Tag: ipad

  • Products



    Sometimes the weekly column I do is made up of smaller bits instead of one big topic and that was the case this week when we rolled together three product reviews into a Digital Savant piece.

    Slightly longer versions of my reviews of the Nike+ FuelBand (beautiful, baffling), the Xbox Live game “Fez” (indie, retro, cool) and the Swivl for camera phones (rotatin’ follow-you action).

    Last week was pretty busy at work. I broke the news about the follow up to Wizard101, Pirate101 from the Austin developers at KingsIsle Entertainment. (The version that ran in print is a little different.)

    And I did a mostly-photos preview of the new Austin Microsoft Store in the blog.

    Things got even busier later in the week with the Moontower Comedy and Oddity Festival, a new thing in Austin that we covered. I ended up writing up The Divorce Show, Aziz Ansari’s fantastic headlining performance, the Theme Park improv show featuring Laraine Newman, Oscar Nuñez from “The Office” and performers I’d seen years and years ago in the sketch troupe “Totally False People.” Saturday night, my coverage ended with Wanda Sykes, which was also great. Aziz Ansari ended up Tweeting a link to the review of his show, which brought us a nice little surge of traffic.

    Still doing reviews over at Kirkus every week or two of children’s apps. In fact, apps were part of a discussion I had with Patrick Jordan, who does a weekly blog feature called “What’s On Your iPad.” I told him what’s on mine for a feature he ran last week.

    And I saved probably the biggest news for last. Because I work for a large company that owns several large papers and is in the process of consolidating lots of things across them, my Digital Savant column will be appearing in the other ones as well. That means the column will run more regularly in Atlanta, Dayton and Palm Beach.

    In Palm Beach, it started two weeks ago with a flourish. They interviewed me for a very nice introduction piece and ran a past column of mine that I suggested would be a good intro to the Digital Savant column. The first column brought me some very nice emails from South Florida from people either needing tech help or offering their own opinions about everything from LINUX to what devices are best for people suffering from disabilities like multiple sclerosis.

    All that recent activity made me exhausted enough for a bad crash early this week. I got several pieces of bad or weird news on the same day, including one about a writing project that I was rapidly losing confidence about (one thing about that; when a writer loses confidence in one piece of writing it can often trigger a chain reaction that leads to thinking you can’t write ANYTHING, EVER AGAIN. That can be dangerous.). It took pep talks from several wonderful people in my life including my writing partner, my wife and my two daughters, who each suddenly became angelic and nice to their dad for once and then things were fine again. I got a good night’s sleep and then today, the day of my 8th wedding anniversary, everything seemed fine again.

    It’s been a weird combination lately of big changes at work (not for me specifically but for the paper and the company in general), always feeling pressed for time at home and having gone on a jag of writing so much in a short period of time that the words began to ran together and I stopped processing. Add lack of sleep to that and things get worse really quick.

    Now my priority is resting up, getting back into the exercise routine and getting recharged because it’s almost summer, I have a few big tasks ahead of me and I’m gonna need every ounce of energy I’ve can generate. (Just not Nike Fuel points because I’m starting to think those are just useless.)

  • Travel gadgets and iPad apps

    Yay, after a very busy few weeks I’m finally caught up!

    This week’s Digital Savant column, which ran in today’s American-Statesman, was a roundup of what some of the newer apps I’ve been using on the iPad are that best encapsulate where we are in the life of Apple’s two-year-old tablet. Slightly longer version ran as two blog entries last week.

    On Sunday, a travel gadget guide ran in the paper. It covers a range of different things you’d want on a plane or road trip as well as a few useful apps. The iPad also made this roundup, which says a lot about how quickly and indispensable the device has become, at least in my family.

    We now have two iPads in the house which seems ridiculous at first, but we really have no plans to buy any new laptops or desktop computers anytime soon and we find that our computers are being used less and less as we rely on our phones and the tablets more and more.

  • E-books, panel picking and a 4-year-old

    Nook Color, one of the e-readers we mention in the guide
    I have a big story due at work on Monday, so my last week has been a crunch to try to make sure all the pieces are aligned for that (and that pieces I might have had missing could be rounded up through some reporting I did last week and over the weekend).

    Not that the Digital Savant print column is a month into its life, it’s starting to feel more routine and I’m figuring out how to balance other larger-sized stories along with that deadline and the daily blog posts and other stuff that comes along from day to day.

    On Sunday, I had a big back-to-school tech gift guide in the paper, this year focused on e-book readers and tablets for college students.

    On Monday, the Digital Savant column is about the South by Southwest Interactive PanelPicker, which allows the public to vote on panels for the fest. As far as I’ve been able to tell, it’s the largest tech conference to do anything like that except for maybe BarCamp-style events where the programming is organized after the event starts.

    The story I have due tomorrow should run next Sunday. I’ll write about it when it’s published, but it’s another part of the online identity series I’ve been working on.

    Lilly is 4

    Lilly turned four years old this weekend. It was not entirely unexpected. I mean, we had about four years to prepare for it (and some months more than that, even). Three-to-four is a bigger transition than two-to-three was; at least it feels that way in my life. She’s no longer a toddler and next year she’ll be in kindergarten. She left being a baby long behind her, I just hadn’t quite accepted it. Having an almost-two-year-old in the house does make it seem a little less like the end of an era, at least.

    We had a pizza party for Lilly. She remembered last year’s and raved about it long enough that we figured we should do it again. She can sometimes be cranky and she’s very demanding, as I imagine most 3-4-year-olds are, but this weekend she really turned on the charm and was on her best behavior for almost the whole weekend.

    She asked for specific things this year without prompting, based on trips she’s made to the store recently and, more disturbingly, things she’s started to notice her friends have at her school. That’s how she ended up with a purple unicorn Pillow Pet that, I’m not gonna lie, I’m pretty jealous about.

    I didn’t have any real work or writing projects or plans and we were able to spend more time than usual just hanging out with the kids all weekend. It was wonderful and brief, but it’s nice that we get to do it all over again next weekend and the weekend after that.

  • Section fronting

    "Sweet" John Muehlbauer, from my tablets story. Photo by me.

    I feel a bit like I lost my Eye of the Tiger (I blame the stupid, eyeless tiger) for a while after South by Southwest Interactive, as I wrote before, but things seem to finally be ramping up again. After months of feeling too tired and overwhelmed to pitch outside of work, I’ve had a few things start to materialize (more on that later) and at work, I’ve had two section-front stories appear this week that I think turned out really well.

    The first is a story is an advice/how-to piece on transitioning to a tablet like the iPad 2 from a laptop or desktop computer. This is probably not a full-blown trend yet, but I’m starting to hear of people ditching their heavy laptop on business trips in favor of a tablet or just finding they have less use for a full-blown computer the majority of the time. We were hoping we were a little ahead of the curve on this. I think by the holidays, we’ll see a lot more of this going on as that market grows. This piece ran in Sunday’s Life & Arts section.

    Austin writer Gabrielle Faust. Photo by Zach Ornitz, Austin American-Statesman

    On Tuesday, another piece I wrote about how Austin celebrities like horror writer Gabrielle Faust, HDR photographer Trey Ratcliff and Jojo Garza of the music group Los Lonely Boys manage their connections and correspondence with fans online appeared in the paper.

    The common thread I heard in my interviews was that it scales up really fast and becomes unmanageable in a short amount of time unless a famous person devotes staff or a significant amount of time to it. (Even then, it can get beyond their control.) Something to think about for those who are gaining popularity online with their art or business.

  • So reviewed

    I hate rushing reviews for tech stuff.

    This is a bit antithetical to what the industry is like now. Everybody wants their hands on a gadget first and to put out the earliest review (usually right when an embargo lifts) and rack up those page views from curious Googling readers.

    But given the kinds of stuff we’re talking about — tablet PCs, smart phones, stuff that you really have to live with a while to get your head around and really sort usefulness from novelty, I just don’t think you can review something like an iPad or a radically new kind of phone in a few hours or even a day or two. So I tend to play with stuff over time and then realize that a month has gone by and I still haven’t written anything about (insert name of gadget). Right around the time the PR people start e-mailing me, asking, “So, uh… are you ever gonna review this thing and mail the product back?” is when my crack timing, motivation and work ethic kick in and I write the damn thing. Sometimes I write two in the same article just to clear the decks.

    So, here’s some recent stuff that ran in the paper. I did a review that appeared as a Sunday secondary taking a look at the Motorola Xoom tablet and the T-Mobile G-Slate. I liked them both for different reasons, but not as much as the iPad, which should be no surprise to anyone who’s spent some serious time with an iPad or iPad 2. The article in the paper was reverse-published from a Digital Savant blog entry from a little while ago.

    A bit of a companion to that is a first-impressions I did of the BlackBerry PlayBook this week.

    I’ve got a more detailed story about migrating to a tablet running June 11 that’ll offer tips, app ideas and more to those thinking about moving away from a laptop or desktop to something a little more portable.

    Also had a review of the new Mortal Kombat game, which I quite liked. Spent a lot of nights trudging through that story mode (which was ridiculously awful/awesome) and getting back my moves from all those years of Kombo muscle memory.

    And on Saturday, I wrote a lengthy “Raising Austin” column about kids, security and Facebook. I got to talk a little about a trip I took to Dallas last year to speak at a panel for Jewish Family Services on the topic and to tie it in with some recent news. Sometimes I do speaking stuff or freelance and worry that it won’t be useful for anything but making a little money, but other times it pays off in other ways and helps me a lot at my day job.

    That’s about it for now. Summer has kicked off her in New Braunfels and we went to Schlitterbahn three times in one weekend. That is how the Gallagas roll when it is hot outside and we have season passes.

  • Story times

    Yesterday, a segment I recorded for NPR’s All Things Considered about children’s storybook apps (a subject I’ve been knee-deep in since about last August) aired. We scripted and recorded it a few weeks ago and in the time I was waiting for it to go live, I became increasingly convinced that it would be met with disapproval from the same NPR commenters who think it’s crazy to have sensors monitor the health of senior citizens or that iPhones are destroying civilization.

    I wasn’t disappointed! The comments on the NPR page for the piece have ranged from a smattering of “Hey, it’s fine” comments to a more consistent drumbeat of readers and listeners who think I’m destroying my 3-year-old’s imagination and rotting her brain and eyes with these dangerous apps.

    Memorably, one commenter suggested we let Lilly sleep with the iPad under her pillow or on her chest so she gets cancer. He later said he was joking, but despite my love of dark, disturbing humor, this one didn’t strike me as particularly humorous. Maybe I should lighten up!

    Anyway, this time I had decided not to respond because I knew the comments were going to be as wild and vicious as the ones that accompanied the CNN.com piece I wrote about religion and Facebook.

    But then I responded to one commenter’s question about CD-ROM adaptations and, well… let’s just say you shouldn’t wish cancer on my kid, OK?

    Apart from all that expected mess, it was nice to be back on the air after a long break and very cool to see Lilly’s face on the front of NPR’s website and to hear her voice on the airwaves. I thought she did wonderfully and the audio is something I’m already coming to treasure.

    The other stuff I’ve been working on, apart from gearing up for SXSW Interactive, are a possible podcast I may start doing at work for Digital Savant, trying to go to the gym more often (we have a new fitness center at work), shedding our VHS tape collection and doing more stuff with Kirkus Reviews on the iPad app front. Or as the commenters see it, ruining my daughter’s life.

    You know, tomato, to-mah-to.