Posts Tagged ‘reading’

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Siine Writer and UI Design for Mixed Media Resources

Sunday, October 16th, 2011

For a number of years, we’ve been talking about how Bible applications need to do a better job of addressing the non-pastorial perspective for their applications. We’ve talked about both content and the over all user experience, but rarely have we been able to do more than just instigate more chrome, rounded corners, or a faster search. Almost non of the Bible applications currently available take into consideration the fact that there are more people who own and use mobile devices than those that can read (by stat: the Orality Network speaks that about 60% of the world is or chooses to be illerate; there are nearly 55% of the world’s population that has a mobile phone* (hardware, not account) – overlap, not symmetry).

When looking at Siine Writer and its approach to creating a keyboard that’s based around iconography, I smiled because there seemed to be some develoeprs/UI designers who get it – on a mobile device, context-tuned entry is more powerful the less the user has to do to invent the context they are inputting.

So here’s your challenge. You have a library of resources, and don’t have the time to go about creating read-first interfaces that respect every language you are trying to reach. Can you create instead an icon (and color pallete) driven approach that is better able to lead towards that expected experince that person should have towards your application? Do you know the context of those whom you are building this solution for to do this? Or, does your mobile ministry approach need to start more with analysis of the people group, leaving you less time to make mistakes or do extra work?

If you are looking to build or deploy updates to your Bible/Bible-related applications for more than just the 120 or so trade languages, I’d encourage you to take a look at Siine Writer, accessibility best practices (for example, IBM’s listing), and even conversations that designers and others have about icongraphy and culture. Speaking from experience, its very hard to create interfaces that convey meaning when you are used to letters, words, and phrases to do so. However, the Bible, and specifically its application into how it is applied today, endears us to have to consider context just as much as we’d consider content.

For those of you already thinking and working down this path, here’s a recent tweet with some links to icons, icon galleries, and icon design practices that should add to your efforts:

Khoi Vinh (@khoi) – Helpful replies to my earlier tweet about icons: iconfinder.com, iconspedia.com and a post at Owltastic. Thanks everyone.

~ Siine Writer found via Ubergizmo & Techcrunch

*Update: got a question via email about the 55% number. That data is in the ITU datasets. However, it was also published by Tomi Ahonen in Feb 2011.

 

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Looking at the Perspective Amazon’s Kindle Gives

Thursday, October 6th, 2011

When I am at a coffeeshop, I usually have my mobile to the side of me and my iPad in front of me -occasionally with my wireless keyboard. At times, at least when I’m typing on the keyboard, I’m stopped to ask if I like my iPad, or how I get along with the keyboard. On one particular day, a woman asked me my opinions on the iPad as she was considering one. It just so happened that less than an hour before she asked me that, Amazon announced its new slate of Kindle reading devices (Kindle, Kindle Touch, Kindle Touch 3G, and the (color/Android) Kindle Fire). I mentioned to her that she might want to consider the Kindle – and it was apparent that she had. And then showed her the image seen on this post – her expression and the conversation that ensued afterwards got me thinking about how leaders, technologists, and then everyone else tends to consider technologies like what is exposed with Amazon Kindle.

For instance, the woman asked me what it is that I do with my iPad (reading, drawing, then everything else was my response). I showed her my artwork, and then the notes that I’d written at a recent church visit. The notes impressed not just because they were handwritten, but because she could see the point in not just having an electronic bible, but an ability to write notes, highlight, and then have those available on any computing device she owned. It sounds almost normal to many of us, but the perception that you can disconnect content from the devices you read it on is still a new idea to many.

She asked about saving the data on my iPad and how much space it takes. I explained to her how I don’t save a lot on the device itself as I use the entire Internet as my hard drive. We talked about how Amazon, Dropbox, Microsoft, and others essnentially give you their servers to use as the hard drive. In that case, its not always a limitation of the space that you worry about, but how you are able to control access, security, and what you are comfortable with storing on another company’s hard drives (servers). She noticed that on the pages for the new Kindles that there was no mention of the size of the internal storage and asked why that could be. I told her how Amazon is positioning their servers to be your hard drive – essentially making the Internet your hard drive. Her expression again amazed at not considering before that you could take what seems to be a normal computer function and turn it on its head.

So what becomes of how we talk and demonstrate Biblical texts? Could we have moments where instead of simply telling people to turn to such and such a passage that we could have shared that bookmark via YouVersion or another Biblical service. Or, maybe as a minister who is an aspiring author, do we learn and utilize services like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and Lulu to disseminate our locally-created materials instead of or in addition to the traditional publisher route? Obciously, there isn’t a need to do these kinds of things all the time, but devices like the Kindle will mean that we do have to consider that our use of the technologies available will endorse the purcahsees that many are already making.

Or, we can choose to not see efforts like the Kindle as being useful or beneficial for our respective audiences. Which is ok. But, if you are in the business of content creation or teaching, what kind of perspective will that lend to those whom you say you lead?

~ picture via Gizmodo

 

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An Unexpected Use for User Notes

Monday, June 6th, 2011

I don’t like printing things. To me, printing out materials for something that is going to be used one time and then tossed away is a waste of both paper and ink – materials I don’t feel like spending a lot of money on. For all my antagonism towards printing, however, even I have to admit that there are times where a printed sheet often managed to get out of the way better than having a few gizmos with me.

Funerals have been a particular conundrum for me. As far as I’m concerned, my job at a funeral is to offer a small glimmer of hope of Gospel and then get out of the way to help people express their grief. It’s a formula which works for me. For several years I was fine printing out my short order of worship for a funeral, using my iPaq/Palm/iPod Touch/iPad to read the Scripture passages. This worked ok, even though I felt like I was juggling too much. The arrival of the iPad on the scene, however, led me to cease the printing portion of the movement. Instead, I’d put the order on my iPhone (in Airplane mode) and read the Scripture from the iPad. I hated it. If I felt like I was juggling too much with a piece of paper – using two electronic devices felt like I was doing an acrobatic routine.

My biggest problem sprang from the reality that devices which were so good at getting out of the way were suddenly in the way. I’d have to wake one device, and then another, and suffer the odd looks that people would give when i unloaded multiple computers on to the podium. It wasn’t good.

My recent embrace of user notes, however, has now afforded me a solution. Olive Tree’s reader allows me to create a user note without linking it to a verse reference (which, ironically, is something I want to be able to add manually so I can edit user notes in two pane mode). This allows me to put the order of worship in a second pane, and access the Scripture readings in the first. I tried this at a funeral last week and finally found myself free of any sense of juggling. If you have an iPad, and you’ve been leery of using it in a pastoral context such as a funeral or wedding, you might want to give this a try.

Previously posted at Painfully Hopeful.

 

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Using A Print (Paper) Bible Alongside the Digital

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

LunchOver at the Laridian blog, a post about using a print bible alongside a digital bible caught my eye. Here is a snippet:

This year was different though. Maybe it was the fact that we were going through the book of Isaiah or maybe I’m not so rigid anymore, but towards the end of the year I dusted off my print Bible and started using it both in answering my lessons and in class, along with my phone. I really liked having the whole passage open for review. That is the one thing missing on my phone (although an iPad could help with that).

My secret weapon though is still my iPhone. While we can’t consult commentaries and reference material, I have a variety of translations installed on my iPhone. When the NIV leaves me wondering, I can quickly review a verse or passage in the Amplified, NLT or Message and I’m not cheating one bit. I also do that when I’m working on my lesson at home for the following week. And it is still much more convenient to look up related passages using my phone than to flip around the Bible.

Read the rest at the Laridian Blog.

How about you? Have you gone from print to digital to a hybrid mix of both? If so, what were your reasons?

 

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7 Bits of Holiday Reading

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

Dickens, The Life of Our Lord - image via Open LibraryFor as much as the holiday is great for family and rest, its also a good time to get some reading in. Here are a few items that have come in recently which might make for engaging reading and reflecting on a new or old mobile reading device:

Do you have some interesting reads that you will be engaging in this holiday season? Share yours in the comments or via Twitter.

 

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The Future of Physical Bibles

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010
2010 Future Trends Series: Bible Software | Bible Publishing | Physical Bibles

Whenever the subject of reading the Bible comes up, there’s this beautiful mixture of terms. Some would refer to the content, while others about the literal bound pages. Since we’ve already talked about the future of publishing and bible software, let’s take a look at the literal book and some possibilities that the two already spoken for areas will have towards this definition.

Digital Isn’t to Be Assumed
Much like we are seeing on the side of publishing, the future of the book is that of the book being a digital container before it reclaimed as a print one. This doesn’t mean that everyone will always default to a digital bible, but that the ease of getting, annotating and keeping content will fall first to a digital construct than that of an analog one.

Don’t agree? Let’s take a similar position as Fraser Speirs who has embarked on a project where grade school-aged kids have been given iPads and as an educational community, are learning the good and bad about the book being first digital. Here’s something that stuck out from a recent post that you should probably also consider here:

#4: Won’t the children lack “proper” computer skills?

Define ‘proper’, ‘computer’ and ‘skills’. Now define them as commonly understood in the year 2023, which is when a pupil starting today will leave school.

I’ve never taught to specific software packages and never will. Of course, we have to use actual real software, but there’s a big difference between “teaching Excel” and “teaching spreadsheets”. Don’t forget we still have MacBooks and iMacs too.

This is a constant tension in educational technology: do you teach for the current “business environment” or do you teach for learning? I prefer the latter. I’m not doing this just to produce the next generation of cubicle fodder.

A child graduating our school this year started school when the Apple Pippin was still current. How can I possibly know what specific technologies will be used in their career? It’s beyond absurd to even pose the question.

In some respects, going digital will look like this. In the meantime, we can see going digital meaning that our Bibles in content take on this form of being digital, but then we use devices such as the iPad or BlackBerry Playbook to augment the print text with a set of digital reference materials.

Flipping Screens or Waving Lights
Once we get past the initial hardware of the device, we have to start thinking about interactions and input. In this post-iPhone era of mobile computing, everything starts with the touch and swipe methodology. And we’ve seen that when it is executed well – and content follows – that the experience isn’t just pleasing, but it also offer a heightened engaged experience (re: Flipboard for the iPad)).

There are a few examples towards what this can look like, but here are a few that I think are closer to the current decade than many others. The first is a conceptual mobile interface from Mozilla Labs called Seabird. The second a user experience video from TAT displaying how someone manages several screens in the year 2014 in an environment that’s meshed and connected with contextual information – to this video, concentrate on the interactions of the person at the workstation as that follows our discussion more closely.

As we can see here, the idea of a physical device is more or less falling away, and the point is the best ways to interact with the content. I will agree that some of the possibilities describe usage scenarios that are at best very optimistic, but then again, what were you doing with mobile devices six years ago versus now (that would be when MMM started compared to today)?

Paper’s Re-purposing
I have to admit, I only know a few people that really like the feel of paper. Most people only know how to get information from a paper, and so that’s where their mental models are stabilized. And as such, there’s a good chance that paper just won’t go away, but it will find a more valuable purpose (replacement and transformation; an example of this in progress here).

Take a look at the periodicals section of any bookstore. Now run your hands over various magazine, ignoring the content, but paying attention to textures, colors, and the feel of the paper. Notice something? The magazines that you take hold of denote this feeling of permanence and quality that’s just not matched by other magazines. Take a feel of those pieces that are published quarterly versus monthly or weekly; notice how these feel. There’s a weighter feel, they are thicker and the paper stock is notably better. This is the future of paper, and specifically when it comes to Bibles, we can expect to see some similar transformations.

Not that we really need more versions of the Bible to choose from, but we will see better quality versions. I’d argue that we might see a trimming of some of the fluffy versions, and see more attention to type and detail since paper will have to fight for that more ingrained role – a return to the family Bible perhaps?

Still Carried, Less Stigmatized
I don’t think that every context will be fine without carrying a Bible, even in today’s rising tide of those who preach from their iPad, there are questions about whether a traditional print Bible is more comfortable for the viewing audience or not.

What is clear though is that the traditional definitions of a book are being challenged, and this is good. We should now begin asking questions around whether its fine or not to just have the text in traditional places for show, or spoken for in digital devices where the proof of it is displayed in our lives and communities.

A physical Bible still makes a pronouncement towards where you stand and whom you stand with. And even between those ground which disagree about how to interpret, there is an understanding that if a Bible is present, that a conversation can begin.

Recalling a recent movie, The Book of Eli, and the scene at the end where the Bible was placed on a bookshelf with several other books of faith – this was the only book that was held in such esteem to not only have the power to cause the issues which backgrounded the movie, but also have the power to restore life to those left behind. The physical book was a sign of the power that we who believe on it carry; but without living what was on those pages, or being able to read it, people were domed to die in their ignorance. Will people believe that not having the traditional, paper-bound Bible that they don’t have the same power to live the text? Or, will engaging the text first from a digital context cause life to happen differently, and with a slightly different hue than it had previously? We’re still early, and that script is yet to be written.

 

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Text, Tech, and Understanding

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Thursday nights are spent with a group of brothers with food, conversation, and a Bible study. One of the more interesting things coming up lately has been the use of smartphones (and an iPad) during that study. There’s been some cross-pollonating of tech understanding in the midst of that. We’ve talked about Bible versions, Bible applications, and even understanding the right times to pull out print/phone versus conversing from the heart. It has been really decent to see.

The challenge is crafting an understanding of the text without being dependent on the tech. And I think that even with print we have an issue in doing this. So, I wonder, before injecting MMM’s stance on things, do we place too much of a value on the resources, and being able to find the answer via the resources, versus knowing the text in our heart, where the resources supply only the accessory evidence?

 

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Late to eReading or Just Looking at the Covers Still

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

Some months ago, I made a post about why it wasn’t such a good idea to invest in ebooks. The thinking was – and still is – that investing in ebooks with unresolved questions such as being able to read books across devices, the long-term viability of certain ebooks, and even the various containers that encourage or prohibit ebook reading makes for a tumutilous time if you are wondering if its a good time to go ebook or not.

And the truth is, I am not sure if it is a good time yet. Yet, today, I took the plunge by purchasing my first Kindle book on my iPad. And for the type of reading that this is, I think I can see where ebooks do have a profitable, and actually advanteageous niche.

The book that I purchased is titled Abusing Scripture: the Consequences of Misreading the Bible and is basically an academic, theological, and sociological look at different abuses to handling Scripture that have occured within evangeltical (and to some extent, all) Christian circles. This is a book ripe with footnotes and endnotes and is the kind of read that not only takes time, but is one where I’ve on several times texted friends encouraging them to either purchase the book or to share a quote.

With a print book, this is a simple matter. You see something you like and either type it verbatium or take a picture of a piece of the passage and then share it via MMS or email. There’s nothing illegal about doing this (it falls within fair use for snippets, not entire books). To my friends, they probably have a bit too much information coming their way, and probably would like a better way to triage it.

I had gotten about 90 pages through the paperback when I realized that I didn’t want to pick up or carry the paperback again. It wasn’t that it wasn’t portable enough, nor that it wasn’t intimate enough. I just knew that in the midst of reading that I’d want to do more than highlight or bookmark. I wanted to dig a bit deeper, and here’s where simple paper failed me. For a person that has grown up in increasingly informational times, there are those reads that are just great (immersive) reads, and those reads like this one where it adds considerable value to the reading experience to be able to cross-reference and dig a bit deeper.

So, I pulled out my iPad, downloaded the Kindle app, and purchased Abusing Scripture in less than 5min. It took me a while to find where I left off, as the page numbers for the ebook didn’t equate to the paperback, but once I did, I was just as comfortable reading on the iPad as I had been the paper. A person watching me read (the iPad was on a table in front of me) even asked how I liked the Kindle. Though letting her know that it was just the kindle app for the iPad, it was still readily apparent that I was reading differently and at the same time little changed.

It is a bit of a two-edged sword to go this route. I’ve spent weeks looking at the various ebook formats and ebook stores. I’m even considering selling the iPad for the latest Kindle (seriously). Because of this, I made some choice value judgements: what ebook companies will be around for the forseeable future; what kind of content will I stick to purchasing in print versus digital; what are potential hurdles; and a number of other questions. I really wanted to make sure before I went with any ebook solution that I was choosing right.

But, the choice became easier as I looked at the types of books that I read and those which I am likely to want to recall for reference, versus pass on as library material. For one, books like Abusing Scripture are great books to co-read with another person. It doesn’t make for a good gift-book because of the type of content and the conversations around it. That being said, after reading it, I’d want to reference it for other readings or writings.

Another aspect to ebooks that works in their favor are in those perodicals that I’d like to read. I’m a huge fan still of magazines and much of my time in bookstores is spent in the magazine section looking at covers, trends, and just glazing content (and offline web browsing experience if you will). I’d like to have a similar experience on the iPad (Kindle, iBooks, or any other reader), but be able to choose those more immersive reading apps like Wired or Popular Science if the content dictates. Ebooks are perfect for such a format.

Where ebooks fall down for me is in those more story-like readings. For example, I have the book Boundaries. I really dig that book, but its one of many that the stories presented always adds the kind of layers to conversations where pulling out the book just makes more sense. Those kinds of books are also the kind where you don’t feel so bad letting someone borrow them. The Nook has a great solution here electronically, would be nice to see other books jump at such a method.

Bibles (and their notes) are different. While I do have a Bible app on my iPad, I’m not yet sure of the right Bible format for larger screened mobile devices. On one hand, having a reading experience that’s similar to a paper bible works, but its an ebook, I’d really like to see something more revlutionary take place because the content is so interconnected. Then also there’s the notes, highlighting, bookmarking aspect of reading the Bible. I’m still not yet pleased with solutions there – but some interesting stuff is happening in this space that’s worth waiting for.

All of this being said, yes, there’s now a book on my iPad. And for the kind of book that it is, having it in an electronic manner makes sense. At some point, perhaps in the near future, perhaps in 5 years or so, this won’t be a decision that needs to be made. It may very well be that the point of paper books will be for those very quality, treasured works to where there is a point in retaining them in that manner. For everything else, having access to it, no matter the device you are reading from, makes more sense. There will need to be some considerable innovations on the side of licensing and formatting, but it will come.

Until then, make careful decisions on what goes ebook and what doesn’t. And then read for longevity where possible. If it is something that will become a box of books that will eventually be recycled (not donated), then ebook just might be the better call.

 

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