Posts Tagged ‘tablets’

Splashtop Remote, Bible Library Servers, and Mobile Accessibility

Friday, January 20th, 2012


Last month, we had a post from LaRosa Johnson talking about his new Asus Transformer Android tablet computer and how he planned to use it work and Biblical studies. Of the latter, he was doing something pretty neat in that he would use the tablet to remotely log into his laptop to be able to use the desktop Bible software packages that he has there. We’ve found another example of this over at Biblical Studies and Technological Tools where instead of a tablet, we’ve got an Android smartphone, and the software being used is SplashTop Remote Desktop. Here’s a snippet of that experience:

In the past I have used Logmein for remote access to the various family computers I maintain. Even the basic free account lets me take over a computer and run programs on it. It works great and is secure. I will continue to use it for such maintenance tasks. Note that this can work the other way around, and what a program like this allows me to do is run programs that are on my home system from any other computer. As long as I have my home system on and Logmein enabled, I can remotely connect to my home system and use my installed programs like BibleWorks or Logos. I’ve also used it to grab files I’ve forgotten on my home computer when I’m at school. (I now use SugarSync to keep my systems all in sync via the cloud. It’s a wonderful thing.) It’s a little slow to use Logmein this way, but it works. What this also means is that I can use the web browser on my smartphone and see BibleWorks on my phone. I say “see,” because without the use of a mouse on my phone, I really can’t do too much. Logmein does have an Android app ($29), but I just don’t use it that much, especially on my phone, to buy it.

Read the rest of BibleWorks and Logos on Android (sort of…) at Biblical Studies and Technological Tools.

Now, this sounds like something that would be only useful in areas where wireless bandwidth is accessible and there’s some technological savy on the part of the person putting this together. But, I can’t help thinking that at some level, it would make a lot of sense to see something like Bibleworks, Logos, etc. offered in a “server package” where you purchase “seats” and those authenticate mobile devices are able to use it. This would be no different than what we see with CRM, task management, Intranet, and office productivity suites (Salesforce, Basecamp, SharePoint, and Google Apps to name a few).

A difference in the application here though would need to be that Bible software suites doing this would want to explore being usable in different streams. For example, something like having the BibleWorks install and UI sitting on a Seagate GoFlex Satellite, with anyone accessing that hard drive/access point being able to “see/read” BibleWorks on their device, but it is being served from that single point. There’d also be something like Logos’ Biblia that could be explored where a license for an organization could make available to authenticated seats some measure of the Logos library. Or, finally we could see the BibleWorks/Olive Tree/Logos/etc. move to a model of use where instead of purchasing and downloading a product, that people and organizations purchase access to a virtual desktop of sorts which would allow them (a) access to the library and (b) multiple devices which can access it per use account. Now that I’m thinking about it, it would be really neat if I could recreate the mobile web server and then host the bible project I’m working on from it… uhmmm

In whatever case, its pretty neat to see these kinds of access choices taken when it comes to Bible software. We shouldn’t limit mobile just to “what’s designed for the small screen” when its clearly possible for that small screen to access a bit more. What is worth being explored though is how we can better enable mobile to be a key to a content library, whether or not those with the devices have the financial means to access the content or not.

 

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Addition of Ink Makes Tablet a Better Bible?

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

HTC Flyer screenshot of Bible app with ink, via Mobile GadgeteerThis past weekend, Matt Miller opined that the new HTC Flyer Tablet might make for the right approach to being a digital bible replacement because of it’s inking ability. During this specific look at the HTC Flyer, Matt notes just how well the ability to ink on the screen adds to the experience that many Bible reading applications already offer.

Spending much of my reading time on a tablet, I can relate to how well this can work within many application environments and communities. And as Matt also shows, using a service like Evernote along with is could also pull some of those behaviors that some are used to (writing in margins, etc.) into a digital domain to take advantage of some of the capabilities that paper just wouldn’t have.

This is a use case more centric to tablet (and even laptop) use. And so we should be careful not extrapolating it to every mobile device that can handle ink. Inking, specifically as we are looking at it here, takes advantage of the larger screen spaces tablets offer, and could also blend some spatial interfaces not used as well on small mobiles.

If inking could work, what are some ways that you could see the exploration of Scripture draw someone into a better understanding of it, or even help a small community better understand how to study the bible together (a community sketchnote if you will)?

 

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How I’m Using My iPad

Monday, November 8th, 2010

It has been a good while since looking at how I’ve been getting along with my iPad, and there has been some changes since that piece about not having books on my iPad. Here are some things that I’m doing right now with my iPad:

Reading, Reading, and Reading

As I said then, and have often talked about on Twitter, I use my iPad primarly for reading. There are two silos in which I do this reading, the Mobile Safari web browser and the Amazon Kindle application. In respect to Safari, I am in places such as websites and Google Reader. There’s a lot that happens in Google Reader.

The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity bu Philip Jenkins, via AmazonThe Amazon Kindle application has been both good and bad. Good in the respect that it is no more complicated to read there than it would be in a browser. Bad in that I’ve really had to figure out what electronic texts actually work best from the vantage point of the Kindle application/service. For example, I’ve got handle on looking at Kindle for reference books, but for the longer-form non-fiction reads (currently reading Philip Jenkins’s The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity), I am up and down about purchasing them via Kindle. These are the kinds of books that normally I’ll reference and/or lend out, and there just aren’t enough people around me with a Kindle or lendable electronic book platform to do this with.

Collaborating and (Nearly) Creating

One of the experiments that seems to be going ok in some areas, and not so well in others is this idea of using the iPad as a collaborative platform. In this respect, I am using my iPad for several projects that I/MMM am working on.

For one project, I am using the iPad as a project management and research assistant. To this end, I’m learning how to use GoodReader, Evernote, Dropbox, and Google Docs in a synchronous relationship. GoodReader and DropBox help me deal with issues of file transfer and managing paperless PDFs (yea for that). Evernote plays the role of a notepad and really comes close to what I think a document management app should look like for the iPad. What it is missing in terms of collaboration, Google Docs takes up – though I’m more just in a reading mode with all but the spreadsheets end of things for now.

For another project, I’ve been using the iPad for speaker/presenter notes, and soon will be using it more in concert with my mobile to do the entire presentation.

The Social Networking Secretary

Part of making sure that MMM is abreast of data and opportunity means staying attuned to a few social networking sites. There’s the Twitter client on mine to handle that aspect, and then I use websites to handle the rest. What is neat is that I now have this flow where I get a notification on my mobile about something (LinkedIn/Twitter add, etc.) and if I am resting, I don’t pick up the phone to see what it is, I just move over to that section on the iPad and look at it there.

At the same time, there’s notable fatigue that I get in using social networks on the iPad, so I’m never there very long before moving off those apps/sites and onto something a bit better. Flipboard has been a revelation (I could see a picture bible using this format) and has really helped me to look into other topics that will eventually be areas that mobile ministry efforts will have to address.

Digging in the Word

In respect to the Bible, I have mostly stuck with YouVersion. Mainly because I’ve not had a need to do any in-depth studies, and also that the general interface of YouVersion works well when I’m sharing the reading with other people. I only use a few translations when doing readings, and connectivity doesn’t matter as much (yea, I need to share more notes and bookmarks, I’ll get there).

I have recently downloaded Logos’s Bible Reader for iPad. Am a lot late in checking it out, but I needed to know why I’d need to look at another Bible reader and a moment came up where I needed more. I needed to do some contextual lookups of a statement made by a minor prophet and this wasn’t possible in the other Bible reader. Therefore, I’m in the midst of checking out Logos. I’ll have some fuller impressions in a few weeks, but so far, I like how well its tuned to studying the text – besides just reading. But, if you choose to read, the way in which the UI gets out of the way is awesome.

I’d still like to see something like an Evernote-plugin that could take my notes from Evernote and link them to a Bible reader/service. I write a lot of reflections, and being able to start at the reference, and then link into the application would be something very innovative. I get that we use the same behavioral metaphors for digital bibles, but they aren’t yet taking advantage of the digital paradigm enough for me.

Evangelism’s Weird Leanings

The iPad is weird. I’ve entertained two very different sides of discussions since having one. There is the side of people who see it as a magical device – they are impressed at how easy it is to use and how hard normal PCs look and act like after playing with it. To these folks, it causes conflicting thoughts as well, because as the iPad is neat, some have admitted that it makes computer technology seem even more idolatrous than ever before (touching the digital versus having a layer between you and digital with the traditional paradigm).

The other side of conversations have been those people who see the iPad (and its iPhone forbearer) as primarily a Western/developed-nation experience. This is true to some degree, but the larger picture is being missed. The iPad, as with smartphones before, are a technology that doesn’t need legacy computer leanings to find relevance. The speed at which the world has moved to touch-gesture interfaces as normal versus one-off is something being felt everywhere. No, we don’t have iPads (yet) in the price range that makes this accessible, but we do have the need to have content on those iPads disrupting industries such that we are seeing this trickle down and across to other technologies.
Evernote on the iPad and N8 - Is Local Storage Needed
In both cases, there’s this pull to at least see what’s possible. Most people see this space as something that won’t last long (and it might not). But there’s a challenge to the way things had been done, and a reluctance on my part to want to go back to the way things were. Certain types of friction aren’t needed, and with the iPad, doing computing easier seems to speak to people differently than even using my mobile has.

Having the iPad has in a sense turned me more into a person that pays attention to the implications of mobile and connected technologies and how we are sending and receiving Christ in these changing times. Surely, not everything will be answerable, but as we all use these more, we come up to challenges and work through them with the hope that what we learn will filter into ways that we can enable the Body to take advantage of these tools.

At least, that’s how I look at using this tech. I’ve got a lot of learning to go.

 

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Posted in Commentary, Devices and Software | 2 Comments »

What’s in Your Pocket

Friday, October 22nd, 2010

MMM on the N8 - Share on Ovi
While we often look at what you can do with mobile, it has been a while since talking about what kinds of devices you might have in your pocket (wrist, hand, satchel, etc.). So let’s hear it from you, what are you using and what do you like most about it?

Or, if you have been coming here a while, let’s hear about how your mobile device has been used for or around ministry efforts.

 

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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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Posted in Devices and Software, Future Trends | 4 Comments »