" available but the one most people are talking about is the Samsung Series 3. From a hardware point of view, I was surprised that the Series 3 only claims 6.3 hours of battery life. That's pretty poor for an ARM-based device. Heck, I can get better than that from my Core i7-based MacBook Air. Long battery life is not something to be sniffed at - it's genuinely transformational in the classroom.

I also think the laptop form factor is limiting compared to a tablet. I don't disagree that a laptop can be a very strong form factor for document production but the laptop still generally requires a surface to work on, is difficult to use standing and lacks functionality as an integrated media capture device (i.e. shoot video on the device then edit it).

I'm also not totally convinced about ChromeOS. We use Google Apps, so actually adopting Chromebooks wouldn't be particularly hard for us. I just struggle to conceive how we would do the range of things we want to do with computers using only web apps. If your main uses are office-type applications, the web and email, I'm sure the Chromebook does a pretty good job. Right now, I think I'd need to see the platform mature significantly and reach into areas like video editing, audio editing, rich art tools and so on.

So, with that out of the way, let's talk iPads. The one question I got after the last piece that beat out the Chromebook question was why I had not written about iPad vs iPad mini. The reason I didn't include that discussion in the last piece is actually interesting in itself: last time, I was writing about platforms. The iPad and the iPad mini are not two distinct platforms to be considered separately. They are two embodiments of one platform and should not be considered separately from one another.

Of course, they are different devices and they are not direct substitutes for each other. Each does a different job, and that's what I want to consider now.

We have learned over the past couple of years that, in school, an iPad can handle everything we've thrown at it. As a result, our school now looks significantly different to most other schools that have "a few iPads" scattered around. We don't have a computer suite any more. We don't have fleets of desktops or laptops to fall back on if the iPad can't handle the task - mainly because it's impossible to justify the cost of fixed infrastructure for such rare occasions.

So, where does the iPad mini fit in? I look at this from the point of view of the job we are hiring these devices to do. We are buying them to be a pupil's only computer for three years. Where does that lead us?

For some time now, I have used the following framework to think about 7"-class tablets:

A 7" tablet makes a great adjunct to a computer; a 10" tablet can replace it.

I first wrote that about the Google Nexus 7 and, having used an iPad mini exclusively since release day, I'm fairly happy to say the same applies to the iPad mini. My experience has been that I use the mini as much as I ever used my 3rd-generation iPad - and I take it with me to more places - but I've also noticed that my laptop has become more important to me.

Two years ago, the iPad mini wasn't practical. Today it is. Why? The cloud got good. Let me explain: in 2010, the options for fluidly moving between a laptop and an iPad on one task were pretty limited. In fact, it was initially near-impossible. Today, this is much, much easier. iCloud is working well and applications like Evernote are increasingly powerful on iOS. Two years ago, iCloud didn't exist and complex applications like Evernote and the iWork suite were not close to parity with their desktop counterparts.

If I had the budget to provide two computers to each pupil, those two devices would unquestionably be a MacBook Air and an iPad mini. Unfortunately I don't, and there's no way I could persuade people to give up their iPads, so we're going with the device we know can handle everything: the full-size iPad.

Another consideration is the internals of the iPad mini. Last year, the A5 architecture looked like it was history. It had a good run in the iPad 2, which is still on sale, but clearly the future looked A6-based. The iPad mini, being essentially an iPad 2 in a smaller case, changes that. The A5 architecture is going to be a major part of the iOS landscape for the foreseeable future.

That said, it wasn't the A6 processor or the 1GB RAM specification or even the retina display that led me to decide on the 4th-generation iPad. Basically, it's about buying the newest and most capable technology we can get. We're signing a three year lease on these devices and, given how fast the mobile world is moving, I feel we need to at least start our leases on the leading edge of technology. To start with older specifications and hardware - even if that device is brand new - is something I'm wary of. We have no roadmap for how things are going to develop so I intend to equip our kids with the best kit we can put our hands on today.

]]>Refresh: The Platformhttp://speirs.org/blog/2013/1/2/refresh-the-platform.htmlFraser Speirs2013-01-02T08:01:58Z2013-01-02T08:01:58ZRecently, I started looking into our upcoming device refresh. We are already two and a half years into the iPad project at Cedars and the first three years will be over before we know it. It's crazy to think how quickly the time has gone.

Anyway, the first question I had to ask myself was: are we sticking with iPad?

The question that naturally arises from that is: what else could we use? Since 2010, we've seen a lot of "iPad killers" announced by the media, but precious few have actually made a serious dent in the iPad's position as the leading post-PC device. In 2010, choosing the iPad was a radical and bold step. In 2013, it seems like the obvious thing to do.

But is it? Where is the competition? What's changed since 2010?

Well, we're now in a world where there are a few more players than there were before. I've looked at all of them in some detail - some more than others, I admit, since my research budget comes out of my own pocket - but we're essentially looking at the following:

  • iPad or iPad mini
  • Amazon Kindle Fire
  • Microsoft Surface (or some crappier hardware running the same OS)
  • Google Nexus 7 (or some crappier hardware running a vendor-contaminated version of the OS)

Let's think about each of these competitors in turn:

Amazon Kindle Fire

The Kindle fire is getting better with each iteration. I don't particularly like the hardware but, as I keep writing, I'm not that interested in hardware. I'm interested in software. Amazon's fork of Android appears to be designed to do two things well: connect you to the Amazon content you've bought and show you more Amazon content to buy.

This is hardly a surprise. It's a conspiracy but quite an open one: Amazon wants to make money when you use the device, not when you buy it. The Kindle Fire is sold at below cost and Amazon makes it all back and more when you buy stuff from Amazon. As a consequence, the design of the system will necessarily be biased towards leading you down this path of seeing and buying things from Amazon. That's a product that a lot of people want - and that's fine - I'm just not sure it's the kind of thing I want to put in front of schoolchildren.

As educational technologists, we can't be naive about the business models behind these devices. The Kindle Fire is a vending machine for Amazon content.

Microsoft Surface

In recent Q&A sessions, I've been asked about the Surface far more than Android tablets. I guess this is because most schools are "Microsoft schools" - not that prior experience with Windows 7 will necessarily help you much when confronted with a Windows 8 tablet. There seems to be an idea abroad that if you get a Surface all your existing software will work with it. Almost nobody seems to have grasped the impact of the distinction between Windows RT and Windows 8.

My line on Windows 8/RT and Surface has been this: we know from a decade of trying that nobody wants the traditional Windows desktop on a tablet. Swivel-screen laptops have sucked for years and I'm willing to bet this trend continues. The only interesting thing about Windows 8 is the Metro UI and the only interesting thing about the Metro UI is whether developers will redesign their software for it. Given that Microsoft themselves haven't managed to properly redesign Office or Explorer for Metro yet, I'm not holding my breath.

Windows 8/RT may be a smash hit but the early indications are not promising. Microsoft Surface may be a smash hit but the early indications are not promising. I'm open minded about Windows 8 but I'm going to need to see some compelling evidence that Windows 8/RT is gaining serious traction in the marketplace. Microsoft is way behind on tablets and I don't have any need to root for the underdog.

Google Nexus 7

I've written before about the Nexus 7 specifically and I don't intend to rehash that discussion here except to note three major failings in the hardware for school use: the 16:10 aspect ratio of the screen; the lack of a rear camera on the device and the Nexus 7's inability to be connected to a projector. I just don't think I could sell my teachers on the idea that they'll go another three years without a camera or the ability to project devices on-screen.

There's also the software problem. Unless it's gotten dramatically better in the two months since I gave my Nexus 7 away, there simply does not exist the same high-quality productivity and creativity tools for Android tablets as exist for iOS. As before, I'm not saying they can never be made; I'm just saying they still don't exist. Where good Android tablet apps do exist they are, broadly speaking, near pixel-perfect clones of the iOS versions - so what's the advantage?

I'm also seriously concerned about the Android malware problem. There seems to be growing evidence that Android is the main target for mobile malware. This is hardly surprising, given the ability to side-load apps onto the device from anywhere on the web. I can't find any way on Android to lock out the ability to side-load, so we have to assume that this is something that some users will do. We know from decades of experience with Windows that such a model is problematic. I'm not prepared to deploy a platform where I have to routinely run anti-virus.

Whatever is working for Android in handsets simply isn't translating into traction for Android tablets. I have my theories but that's another post for another time. I can't say I have any great excitement about any Android device that isn't "pure Google". The track record on timely updates to non-Google Android devices doesn't seem to have gotten much better. Given the threat-rich environment that Android devices now face, being unable to get updates and security patches in a timely manner is unacceptable.

Most people's interest in Android in education is about price. Yes, the Nexus 7 is cheaper than an iPad but my retort is that it's a lesser device with fewer hardware features leading to greatly reduced usefulness in the classroom. Again, I come back to my core belief about tablet computers: the hardware is irrelevant except insofar as it allows you to have a great experience of software. You don't buy hardware in isolation; you buy it to run software.

The next gambit is usually that you can get £50 Android tablets for school. To people seriously arguing this I ask you: what computer are you using? I'm only interested in hearing about £50 Android tablets from people who are themselves using £50 Android tablets on a regular basis - which is, of course, 0% of the people arguing this. This is because £50 Android tablets suck.

iPad

And so to the iPad. It's worked well for us, so why change? Nothing's perfect and I promise you that nobody has a more comprehensive list of things that are annoying about iOS than I do. Yet, despite those niggles, I still believe the iPad is the first education computer worth criticising.

The hardware itself has held up well. Our failure rate has been in the low single-digit percentages over three years. There have been zero unfixable problems. Over three years, I have not once had to completely 'reformat' a device. The only time I get an iPad back in my hands is when it's physically broken. The track record on updates has been excellent; we have now had three major releases of iOS on the same hardware for free. The software ecosystem has grown into an incredibly rich and powerful set of tools. We routinely do things today that I was told would never be possible on iPad. We got a free cloud-based backup system that genuinely works. We got a powerful and free course management tool in iTunes U. iBooks Author is another powerful and free tool. iOS deployment techniques have advanced immeasurably since 2010.

So what's Apple's deal? There's no free lunch, right? Well, it's again simple and not a secret: Apple wants you to buy a new device on a regular basis. That's how Apple makes their money. Apple's cut of the App Store revenues don't even move the needle on their finances. Apple doesn't want to sell you apps or content; they'd much rather give all that away for free to make the hardware a more attractive proposition. Witness the number of free apps on the App Store. Commoditising your complements is a great strategy and it's working very well for Apple - although perhaps not so well for the app developers. Apple is a hardware company that makes great software.

Apple wants to sell you a computer. Amazon wants to sell you stuff while you use the computer. Google wants to sell your activity on the computer to advertisers. At the end of the day, it's all about what you can live with. We are now three years along the iOS road. It was the right decision in 2010 and I think it's going to be the right call in 2013 too.

]]>What's On My iPad Minihttp://speirs.org/blog/2012/12/3/whats-on-my-ipad-mini.htmlFraser Speirs2012-12-03T22:49:22Z2012-12-03T22:49:22ZMy friend Marcus Zarra recently asked me if I would write an update on how I'm using my iPad for productivity. How has my hardware/software workflow evolved over time? I think the last time I wrote about this was pre-iCloud so I thought an update was well overdue. Also, as I recently moved to an iPad mini for most of my daily iPad use, it's been an interesting and useful chance to think through the use cases once more.

I guess the first thing to say is that the 'reboot' onto the iPad mini has been largely very smooth. I made what, in hindsight, was a mistake in jumping on a 16GB WiFi iPad instead of waiting for a 32GB LTE version. I guess I didn't know that I was going to like the mini so much but I haven't bought a WiFi-only iPad since my first iPad and I doubt I'll ever do so again. Cellular networking is absolutely essential to the way I work.

It's probably worth mentioning here how I get that cellular access. I have been with the UK carrier Three for a few generations of iPhone and I have been very pleased with their coverage in all the areas I need coverage (your mileage may vary). I don't have a contract. I just buy their pre-paid data SIM package and use it until it runs out, then get another. Typically, I'll buy their 3GB SIM, valid for 90 days, which costs about £20. There's also a 1GB/30 day/£10 package but I get the bigger one just to reduce the frequency of running out of data or time. We don't have prepaid SIM packages for LTE yet in the UK so I'm still slumming it on 3G.

So, what do I do with this thing?

Cloud Services

I use three main cloud services: iCloud, Evernote and Dropbox. iCloud is generally working very well for me. I sync everything that iCloud offers through that service except email. It's become my default location for all new iWork documents and I'm leaning on it pretty heavily. All my presentations live in Keynote on iCloud - including some rather fat presentations containing large videos - and it's been dependable. Interestingly, with my adoption of the iPad mini alongside my regular iPad, I noticed one big hole in the syncing landscape: iPad-only apps that don't sync. Until now, it wasn't really a requirement that an app that isn't on iPad and iPhone - or iPad and Mac - should sync. After all, who has two iPads? Well, now I do and it's pretty annoying. I'm not suggesting that this will be a common use case but it might crop up more often than before. Basically, I don't want to use an app that doesn't sync any more.

I've been on Dropbox for several years and have a large amount of data in there but it's increasingly feeling like a legacy service. I tend not to put new documents in Dropbox when I have the option of using iCloud - except when I expect to have to collaborate on them. The fundamental problem is that the Dropbox model - a folder that syncs - is perfectly happy on desktop operating systems but hopelessly hobbled on iOS. On iOS you either use their app or depend on all the apps you use supporting the Dropbox API. Many apps do, but I'm not totally happy restricting myself to only use apps that talk Dropbox.

Finally, Evernote. Evernote is for everything that's not a document and quite a few things that are. I tend to put reference PDFs into Evernote. The killer feature for Evernote on iOS is the ability to email things to your Evernote account. I do this all the time.

Work Apps

I use Evernote a lot for work. All kinds of reference material and records of work go into my Evernote account and I'll frequently use the camera on my phone or iPad to capture something and stash it in Evernote.

The second app that I critically depend on is PDF Expert by Readdle. I'm not exaggerating when I say that PDF Expert is the best PDF app I have used on any platform at any price. The only thing it can't do is create a PDF form (feature request!). I use it for presenting PDF documents to classes and I'm increasingly using it as the cornerstone of an all-digital marking workflow that goes like this: student emails me a PDF assignment; I open it in PDF Expert and mark it using the pen and text tools; I then email back a copy of the document and CC it to my Evernote account as a record. PDF Expert can also talk to numerous other cloud services including Dropbox, Google Drive and Skydrive.

I use the iWork apps at school but not in the way you think. I hardly use Pages at all, but I use Numbers to record class data and maintain certain registers. I use Keynote when I'm presenting about our iPad work but I typically don't teach in a Keynote-heavy way. I think I probably have about two actual Keynotes that I do in class. I much prefer a whiteboard and pen, with a device camera for capturing that.

We also make extensive use of iTunes U at school so I have that app as part of my toolkit. For the most part, though, I write into iTunes U and the students use the app. A weird anomaly with iTunes U is that you can't use the Course Manager component from an iOS device - despite Course Manager being web based.

Explain Everything always comes up in education circles and rightly so. It's a great whiteboard-recording app for iOS. When I was recently laid up after a knee operation, I used it extensively in conjunction with iTunes U to create short videos that my classes could watch along with the lessons.

Two other apps I use for teaching are Prompt and Textastic. These two tools are the iOS end of our programming classes, which is all done on iOS. I've written about this before.

Communications

I've recently been interested in the idea of using my iPad mini as a 'replacement phone'. This idea isn't unique to me - Stephen Hackett is going iPhoneless with an LTE iPad mini, and Greg Kroah-Hartman is curious about doing the same with a Nexus 7 (but can't because the N7 has no cellular networking option; something I complained about in my review) - but I certainly saw the possibility almost straight away.

To this end, prominent on my home screen are: Messages, FaceTime and Skype. I counted it up yesterday and, on my iPhone, I had eight separate ways to send a message to my phone that didn't involve making a carrier-based phone call or sending an SMS. Those options were: iMessage, Skype, FaceTime, Twitter, Netbot, Google+, Facebook and Mail. You could also count - at a push - Instagram and Photos via a shared photostream.

It is increasingly unclear to me that a £40/month contract is good value just to receive legacy SMS messages. Certainly, there's a portability question. However, from a technical point of view, I think I'm adequately contactable without a carrier contract. Unfortunately, I just signed a 2-year contract for an iPhone 5 so this experiment will have to live alongside my phone for now.

Reading

I enjoy reading on my iPad and I'm even grudgingly getting used to it on my iPad mini - making the fonts a size bigger than you would on a retina iPad definitely helped me. I buy all my eBooks on Kindle and use the Kindle app. This decision isn't software-driven - I vastly prefer everything about iBooks - but the range of books available in the UK iBookstore is far inferior to Amazon's selection and the price disparity between iBooks and Kindle is often shocking and bizarre. I recently bought a book for £2.99 on Kindle that was £8.99 on iBooks. That's fairly typical; books are either priced identically on both or Amazon is far cheaper.

I also use and love Flipboard. Flipboard has been my RSS reader for a couple of years now. Initially Flipboard didn't click with me but, when they announced their iPhone version, I suddenly saw how it could be a real part of my reading 'workflow' if you will. I have connected my Flipboard to Google Reader as a way to follow certain blogs but I have dramatically cut down on RSS over recent years and only subscribe to the few writers from whom I don't want to miss a single post. I read most of the big tech sites through their own Flipboard channels.

I also connect Flipboard to Twitter. I use Twitter lists as a way to gather like-minded people and read the links they post. You know how sometimes a person is a great curator of links but their actual tweets might not be all that? This is how I deal with it: put them on a list and read their links through Flipboard. This has become such an essential part of my knowledge-gathering that I'm genuinely worried about how this will work if Twitter cuts off Flipboard.

For my "read later" service, I now use Pocket over Instapaper. The main reason for this is that Pocket handles video much more elegantly and it's as broadly-supported as Instapaper in the apps through which I may find links.

It feels weird to actually bother mentioning Newsstand but, like many people, I've started to find it useful since Marco Arment's wonderful "The Magazine" shipped. I subscribed on day one and can't imagine unsubscribing any time soon. I also quite enjoy Distro from Engadget from time to time.

Media

I'm not a huge music guy and I've found iTunes Match meets my needs very well. I've never subscribed to any music services like Pandora or Rdio - it's just not worth the money. I can buy all the music I'm ever interested in for less than the cost of subscribing to any of these services. I don't subscribe to Netflix either but I do use the BBC iPlayer app.

For podcasts, I recently switched from Instacast to Downcast. This was a new change prompted by the switch to the iPad mini. The mini was so portable (and the audio so good) that I found myself wanting to listen to podcasts on the device. Up to this point, I had always used Instacast on my phone only. I owned Instacast HD but the syncing between the two has never, ever worked for me. Downcast syncs between the devices perfectly but there is literally nothing else I like better in Downcast than Instacast. With the upcoming release of Instacast 3.0, I hope I can go back.

Social Networking

Tweetbot, of course.

…but I'm also getting interested in Google+. I think there are some really great tools there and the iOS app experience is probably the best one that Google has yet shipped.

I also really enjoy Instagram and you're welcome to follow me there. With the advent of the iPad mini, I wonder if Instagram will feel some pressure to produce an iPad version? For now, I've hooked Instagram up to Flipboard and browse my friends' photos that way.

Games

I don't really play games on my iPad but the iPad mini is much more pleasant for doing so. I only have Need For Speed - Most Wanted installed, which is a simply wonderful game, and Deep Green Chess. I keep the Toca Boca apps installed for my youngest daughter, although I'm never all that happy about letting children put their filthy hands on my devices. We have a sacrificial iPad 1 in the house for that.

Miscellaneous

I have a few other utilities that I keep around:

  • iTeleport for VNC sessions onto various Macs
  • PCalc for hard sums
  • The official Gmail app, in case I need to search my email (why is this operation still so awful on mobile?)
  • Keynote Remote
  • Flight+ for tracking my flights (syncs with iPhone; yay!)
  • Delivery Status Touch for tracking packages
  • WeatherPro HD - the design is nothing much to write home about but the data is deadly accurate for the UK and it syncs favourite locations through iCloud.

So that's how I'm using my iPad these days. I think it's an interesting look at the evolution of the iOS software landscape. Compared to 2010, I'm definitely using fewer apps but those apps have grown far more powerful, capable and - crucially - dependable than they once were.

It's also instructive to note that the home screen on my iPhone increasingly looks like a quick-access version of my iPad: Phone, Photos, Camera, Messages, Flipboard, Pocket, Kindle, Downcast, WeatherPro, Maps, Mail, Newsstand, Instagram, Skype, Netbot, Google+, Safari, Evernote, Calendar, Tweetbot. The only home-screen phone app I don't have on my iPad being Instagram.

I'm continually impressed by the range, depth and quality of top-tier iOS software. Sure, there's a bunch of dreck in the store - 90% of everything is crud - but that top 10% on iOS is some of the best, most innovative and creative software being built today. It's why I choose to use iOS. It was never about the hardware alone.

]]>Thoughts on Amazon Whispercasthttp://speirs.org/blog/2012/11/25/thoughts-on-amazon-whispercast.htmlFraser Speirs2012-11-25T19:36:31Z2012-11-25T19:36:31ZRecently Amazon announced - in the US only, naturally - Whispercast. Whispercast is an online tool that Amazon is marketing as a method of deploying Kindles in your school or business. Given my long-standing wish for a way to deploy electronic books to devices in a way that isn't astronomically expensive or entirely crazy-making, I was naturally interested.

As with all examples of using consumer technology in education, the devil is in the details. The question is: what does Whispercast actually allow you to do that you couldn't do before, and how does it compare to other content deployment systems?

Whispercast seems to be two things under one brand name:

  • A basic Mobile Device Management tool for Kindles and Kindle Fires
  • A volume purchasing system for Kindle content

Whispercast is said to work with both e-Ink Kindles as far back as the 'Kindle 2' - the last white version before what's currently known as the Kindle Keyboard - and all Kindle Fire devices although some configuration settings are not available on the original Kindle Fire and Kindle Touch. The content distribution part of Whispercast also works for the free Kindle apps on iOS, Android and the rest.

Whispercast MDM

As an MDM tool, you can now do a few useful things with Kindles, and you can do them wirelessly from a central interface:

  • Enforce a passcode
  • Configure wireless and proxy settings
  • Block things: Facebook, Twitter, the Kindle browser and the Kindle Store
  • Block factory reset, device deregistration and changes to network settings.

These are essentially the bare minimum things you might want to do when managing a Kindle. I'm surprised, though, that there's no adult content filter in this post-50-Shades world. I believe the new Kindle Fires can do this, but that it's not enforceable in configuration seems like an omission.

You may wonder how you're supposed to configure network settings on the device by a push from a remote website. The answer is that Whispercast will generate a configuration file for download that you manually install on each Kindle via USB. In this respect, it's not so different from installing a Configuration Profile through Apple Configurator. My understanding is that this step is only to configure the networking and the rest is configured via Whispercast push.

Whispercast Content Delivery

This is really the meat of any new features for these devices: can we get simplified access to books, apps and the rest? Unfortunately, Whispercast seems to fall short of my hopes and dreams: essentially, Whispercast appears to be functionally equivalent to Apple's Volume Purchase Program.

In the most basic form of using Apple VPP you bulk-purchase gift codes for specific apps, distribute them to end users and those users redeem their coupons in their own iTunes accounts to get a download of the app. As we have discussed before, this means that the end user now 'owns' that content and you have no way of getting it back.

Under Amazon Whispercast you bulk-purchase books, allocate those purchases to users and the users then see these purchases available in their account. Having spoken to some Whispercast beta testers my understanding is that, once a purchase is allocated to a user, it cannot be reallocated to another user at a later date.

The only significant difference between the Apple VPP model and the Amazon Whispercast model is that Amazon automates the "hand out the codes" step of the process. Most good MDM providers that support iOS can do the same for VPP codes.

Deployment Models

So, how could we use Kindles in school? I'm not all that interested - yet - in the Kindle Fire as a general purpose computer as it seems to suffer from many of the same problems as the Nexus 7 (in a nutshell: few great apps and none that aren't already on iOS). I am, however, very interested in finding a workable eBook platform for schools that combines ease of deployment, sensible pricing structures and year-to-year flexibility in reallocating purchased resources.

Essentially, the eBook problem comes down to: you, the publisher, want me to buy everyone a brand new copy of the book. I'm happy to do that, but you want £9.99 per copy. We're more used to paying £9.99 and giving it to 10 children over the course of years. Make your eBook £1 per copy and we can talk.

On the other hand, I'll buy 30 copies at £9.99 but I need to be able to reallocate those books next year.

Is there a way to square this circle? Maybe.

Whispercast, like the iTunes Store, requires that each Kindle have a separate Amazon account associated with it. Unlike the iTunes Store, Whispercast can bulk-create these accounts for you, which is handy.

Perhaps the model is this: create 20 generic "First Grade" accounts (e.g. fg01@example.edu through fg20@example.edu) and buy 20 copies of the First Grade reading list. Have the students use that account for a year. When they move on, give the account and password to the next set of pupils coming in.

This is harder to do in the Apple world because the use of AppleID/iCloud is so pervasive across the system. With the Kindle system (at least on the e-Ink Kindles, if not the Fire), it would potentially be easier as there's less actual data being stored in the user's account. The pupil logging into the account the next year would - I presume - find the last owner's book locations, highlights and notes in there but that's hardly different to the common experience of getting someone else's used textbook.

Such a deployment model might work in primary education - where everyone is in the same class, likely reading the same class novel at the same time. It doesn't really work for secondary education unless you buy all the books for every account because the pupil using the account next year is unlikely to be taking the same mix of classes as the last pupil.

I don't know whether Apple or Amazon is going to get this right first but the company who finally cracks it stands to win a lot of business the education market.

My thanks to Steve Kinney for reviewing an early draft of this article.

]]>Two Weeks with iPad minihttp://speirs.org/blog/2012/11/19/two-weeks-with-ipad-mini.htmlFraser Speirs2012-11-19T16:54:44Z2012-11-19T16:54:44ZThe first thing to get out of the way is that the iPad mini is an iPad. Even more than calling it a real iPad, I want to describe it as a full iPad. Give or take a few benchmark points, it's as powerful as any iPad that existed until the 4th-generation 9.7" iPad. This is really important. It's important because the executive summary of what I'm about to write is this: get the one you like best.

As the tablet market has developed, I've fallen into two lines of thought about tablets:

  • Tablet hardware is uninteresting, except insofar as it allows the user to have wonderful experiences of software
  • The question of what you want to do with a computer has never mattered more

I'm not going to reiterate everything that's been in other reviews of the mini. It's thin, it's light, it's not Retina. So what? Well, I'll tell you what I think personally and then I'll tell you what I think about the mini for school situations.

The Display

Let's talk about the non-retina display. I understand the engineering reasons behind why it's not retina but I can't pretend that I like it or that I don't notice it almost every second I'm looking at text on the iPad mini. Games, videos, photos are all fine but to my Retina-ruined eyes, text simply isn't up to scratch.

Maybe most people won't care, but I care. The iPad mini is a functional eReader that will do in a pinch but I can't imagine that any serious eBook reader would choose the iPad mini over even the basic Kindle.

I do have something good to say about the display, though, and it's this: as I expected, the 4:3 aspect ratio of the iPad mini screen puts it in a different league of usability from the 16:10 tablets that I've used in the past. The only compelling reason to build a 16:10 tablet is that it makes the device really good for watching movies. The 16:10 aspect ratio isn't really good for anything else. It's weirdly tall and narrow in portrait orientation. In landscape orientation, a widescreen device doesn't have enough height to be useful once the keyboard is on screen.

By contrast, the 4:3 aspect ratio of the iPad is, in many ways, its saving grace. With this size and aspect ratio, you get a satisfyingly wide screen in portrait and a usefully tall screen in landscape. Compared to my experience using a Nexus 7 to actually get stuff done, it's night and day.

The Size and Weight

Like other tablets its size, the iPad mini doesn't disappear into a pocket unless you wear cargo pants. It's usually noticeable but it won't make you list to one side with its weight. The weight is a crucial factor in the attractiveness of the iPad mini: for anyone who spends their time standing or walking and using an iPad - as many teachers in iPad schools do - I think the ethereal lightness of the iPad mini is going to be overwhelmingly desirable.

I have not found the mini to be unusably small, even with iOS being scaled down to fit. There have been occasional apps where certain operations have been fiddly, and I found drawing precisely with a stylus was difficult because of the relative size of the stylus tip. This might be something that can be overcome with a bit of practice but I'm not there yet.

The keyboard is perfectly functional but I couldn't say I find it as fast or as comfortable to type on as the full size iPad. Over the course of the last two weeks I've been using it, I have become much faster with it but still not in the same ballpark as the larger iPad.

This leads me to one of my main concerns with the mini in 1:1 schools: if you're going to ask pupils to spend a lot of time with this device, consider carefully how much typing they're going to be asked to do.

That's not to say the mini is wrong for all schools everywhere. If your model of use extends to typing a few URLs or search terms, using books and other content, the mini may well be a fine choice. I would just suggest that you think very carefully before going 1:1 with the iPad mini. I'm not sure I would.

In School

I think the dividing line between the iPad and the iPad mini is not so much "what you want to do on the device" as much as it's "how often and for how long you want to do it". The iPad mini can do anything an iPad 2 can do and, thanks to improved cameras, WiFi and cellular, sometimes it can do it better.

In an established 1:1 school like Cedars, we're all-in on iPad. We don't have a computer lab to fall back on. The iPad has to do all the heavy lifting for us. In such a situation, I really don't see that the iPad mini is a reasonable device to give a pupil. It is, in my opinion, just that side of 'too small' to be a 5-days-a-week, 6-hours-a-day tool for pupils. It is in no way too weak a computer to be used that way. I just think that the more restricted keyboard will prove tiring and the fractionally more cramped UI will show itself as problematic over extended use.

In a school where the iPad is deployed as a shared device, the iPad mini might be a fine device to use. Such deployments typically aren't so focused on extended content creation. Yes, you'll probably make a few things on the device but because they're shared, you're not going to be doing projects that span weeks or get into more detail. If you're using the iPad mini for a few hours a week, I think it will do a great job for you.

I don't see cost as a major driving factor towards the iPad mini. At current rates of device churn, in my opinion, most schools should be leasing devices these days. The difference between an identically specified iPad mini and iPad 2 is £60 which, over three years, is a difference of £1.60 per month. To my mind, that's an irrelevant saving because the most expensive computer deployment is the one that doesn't work for you. Far, far more important to get the right device.

In the end, though, the beauty is that we now have another great option for using iOS in schools. It's still the best mobile OS, with the best ecosystem, with the best support, with the best tools. I know this because at every education meeting or conference I go to, iPad is the only tablet people are seriously using. I can't stomach a future where people with iPads decide that children should get bargain-bin Android devices.

Give it Two Weeks

I initially wasn't crazy about the iPad mini. This review has lain in my Evernote drafts folder for a couple of weeks while I gained more experience with the device. Having used it more or less continuously since launch day, I can say now that I think it is - overall - a great device.

I was initially very unhappy with the display. I still am, in large part, but I am also aware of what I'm getting in return for giving up the retina display: size and weight gains. Moore's law will bring us a day when we don't need to make the resolution/battery tradeoff we make today but I can't pretend I don't constantly notice it.

For the first week, I took the iPad mini on the road. I still carried my full-size iPad but didn't really feel the need to pull it out my bag, except to deliver a presentation. I was forcing myself to use the mini and wasn't really enjoying it. It was cute that you could get the iPad flavour of iOS in this little package but it wasn't a 'real' iPad. It may seem weird to say that a week of travel didn't sell me on the device, but a travel week is always a bit of a hiatus from 'real life' and I wasn't really putting the device through its paces.

The second week, though, was different. I was teaching all week and didn't really have time to chew over questions of should-I-use-this-iPad-or-that-iPad, I just had to get my gear and get up in front of classes hour after hour after hour. It got to Friday and I realised that I had literally not touched my 3rd-generation iPad all week.

That's when it clicked. When I realised I had - without really thinking - done all the things I need an iPad to do for a whole week without being forced back to a full-size iPad, I saw that the iPad mini is just that: an iPad. No need to over-think the distinction, no real need to develop theories about it: the iPad mini is an iPad in the same way that the 13" and 15" MacBook Pro are both Macs. They'll both do the same 95% of the job: get the one that suits you best.

The iPad mini reminds me of my first MacBook Air. When the Air first shipped it was a Mac with some serious technical compromises with a design and form factor so compelling that you would re-arrange your entire digital life to make it work. The iPad mini reminds me of that except that it only has one serious compromise: the non-retina display. In every other respect, it's a full-bore iPad. In fact, I don't even refer to it as "my iPad mini" any more; I just call it "my iPad".

So, to wrap up: despite myself, despite my initial impressions and despite my expectations, I love my iPad mini and I find it's really working well for me. I'm a much heavier iOS user than most people and it has handled everything I've thrown at it. I have no doubt that it will work perfectly for a huge number of people. I remain a bit sceptical about pupils using it all day every day in a 1:1 situation in schools. For that application, I still think a 9.7" iPad will be easier and more comfortable to use.

Still, it's great to have options.

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