Mobile Thing 5 - Notetaking

I had downloaded Springpad previously and added a couple of notebooks by others (namely my organizing hero, Peter Walsh) but hadn't really had time to do much with it. So now I've added the app to my phone and iPad, pinned a craft I want to try this summer and added a To Do list for this weekend. I like that the list feature has checkboxes so I can see progress on the list.

I tried Remember the Milk briefly in one of the other 23 Things series, and I have a friend who uses it quite a lot. My favorite notetaking app is Evernote, which I have on my phone, iPad, computer at home and two computers at work. I use it *all the time.* I LOVE Evernote. I love that it syncs across all my devices. So to have Springpad described as what results if Evernote and Pinterest had a baby certainly attracted my attention.

And here's my dilemma: I have a notetaking app I like and use regularly. I use Pinterest quite a lot as well (I have a ton of pins in lots of categories). How many apps do I need that do kinda the same things??? When I first got my iPhone, I started using its native Notes app. Then I got Evernote - but didn't transfer my previous notes (seriously, who has time?). So now there's Springpad. Do I just go on from here using Springpad? Then I have to remember which app has a note I'm looking for. Do I spend a ton of time recreating notes/pins in Springpad? Seems an inefficient use of time for an app that's trying to increase efficiency. I do love technology, but how often to update/change my habits is a question.

Mobile Thing 4 - Keeping Up

Ahhh....keeping up. I can't keep up with anything these days!

I've used a blog reader since the initial 23 Things, and love it (but can't keep up with all the great blogs I've found...). Bloglines is my reader of choice.

And I've had Flipboard on my iPad for quite a while but haven't used it much. It seems to me that I had it linked to my Facebook account - and it was kinda weird to read Facebook content in that format - but things must have gotten re-set somehow because when I was just now looking at Flipboard, there wasn't any personalized content. I've added several interest areas, the M Word blog (which I also have in Bloglines) and linked my Facebook and Twitter accounts. I think the content presentation may take a little getting used to - it's just not the way I usually read things online. All of this is habit, and if I can make using Flipboard a habit and reading this content, then it will be a useful tool.

Mobile Thing 3 - Utilities

I've tried several QR scanner apps over the past few years - one worked great in my office but wouldn't scan anything in real life. One worked well - it may have been Red Laser - but has somehow disappeared from my phone. So I've re-downloaded it and will be glad to have it back. I don't use it often, but when you need it, you need it!

I've used QR codes at my library for several years. We've added them to posters for programs, and they take users to the webpage with more details about the events. For the last 2 or 3 years I've included one on the cover of our One Book, One Community brochure, again linking to the webpage. I saw a suggestion on a listserv for posting a QR code next to the Chilton manuals which would then take the patron to the Chilton database. I like that idea -  need to pass it on to our databases librarian!

I also downloaded Google Search, onto both my phone and my iPad. I think Google Goggles will prove to be useful, but in my limited test in my office, it didn't find many results. I did scan a book's barcode so I could see what the results will be, and this would have a lot of use when traveling or shopping. (Hmmm....maybe I need to travel. Or go shopping! All in the name of 23 Things research...) I like a lot of the Google apps/services, so it'll be great to have them all aggregated in one spot.

And I downloaded the WiFi Finder. Undoubtedly useful. Oh, wait. I already had that one!

23 Mobile Things - Thing 2

I've had my iPad for about a year and a half, but there were things I didn't know in this Thing.

Things I didn't know:
- How to close a running app. I didn't realize that apps remained running after I closed them. And when I used this method, it looks like apps I haven't used in months were still technically "running"!

- how to pause an installing app so that another one "behind" it in the update list could be installed, perhaps more quickly or because you need it sooner.

- how to add multiple spaces by tapping the space bar with multiple fingers

- how to type special characters (or what I'd call adding diacritics) by holding down a key and swiping the new character

- how to quickly move between the alphabet and number keyboards if you only need one of the other characters

- to add emoji characters

- adding keyboard shortcuts for frequently used phrases

- how to undo/redo actions by shaking

- splitting and merging the keyboard

- how to take a screenshot

- some of the bookmarks info

- add a web clip icon to the home screen for frequently-accessed websites. This could be very useful! I've usually left my frequently used websites open in tabs in Safari, but will try this.

- Safari Reader. I've seen the button but not tried it.



Things I did know:
- seeing open apps (which I had thought were just the last apps I'd used, rather than "running" apps...) and switching between them on the bottom multitasking bar.

- how to install and remove apps

- how to create folders (and label them) to organize similar kinds of apps

- how to rearrange icons

- how to put a period at the end of a sentence/word by double tapping the space bar

- how to cut, copy and paste

- how to select wallpapers (I use this a lot!)

- notification center

- using the built-in dictionary

- some of the bookmarks info

- tabbed browsing

- setting up email accounts

- changing mail signatures

- sending instant messages (free between iOs devices!)

- using the calendar for reminders and appointments. I have my calendars and contacts sync between the iPad, iPhone, and home and work computers. Invaluable!!



Unfortunately, the free downloadable iPad User Guide isn't available for my not-yet-upgraded-to-iOs-7 device, so I'll have to hold off on that a bit. But I've learned a few things from this article that should make my iPad more useful. I should also read the iPhone article...

23 Mobile Things - Thing 1

I was surprised to see the date on my last post - 2009! There are so very many "things" available - both new since '09 and ones that I haven't fully taken advantage of that were around then. So for this round of Things, I'm hoping to feel more current and have a fuller understanding of the social media/productivity/online tools people are using.

I'm hoping that one of the Things will be a way to add more time to a day....
:)

Thing 47 - Evaluation

When I think back about this second round of Things, my impressions are that it was not as useful to me as the first round. Then I looked at the list in the evaluation and realized that there are indeed things that I'm going to keep on using. I'm eager to work some more with the screencasting tools and add some tutorials to my library's website.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about making the library website a more interactive experience for patrons, which is a way libraries can remain relevant and appeal to younger users (who are, of course, the future taxpaying supporters of a library).

I'd love to see more programs similar to this as web-based tools and apps continue to evolve. I want to go back and review all the different kinds of available tools from all 46 Things. I've urged a bunch of people to participate, even if they don't do it "for credit."

Thanks very much to everyone who worked on putting all 46 Things together!

Thing 46 - WebJunction

Investigating WebJunction has been on my To Do/Don't Forget list for a long time, so I was glad for an opportunity to explore this site. I was particularly impressed with the course offerings - I don't think I realized they were available. Despite the fact, however, that I was logged in and had clicked in the Remember Me box, the courses kept coming up with a charge. I tried logging out and back in and it was the same. So that was a little disappointing. I'll try it again another time when I may be able to actually do one of the courses.

The groups show potential but there doesn't seem to be a lot of action yet. I was hoping to find a list of groups, and finally did. It's interesting that many of them are not limited to MN libraries.

I found the options listed under some of the top tabs (Technology, Library Services, etc.) to be worth exploring in more depth. It would be nice to find a group for sharing ideas for the summer reading programs or for Teen Read Week. Those kinds of hints/suggestions/ideas would be pretty quick to post and useful for a lot of people.

I just tried registering for a course again and followed the "green box instructions" on the courses page step by step.....and it still wants me to pay $40 with a credit card.

My final take on this is that it's a very nice site with a lot of potential if more people would be using it.

Thing 45 - Up in the clouds

This is just an exhilarating concept! And scary, too. And overwhelming, from a workload POV. I was reading parts of this Thing immediately after reading an article in Computers in Libraries about making your OPAC accessible via smartphones and other handheld devices. And the point is, people want access to everything at all times! The way libraries can remain relevant is to facilitate that access, to make information and collections available online and for a variety of computer-like devices. What a huge undertaking this is! And especially difficult in a time of staff shortages when we're struggling just to keep the doors open.

Thing 44 - Money, money, money

I really liked both the mymoney.gov and the National Endowment for Financial Education sites. There is a ton of information and I plan to go back and explore them further. I'll consider using a site like Mint, but I'm not quite there yet. Feed the Pig does have some useful info, and FuelEconomy.gov as well. The cell phone plan comparison site was very interesting, as I'm thinking about making a change there. The Frugal Dad tips sound a lot like my dad and are the kind of tips found in lots of magazines these days. (BTW, it was good to see him plug using the library!) And Wisebread would have a number of interesting articles for people who take the time to click around. I liked the list of frugal bloggers, but I have a hard time reading all the blogs I have in my reader now! (I know, I know, I'm going back to that page....Subscribing to blogs is so darn easy!) I'm already familiar with some of the coupon code sites.

So, just like nearly everything else, there's a lot about money and how to save it on the Internet. It's interesting to find the various money management tools, though. I have quite the list of sites to go back to.

Thing 43 - Online TV

Hmmm.....just what I need - more TV! 

Hulu was very fun. I'd looked at it a year or so ago after seeing it mentioned somewhere else. This is a great way to see episodes you missed or old TV shows. I watched part of an episode of It Takes a Thief, which I loved as a kid. (Ahh....Robert Wagner!!) And it is not available on DVD.

(It made me laugh to see that when I ran this on my computer, the commercial sponsor was the National Anti-Crime Network. For a show about a jewel thief! Ha!)

The problem for me here again is bandwidth. I don't think my connection at home is fast enough to watch with any continuity, and I'm sure not going to do this at work.

It's fun to know that this is available, but I don't see any library application here and I probably won't use it much at home.  (A colleague just suggested that out-of-copyright films could be shown as a public program.) While I certainly watch *plenty* of TV, I don't think I want to do it in front of my computer screen, even if connection speed weren't an issue.

Still, this to me is one of the marvels of the Internet - the fact that so many programs and specials that are no longer available through "regular" TV can be enjoyed without special charge (except for the high-speed access...) by anyone in the world. Amazing.

Thing 42 - Music

This one is really fun! I mostly work alone in a windowless office surrounded by loads of computer equipment, and therefore am usually playing some music, either through my computer or on a CD player. But eventually you get tired of hearing the same tracks repeatedly. This is where Internet radio is so handy. I signed up for Last.fm, downloaded the app for Mac and let it draw on my iTunes library to create a station of music I'd like. And it's pretty good! Lots of people I haven't heard of but whose music I do like. The listings also indicate similar artists (so I can see what they're basing the choice on) so I can explore further if I want.

The one problem here is that we've been asked (well, all right - told) not to do streaming radio at work because of the bandwidth demands. So I probably can't use this a lot at work. I'll have to see if my connection at home is fast enough.

I also played around a bit with Pandora, which is also very cool. The only problem I found was that the first two search terms I put in in Pandora returned no results. It's been great to have something different to listen to in my office. 

As you can see, I added the Last.fm widget, both here and in the sidebar.

Last.fm, at least, does not seem much like "radio" to me. Well, maybe it's more like MPR than regular commercial radio. When I listen to commercial radio, sometimes it's partly for the local stuff - news, weather, ads, etc. You don't get that with Internet music services. Even the Internet weather, it seems, is not updated as quickly as local radio can give updates.

Thing 41 - Life as a mashup

I signed up for Lifestream. The thing that I found most surprising is the HUGE number of sites it supports. I thought we were seeing lots of sites during this whole Thing process (and we are!) but there are so, so, so many more out there! To say I'd never heard of most of the supported sites should be expected. (And there are some that sound familiar, so I've probably looked at them during the Things and just can't remember them.) 

It's a great idea, to be able to pull all your accounts into one spot. Practically, though, I probably don't use enough of them on an ongoing basis to make this as useful or necessary as some find it. I'll follow it for a while, though, and see.

I added a Lifestream badge to the sidebar. And I found another Minnesota 23 (or 46) Things person to follow.

Thing 40 - Mashups

Wheel of Food is just fun to do! It made me laugh out loud. And the Flickr Memory Game was very fun. Bubblr too.

Here, I tried Bubblr again, with more photos.

I'd forgotten about BigHugeLabs (the trading cards from the first 23 were so cool...). It was fun to play around with those apps again.

The Mashup Awards website lists some fun things - track what's being talked about the most on Twitter, match your Twitter posts with Flickr photos, get a 10-day forecast for cities around the world...

I am continually amazed by the creativity and resourcefulness of the people developing all these tools. Real-world applications aren't leaping out at me right now, but I'll keep thinking about how we could use them.

Back to Thing 37 - Just a comment

I've done most of these Things at work, but because of the problems with the scrapbooking tools, I was working from my computer at home, and I found that one of the two Animoto slideshows is now visible! And I still don't have a gmail account! I don't think I could see it at work earlier. How weird. And if one is visible, why wouldn't the other one be too? Computers really do have minds of their own.

Thing 39 - Digital Storytelling

What could be better - scrapbooking *and* computers?? These tools were lots of fun, and I want to play with them more, both at home and at work. For the page creation, I tried both Scrapblog and Smilebox. With Scrapblog, it wanted me to purchase anything I wanted to use on a page (which I didn't want to do). With Smilebox, I wanted to create just one page, but the template required me to do four (which of course took more time). It's nice to be able to use video in the pages, though, and to add music.

Uploading the file from Smilebox did not go smoothly. The application kept quitting, and then it was unclear as to whether it was actually uploading the file or not.  So I tried it from home, and didn't even get that far. The application would download but not open - kept crashing.

So back I went to Scrapblog and finally found some things I could use without buying them. The page is the post above.

I liked both of these tools, but there are some drawbacks - the fact that I couldn't actually upload the Smilebox set is the biggest one, of course. I'll try it from work again tomorrow and see if the problem has been resolved or if their tech support has any suggestions. I think digital scrapbooking would be really nice to implement on my library website, but it may take a while to get going.

Thing 38 - Screencasting

This is very cool. I can foresee load of library applications for this! I tried several apps - Jing, Skitch, Screencast-o-matic (who wouldn't love the name!) - and I think they all will be useful in various ways.

The screencast I made, using Screencast-o-matic, was on how to renew library materials online. This is something I will use on our website, but will probably re-do it and add some more details. The info in the training screencast on how to embed something into a blog or website doesn't work, however. There isn't an option for getting the widget and an embed code. So I'm not sure how this is going to go....

Worked! I'm really excited about the opportunities here.

Thing 36.1

I thought I saw a pdf-to-Word generator when I was looking at the online pdf generators the other day. Today I needed to manipulate text from a pdf in order to create a booklist we use as part of our Teen Summer Reading Program - the 2009 Teens Top Ten nominees. I've done this in the past with a lot of cutting and pasting, and then a lot of stripping out unwanted formatting.

Just now I downloaded the pdf to my desktop, uploaded it to the pdf-to-Word generator, waited 2 minutes and then downloaded an .rtf file. Easy! Useful! Woo hoo!!

Thing 37 - Photo Tales.....or, A Lesson in Frustration

Several of these items were not very successful....

Here's an Animoto video:

And here's one that I did of a trip to England:

OK - so those didn't post in the body of the blog.  They did post in the sidebar (eventually), but the width is cut off. In order to post videos to Blogger from Animoto, you have to have a Gmail account. With all of the things I've signed up for during this process, why didn't I sign up for a Gmail account? Just stubbornness, I guess. Perhaps I'll do that later and then try re-posting the videos here.

Here's my collage of the photos of Youth Services at the end of our remodeling last year.

Slide's slideshow:

This was really easy to do. I may delete the music, though.

CaptionBubble didn't work for me (a Mac issue??), but I could add a caption with Captioner. It wouldn't post to the blog, though...

How about a Tiltshift photo:

OK, here's my "story," done with Picnik (which I think will have library uses), Tiltshift and Flickr slideshows:

Thing 36 - Generating some fun

I'm thrilled to find the online pdf converters (Publisher files are often a problem), but when I uploaded a file to try it out, I got an error message saying there were server problems. I'll try that again later, because this would provide a real service for us. I think the password generators could be very useful as well ... as long as you remember to write them down somewhere! (My top tip for anyone doing the Things programs is to write down your usernames and passwords!)

I tried out the little READ posters and the newspaper generator, using a clever press release one of our former librarians wrote for a previous summer reading program.

And Wordle is fun - I did several versions for Strikepoint, which I'll post on the Strikepoint blog, but here's one of them.

I've seen these done before but haven't tried it. Just clicking the Randomize button after you get the initial image is fun. I did a Timetoast timeline for last summer's tour. If I had the photos of the churches where we played, I would have included them.

Oh yeah - way too much fun!

Nancy Eaton's Dewey Decimal Section:

585 Gymnosperms; conifers

Nancy Eaton's birthday: 6/28/1957 = 628+1957 = 2585


Class:
500 Science


Contains:
Math, astronomy, prehistoric life, plants and animals.



What it says about you:
You are fascinated by the world around you, and see it as a puzzle worth exploring. You try to understand how things work and how you can make them better. You might be a nerd.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com