Backstory
I’m hanging out in YVR, waiting for my very delayed flight back to SFO, and reflecting on the whirlwind that was Northern Voice 2010. It was such a wonderful, lively conference, and I got such a kick out of meeting people whose blogs and tweets I follow. The sessions were really quick and packed with information — which made it a challenge to take notes on my iPad, but that’s what I did.

A couple of weeks ago, Scott Leslie started to actually organize an AltMooseCamp, because MooseCamp wasn’t going to happen this year (after seeing the program for NV10, I understand why — so many great sessions — they needed both days!). I took one of the AltMooseCamp spots and said I’d talk about how to do graphic recording on an iPad. I had recently talked to Fred Lakin about visual recording on iPads, and he had tried it, so it was almost like I knew what I was talking about. At the time, I didn’t even HAVE an iPad, but I had one on order, and a lot of faith that it would all work out.

It did. My iPad arrived about a week before NV, giving me enough time to play with it a bit. I also ordered a stylus (this one) and I played with that too. I didn’t actually do any visual recording, but I bought a sketching app and played around with it to learn the controls. Then my iPad, my stylus, and I got on a plane for Vancouver.

I figured it would be best if I had something to show during my talk, so I recorded Bryan Alexander’s opening keynote on Friday morning. That’s it up at the top of the post. I was really pleased with how easy it was, once I had the hang of the controls. During my talk, I showed two apps and let a couple of people actually hold the iPad (it’s true, and I have witnesses). I was expecting about four people to turn up but there were at least 20 in the room. We talked about visual recording and what’s different, worse, and better when using the iPad. After my session, I went on to record almost every session I attended on Friday and Saturday.

Here’s What I Learned
Software. I tried Autodesk SketchBook Pro ($7.99) and Adobe Ideas (free). All the notes in my Flickr stream were done with SketchBook Pro. The controls in SBP are very easy to access while working: 3-finger swipes and taps get you to the brushes, the layers, undo, redo, and the menu; 2 fingers let you zoom and pan; and 1 finger is used for drawing. There’s also a handy “puck” that lets you change brush size and opacity quickly. To switch colors, you swipe down with 3 fingers (this brings up the brush palette) and tap the new color (30 swatches are displayed, or you can tap the color wheel to pick a custom color) — you can also change brush type, size, opacity, and other options here if you want — then tap once on your drawing and you’re back in business.

The controls in Ideas are a little harder to master and are a little too fiddly for me to use quickly while recording. They are housed in a panel on the side, and one button is used to change the context of the panel (color, opacity, or size). So to switch colors while drawing, you tap the brush button, tap the color button in the fly-out panel, and then either use one of the four default colors that appear in the context menu or tap the color wheel to access other colors. I’ve seen a screenshot of a larger palette of swatches, but I haven’t worked out how to make it show up yet. If you also want to change the size and/or opacity, it’s a few more taps to do that. I usually missed the button and had to tap more than once to get the fly-out panel, but that would probably get easier with practice.

Drawing Feel. Both programs have a good drawing feel. Ideas auto-smooths lines, which is nice (sometimes) and a PITA (sometimes) — if you’re a sloppy letterer, it’ll end up changing your a’s to circles — but the sensitivity is very good compared to other auto-correcting applications I’ve used. Mostly it just smooths out your writing, which is actually nice. SBP does no smoothing at all, so what you sketch is what you get. I didn’t have a problem with it.

Zoom. Both apps let you zoom in to do small writing and fine detail. Ideas has an infinite canvas, or something really near it, which is really nice. SBP does not; the canvas is the size of your iPad, and you can zoom in to make better use of the space, but it’s meant to be small. I found that one screen was perfect for an hour’s talk.

Stylus. I didn’t use mine to take notes. I found that when I held it, I wanted to rest my wrist on the surface of the iPad, as I would if I were writing on paper. Since the iPad is multi-touch, this resulted in really interesting but unwanted lines on my notes. Instead I used the tip of my finger, as if I were shading with chalk or pastel. Both programs gave me a satisfying variety of line widths. Neither is pressure-sensitive, so I had to adjust the width when I wanted it to change, but I found it worked fine. If you *do* rely on a stylus, I recommend Ideas over SBP, because it’s easier to switch tools with a stylus in Ideas and it’s easier to switch with your fingers in SBP. You have to put the stylus down or hold it awkwardly to do the 3-finger swipes in SBP.

Here’s a video of an actual artist (Dani Jones) using the same stylus and SBP to actually draw something really cool, just so you see it can be done if you have mad skillz. She also uses a lot more of the brushes and tools. It’s worth taking a couple of minutes to watch just to marvel. You can also get an idea of how SBP’s brush/color palette works. (Note: I initially, and mistakenly, attributed this drawing and video to Erik Mallinson, who had reposted the video on his blog. My apologies to both.)

Layers. SBP lets you add as many layers as you want, quickly and easily. Yay! Ideas has two layers — the one you draw on, and the one you can put a photo into to draw over. I couldn’t see a way to add additional layers.

Posture. Obviously this is something that will vary quite a lot from one person to another. I had the opportunity to try out a number of different kinds of seats during the conference. I found that the easiest way to take notes was to have the iPad resting on my knee, tilted slightly up from horizontal, when I sat with one leg crossed over the other. This worked best in chairs with no arms, and in right-handed student desks. When I used left-handed student desks or those long curving desk things in large lecture halls, the iPad was too high up for me to draw comfortably and it was difficult to keep it tilted at a slight angle (see “Glare” below). I also found that sitting cross-legged on the floor or on a bench with the iPad on my lap was a good way to draw, although it was harder on my back and rear. TMI? Sorry.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Notetaking Experience. Brilliant. I loved it. It’s still a little slower than using paper, for me, and still a little sloppier, but I really liked having different colors and shades and not having to cap and uncap pens, or keep them from rolling off the desk, or cart them around. I really liked having my notes digitized and ready to post on Flickr in a couple of taps, too. With SBP, by the way, all drawings are portrait by default, so if you turn the iPad horizontally (as I did), you have to rotate the image before you post it or it’ll be sideways. I’m hoping they’ll fix this somehow. I could not find a way to rotate it cleanly in the app, so I saved the layered version to iTunes and opened it in Photoshop. It was an extra step, but a quick one.

Glare. The Life Sciences building at UBC is gorgeous. Lovely wood, lots of light, the ceiling is entirely glass — just beautiful. It reflects perfectly in the shiny screen of an iPad. The glare in any kind of light is very pronounced — you can use the iPad to check your hairdo when it’s turned off — but in the atrium where the keynotes were held, it was astounding. If you’re recording in a dark lecture hall, you’ll have no problem at all, but if the room is lit or you’re in a lovely natural light setting, it can be challenging to find a way to tilt the iPad so that you can both see it and draw on it. Not impossible, just challenging.

Battery life. Awesome. I started with a full charge in the morning, recorded six talks (a one-hour keynote and five 45-minute sessions), checked email, showed the iPad off to anyone who looked even remotely interested or couldn’t outrun me, passed it around after dinner so people could play games, and ended the day with 20% charge. I didn’t have to plug it in at all during the day (which is good since the cord is really really short).

How Does It Relate to Visual Practice?
Well… I wouldn’t use it (yet) for visual facilitation, where I’m interacting with a group and helping them work through something. It’s not as natural as pens and paper yet so I would be too distracted, I think. What I was doing at Northern Voice was visual recording, where I’m just listening and making notes. Then there’s the issue of the size; when you’re doing visual practice with a group, either recording or facilitating, you want the group to be able to see what you’re doing. I have not tried projecting the iPad onto a screen while working, so I don’t know how that would work, but I’ve heard that not all apps can be projected yet (some can’t access the video out?). I also have some concerns about sensitive persons in the audience watching my mad panning and zooming as I work. I think this is a great process for personal recording, but not yet for group work.

I’m also very interested in the possibilities for remote visual practice through something like screen sharing, but I haven’t even begun to figure out how to set that up.

Would I Do It Again?
Oh yes, yes I will. All that stuff I said about Why I Need an iPad is actually true — the phone’s too small, the laptop’s too big, and it does what I need to do when I’m away from my desk during the day.

If you’ve used your iPad for something like this, please leave a comment about your own experiences, especially if you’ve tried other apps or if you have a different take on the experience.

Pix or It Didn’t Happen
You can see all the notes I took collected on Flickr. Also take a look at these visual notes from NV10 by Rob Cottingham — he did the same thing, only he’s a cartoonist so his sketches bear a strong resemblance to real-world objects and people. Here’s the one he did of my talk — I love it!

excerpt from a keynote by Gardner Campbell that I recorded in San Antonio, April 2010

Allthis is an online auction where you can donate anything — things you’d sell on eBay, or your time doing something you’re good at — and the proceeds go to a charity or nonprofit. I was intrigued so I set up an auction for half a day of visual facilitation. If anyone bids on my auction and wins it, as long as they’re within driving distance and we can agree on a date, I’ll go facilitate a meeting of up to four hours for them. The money that they pay for the auction will go to the Mt. Diablo Chapter’s fundraising effort. My auction doesn’t open til May 10, which is the date that I guess the Mt. Diablo Chapter auctions start, but there are others that can be bid on now.

I really like the way Allthis makes it easy to give something that you really want to give, and still have the charity or nonprofit receive what they really need (money). From the Allthis press release:

Until now, if someone wanted to support a charity, there were only two options – write a check or volunteer. Beginning today allthis, the marketplace for things money can’t buy, offers a new way to support a cause: by turning an individual’s time and expertise into cash. Allthis is an all new way to give.

People have two options to support a charity – bid on an existing auction item or create a new one. Non-profits, clubs, companies, or any type of affinity group may also create teams to raise money together for a common cause, competing against each other to raise the most. The real winner is the non-profit, which receives the money from all the auctions in the end.

You can browse Allthis to find a cause to support, or if you ARE a cause (well, not you personally, but you know what I mean) you can set up a profile so that people can donate and bid on your behalf. It was very easy to set up the auction — only took a few minutes. It seems like a neat use of social media to facilitate what is essentially a barter system to support good causes.

I need an iPad because the iPad redefines portable computing.
It’s just possible that the laptop has too much overhead, and that we simply never noticed before. If I want to go sit on the back porch and read email, I have to unmount a couple of hard drives, turn on monitor mirroring, unplug my USB headset, and carry the laptop outside. That used to be fine because it was better than lugging a tower and monitor out there. But it turns out there’s another level of portability, almost satisfied by devices like the iPhone — but not quite. The screen and keyboard on the iPhone are too small for anything but really short emails. Forget document review or authoring — it’s really just too painful.

I want something bigger than the iPhone but smaller than the laptop, and I want to be able to pick it up in one hand and carry it outside — or pull it out on an airplane, even if the person in front of me leans back; or on a bus; or in the waiting room at the doctor’s office; or… you get the idea. I need an iPad so that I can overcome “the phone’s screen is too small” or “the laptop is too bulky,” which is true even though there’s no way I would have admitted either until there was a better solution. I need an iPad so that I can really work anytime, anywhere.

I need an iPad because I read and I write, and books are changing.
In this post, Books in the Age of the iPad, Craig Mod addresses the point that print is dying. He says that’s okay, though, and that having fewer books printed will result in higher quality of printed material overall. He also says:

“In printed books, the two-page spread was our canvas. It’s easy to think similarly about the iPad. Let’s not. The canvas of the iPad must be considered in a way that acknowledge the physical boundaries of the device, while also embracing the effective limitlessness of space just beyond those edges.

“We’re going to see new forms of storytelling emerge from this canvas. This is an opportunity to redefine modes of conversation between reader and content. And that’s one hell of an opportunity if making content is your thing.”

I think that’s just brilliant. “Let’s not.” Let’s invent formats that really work on this kind of device, and no other. Making content *is* my thing, or a big part of my thing, and I agree that devices like the iPad are going to change the way writers communicate with readers. I need an iPad so that I can imagine the possibilities for those new forms of storytelling — and so I can help invent them.

I need an iPad so I can use more of my skills in more places.
One of the things I do is visual facilitation (drawing on giant wall charts with big markers while a group discusses something). There are varying levels of portability: Sometimes I can just bring paper, tape, and pens, and tape the charts right to the walls or whiteboards. NMC has a nice set of portable walls for rooms where I can’t do that. But some rooms are just too small for the portable walls and also don’t have a place to tape the paper. I’ve also been in situations where the event was at a restaurant or other odd venue, where it’s just not appropriate or possible to set up the charts. And I’ve been in situations where the need for visual facilitation arises spontaneously, and I don’t have markers or paper or tape.

The iPad, and devices like it, may make it possible to do impromptu visual facilitation on the go. As Fred Lakin* points out in this post on graphic recording, it will depend on the resolution of the software, but if it does turn out to be possible, I could have an always-available set of “markers” and “paper” that I could use anywhere. It could be projected on a screen if one is handy, and the visual record would already be digital when I was done (I always spend time digitizing and cleaning up chart photos after meetings). I need an iPad so I can experiment with digital visual recording and, hopefully, help influence the state of the art.

I want an iPad so I can play games with it.
Okay, this may not be a need — although that could be arguable too, play being as important to learning as it is — but I really want to find out what kind of games we develop for devices like the iPad. Tim Bajarin says in a post on PCMag.com:

“There is some real innovation happening in the games space, as well. I downloaded the iPad version of Scrabble and found that it could be played with iPhones and iPod touches through the Bluetooth feature. You place the iPad down on the table between yourself and a group of friends. The iPad serves as the board, and everyone around the table uses their iPhones and iPod touches to create words, which magically show up on the iPad in the center.”

Okay, that rocks. What else can we do with this device? It reminds me of the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age (warning: link contains spoilers). This is a device — in Diamond Age, it looked and functioned like a book — that “contains” nearly all the information you could need to know, and lets you access it when you need it — the ultimate just-in-time learning device. I want an iPad so I can play games, watch movies, learn things, and be curious, in addition to reading and working, whenever and wherever I want.

But none of those is the main reason I need an iPad.
The main reason is the same reason I needed to build a web page in 1994 when a friend told me to. (I thought he was nuts, but I did it anyway. It changed my life.) It’s the same reason I needed a Second Life avatar in 2006 and a Twitter account in 2007. I had no idea what they might be good for, but there was a sense that they would turn into something.

The main reason I needed all of those, and the main reason that I need an iPad, is because I don’t know what the best reason is. No one does. But with some things, you can sense that there is a “there” there. You can sense that this train is going places, and that those are places you want to be.

The main reason I need an iPad is simply to discover why people need iPads. Or, if I’m really, really lucky, to help invent why people need iPads.

*Small update: The blog author formerly known as [the author who, despite my best efforts, I can only identify as Visual Raccoon] has been identified. Sorry, Fred!

I’ve spent a lot of time now with the six topics in the report, but I haven’t forgotten that those six came from a list of twelve, and those twelve, from a list of (this year) 111 different possible topics. One of the topics that made the short list (the list of 12) but not the final cut is location-based services:

Location-based services provide content that is dynamically customized according to the user’s location. These services are commonly delivered to mobile devices, but can also be accessed from other portable computers, handhelds, or any Internet-capable device. Current common applications for location-based services include advertising, news, social networking, and similar services. (2010 Horizon Report: Short List)

My iPhone is loaded with location-based services. I have one whole screen devoted to apps I use when I travel, to give me local information about whatever city I happen to be in. Admittedly, I can’t use most of them at home, since I don’t live near a major urban center, but they’re extremely helpful when I travel.

A sampling of some of my favorites, in no particular order:

• Where – Indicates where to find cheap gas, Starbucks coffee, or the thing I use it for the most: drugstores that carry Nyquil and saline solution, two things I seem to run out of while in strange cities.


• WikiMe – Shows wikipedia articles related to wherever you happen to be. Useful for those spare moments when you want to know something, anything, about wherever you find yourself.


• Come Here – Send your coordinates and a map to another mobile user so they can find you. Very helpful when most of your group has already walked to the bar down the street and the last few folks text you from the hotel asking where you went. (Look this one up in the App Store; the website is not really functional.)


• Layar – Launch the app and pick from a list of layers, such as World Peaks (mountains near you), H1N1 flu shot locations, In & Out Burger locations, and so on. Layar overlays the information on the image from your camera’s screen, showing the name of and distance to nearby features. One tap gets you a Google map from here to there.


• Foursquare – Foursquare’s fun, though maybe not as fun as it could be; I have to agree with some of the criticisms that have been voiced about its bizarre reward system and limited applicability outside of large urban areas. I mostly check in from airports. The idea has potential, though. Essentially, you and your network of friends “check in” from different locations, earning points for doing so. Some merchants offer incentives for people who check in repeatedly from their location, which is an interesting idea because it combines the game with real-life things that people do anyway, like going to bookstores or coffee shops (or airports, I suppose).

Personally, I love the kinds of services and games that are possible with location-awareness on my phone. It’s very empowering to have a BART map that knows not only where all the stations and lines are, but where I am in relation to them: I suffer from public transit anxiety and am always certain I will miss my stop and wind up lost. iBART goes a long way toward reassuring me that I’m on the right track, so to speak. I don’t have a lot of occasion to use BART, since I don’t actually live in San Francisco, but it has come in handy once or twice.

Although it didn’t make the cut for the 2010 report, location-based services *did* make it into two editions in 2009 — the Australia-New Zealand Edition (as Location-Based Learning) and the Economic Development Edition. Interestingly, it appeared on a nearer horizon in the Economic Development edition (mid-term; it’s on the far-term horizon for Australia-New Zealand). It’s much easier to find commercial applications than educational ones at this stage. There are several schools that are experimenting with ways to use location-based services for fieldwork and campus information, and a few that are developing augmented-reality games that have location-based aspects to them.

Based on the amount of development that’s going into apps like these, location-based services are going to be big in the coming year. TechCrunch’s Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010 lists geo as an essential ingredient for killer apps, and I think they’re right. I can’t wait to see where we go from here.

From the Prezi release announcement:

Prezi changes the way you think about presentations. It lets you arrange your ideas and images on a large canvas, where you can zoom around to show details and overview. And it is still very simple to use.

After a year in intensive private beta development, Prezi is going public on April 5. Please visit www.prezi.com and start to convince, amaze and take the day.

I’m still planning to try Prezi with some of the charts from my visual facilitation. Those should be very easy to set up, since I’ll just pop the cleaned-up chart graphic in there and then set a zooming path.

Meanwhile, congratulations to the Prezi team for creating — and releasing — such a clever little tool. I wish I could be at the release party, but alas, I will not be in Budapest anytime soon.

My strategy so far — pretend it isn’t happening, quit and restart Mail — isn’t working. I may have to resort to drastic measures. The problem is, I don’t have TIME right now. I’m on deadline for something else and can’t sink a couple hours into a solution that may work or may make things worse or may have no effect.

I’m using Gmail but I check it using the default Mail program on the Mac. So far I have one lead but have been too shy to try it.

It does make me reflect on my dependence on technology. So much of my information is bound up in my email: things I have done, things I need to do, things I need to know. If I can’t rely on that, where am I? I don’t want to go back to post-it notes!

However, I don’t really care what they called it so long as it works, so of course I tried the hello world of search engine tests: the ego search. Yup. Typed “rachel smith nmc” into the little box and hit enter. (I used to do just “rachel smith” but ever since that other one nearly made it to Miss Universe, I’ve had to be more specific. Adding “nmc” usually keeps her out of the results.) Let’s see what you’ve got!

Um. What? At first glance, none of the results are relevant except the first and last ones. I recognize the NMC logo, and I recognize the screenshot of our podcast page. The rest of the photos are not me, not anyone I know, and not relevant.

But the text is.

Who are those people? There’s my Academic Commons profile in the #2 slot, but that’s not a picture of me. I’m willing to give Cuil some credit and say that it is a photo from a different profile on the AC site. Not ideal, but understandable. Let’s look at the next entry. An older blog post from CogDog, looks like, talking about the Director’s Meeting in 2005 that focused on Campus Impact. I was there, so that’s likely to be relevant. But the photo is… oh no! It’s her! WTF?

At this point, I glance over the rest of the page and realize that EVERY SINGLE text entry is relevant, but NONE of the photos of people are. Some of them aren’t even related to the text they are next to, like the CogDog/Almost-Ms-Universe combo. And what’s up with the one on the horse? Who knows.

I am now wondering how they pick their images. Maybe the FAQ will shed some light. Let’s check it out.

Not so much.

If you can’t match the photos with the text, don’t put ‘em in. It’s just misleading. I notice the photos first and assume the results aren’t relevant. For comparison, the first 21 images in a Google Images search on the same phrase are either me or related to me. That’s the entire first page. My pageant counterpart doesn’t even turn up until page, um, I don’t know. I got bored and stopped looking for her after page 9.

My $0.02: Not ready for prime time. Sorry Cuil.

Xobni is a fabulous little tool that works with Microsoft Outlook. In fact, I’d phrase it differently. Xobni is a fabulous little tool that makes Microsoft Outlook work. You know that useless search that churns and churns and doesn’t turn up anything remotely useful in the first fifteen minutes? Xobni takes care of that. Say you need to find the document your boss sent you last Tuesday (or one of the six or seven documents your boss sent you last Tuesday). There’s a little list right there in a pane on your inbox that has everything you need — just click any email from your boss, any one at all, and you see a list of all the attachments you and s/he have ever exchanged. Plus a list of all the email communications you two have had. Plus a list of all the people that are associated with your boss, i.e. copied on emails that you two have sent or received together. It’s incredible.

If for some reason you do need to search, Xobni’s got your back with a search that actually works. Inside Outlook. It finds stuff and it finds it fast. Xobni’s people-centered focus and ability to make your life easier by organizing information you already have (people you know, conversations you have had with them) but can’t use in its present form (scattered throughout your email archives) marks it as among the first of a new generation of social software. (See NMC‘s 2008 Horizon Report for more on the social-software angle.)

My fear, of course, is that the company will get bought, the developers won’t move to Seattle, and Xobni will languish in dusty neglect. My hope, on the other hand, is that Xobni will continue to be developed — with or without Microsoft, either way works for me — and continue to be a model for new tools that organize the stuff we do based on the people we know, rather than on file structures that make more sense to our computers than to us.

Here’s hoping that maybe sometimes the good live long enough to pave the way for something even better.

april fool by Rachel Smith
posted 1 Apr ’08, 8.31am PDT PST on flickr

16 years ago today…

I was in Libreville, Gabon, wrapping up four months as an intern with the Peace Corps. My job was to set up the computer network (Appletalk) in the main office, help the staff convert from a paper-based forms process to a computer-based one–this involved creating a lot of custom forms in FoxBase–and teach them how to use everything from word processing software to Hypercard.

For April fool’s day, I created a custom Hypercard stack and set it up on every single computer the night before so that when the computers were turned on in the morning, the only thing that would launch would be my stack, with the first card (top image) showing. Of course, if you looked hard enough, it was obvious that Hypercard was running, but most people just read the “error” text. When they clicked OK, they got the next card in the stack (bottom image), and then if they followed along through, there were some jokes and animations. I printed out screen shots of the stack and pasted them into my sketchbook, which is how I am able to share them with the world now.

I suppose it’s not surprising that most people didn’t think it was funny. So, if anyone from PC Libreville sees this, happy April Fool’s Day! I hope you can laugh at it now :-)