New Apple software saves time!

I am only just starting to get to grips with the latest version (3.0) of the software for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch but I am already seriously impressed.

Things like the large keyboard on all applications are cool and useful but what I really like are the changes made to the music player, after all listening to podcasts is the main use I make of my iPods.

At a Gurteen Knowledge Cafe in April this year I made the comment that one of the advantages of using audio to transfer knowledge is that you can play it at different speeds to suit the immediate need. Apple listened.

The symbol below the time remaining in this picture says that I am listening to the podcast at 2x speed. This may sound silly but it works very well.

The speeding up (or down) is done with software so you do not get the Pinky and Perky effect when playing speech fast, though it does make rather a mess of The Archers theme tune!

I listened to several podcasts at 2x speed on the journey back from Sheffield on Friday and it was a great experience. I was able to listen to a lot more that I would otherwise have been able to and the enhanced pace of the programmes made them more compelling.

I did a few timing checks and it looks as though the 2x speed is a guide rather than a promise. Most of the 30 minute programmes that I listened to were reduced to 20 minutes. That's not 2x but it is still a serious time saving.

I have around 60 unlistened to podcasts at the moment but now that does not seem such a daunting number.

Reading books on the iPod

The iPod touch keeps getting better and now I am using it to read books, something that I have not been doing much of recently.

There are several eReader applications for the iPhone/iPod but the one that I chose is called Stanza.

Stanza gives you access to several libraries where you can download thousands of books. Obviously I have only explored the free books so far but I have already found a few interesting ones that I am now reading.

A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde is already proving to be delightful. It's a collection of magical short stories about kings, princesses, mermaids, dwarfs, dreams and enchantments.

It rather reminds me of Neil Gaiman in both subject and style. And that is a good thing.


The Stanza software itself is both simple and clever. To move through the book all you do is to touch the screen on the right or left side. This may not sound much but it means that you can read the book with one hand (using your thumb to turn the pages) which is very useful when commuting.

Touching the middle of the page brings up the menu where the display settings can be changed. It is possible to modify the background colour and the font face, size, colour and alignment.

I have chosen dark green (teal) text on black as I often read in the dark. It works well.

What I really like about reading books on the iPod is that this means that I always have some books with me so, for example, I can read a chapter of The Time Machine if the pub is quiet.

Stanza has got me reading books again while pretending that I am just playing with cool technology. And that's why I love it.

Telling stories with numbers, telling stories with words

As a mathematician by training, and inclination, who is employed to exploit words, a talk entitled "Telling stories with numbers, telling stories with words" was always going to interesting.

I was also interested in the possible Knowledge Management (KM) connections as story telling has been a hot topic there for some years.

But let's start with the geeky stuff first. The map shown here is taken from my iPod touch. When at home and on the wi-fi network I can use the maps application to find out where I am going and then save that map as a photograph so that I can access it later when offline. Simple, but very useful.

The talk was hosted by the Royal Society and was in the form of a conversation between Mark Haddon (author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time) and Marcus du Sautoy (ubiquitous maths guy) on the similarities and differences between their two practices.

I am not sure that I agree with all of their observations but it was interesting to hear how they see things.

The main difference between the two was that story telling with words was seen as a open world where gaps are left deliberately for the reader's imagination to fill and where the story never really ends whereas as mathematics has to be precise so that all readers get the same message and the story ends with a firm statement, e.g. a proof.

The point was also well made that the mathematics invented (or discovered, perhaps) by the Ancient Greeks is still used today, and always will be, whereas their stories are mostly forgotten.

From a KM perspective, the aim of literature seemed almost to be the antithesis of KM in that the aim is to have uncertainty but in maths it was interesting to hear Marcus du Sautoy describe how he goes from having his original ideas, to sharing them with a small number of people who can understand what he is on about (the arm waving stage) and then writing them down in an academic paper that any mathematician can understand.

Like all good conversations it was inconclusive but it was well worth listening to for an hour and it gave the 200 or so eavesdroppers a few things to think about.

Two icons

The back page ot last week's 2000AD had this stunning advertisement for clickwheel, a service that lets you read comics online.

The advertisement is for the iPhone/iPod touch clickwheel application that looks like an interesting way to read comics, I will be giving it ago.

But what I really like about the advertisement is the simple use of two icons that says all it needs to say in one white and one black image.

The white iPod and earphones should be familiar to everybody from the TV, billboards and personal use.

The black image will be familiar to lovers of comics in general and of 2000AD in particular, and is Nemesis the Warlock as drawn by Kevin o'Neill.

The strap line, iPod + Thrills, says it all.

iPod touch gets even better

Several of the enhancements made this week to the iPod touch software are cute but of minor interest, such as the calculator that is a basic calculator when the iPod is held upright (portrait mode) but when it is rotated to landscape mode it becomes a fully fledged scientific calculator. How cool is that!

Similarly, there are minor enhancements to email, contacts and calendar. All good but nothing to get really excited about.

What is worth getting excited about is the new App Store application which gives you access to a wide catalogue of new applications, several of which are free.

I quickly added new applications for some of the websites that I use regularly, i.e. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. These are all good and give you much better access to the websites than Safari does (hardly surprising as that is what they have been designed to do).

I've also added my first game, Morocco (a.k.a. Othello), and enjoy demonstrating my mastery over the computer, though it beats me often enough for this to be a real challenge.

My favourite application so far is last.fm. This sounds like, and to a certain extent is, a radio station that plays your favourite music. But it is much more than that. last.fm makes it easy for you to find new music based on the artists that you like, to find gigs that you might be interested in, to find out what your friends are listening to and to find people with similar musical tastes.

The beauty of last.fm is that it relies on the input from the many users to create the links between artists and events etc. which is where the value of the service comes from. User content and networking is what web2.0 is all about and last.fm is an excellent example of this.

Watching TV on my iPod touch

The news that the BBC iPlayer has been made available for the iPhone and iPod touch is fantastic! I've only dabbled with the potential so far but must confess to watching an episode of Two Pints ... in bed last night :-)

The screen on the iPod touch is superb and I prefer wating vidoes on that to using a laptop (I have several) with a larger screen. It is also much more mobile so you can watch it, for example, when lying in bed or sitting in the bath.

The iPhone and iPod touch are dream machines and they just get better. Perhaps I should get an iPhone too ...

A happy early birthday present for me

Travel for work has rather got in the way of my birthday this year, as I'll be spending most of the day itself flying to Brazil, but the good news is that this meant that I got my main present early.

During a short play with an iPod Touch in the Apple shop in Kingston upon Thames, I managed to get a map and check the weather forecast for Sao Paulo (it is going to be very wet), send a couple of emails, spend my gold on Kings of Chaos and have a fun time doing all this. And in the few hours since owning one I have read some emails, checked the football scores and had even more fun.

I'll also use it as an iPod too and I have loaded my other present, Neil Gaiman reading his preferred version of Neverwhere, to listen to during my two long-haul flights this week. I'll also be taking my iPod Nano to catch up on some podcasts and my iPod Shuffle for the music!

Musical journeys

It's two years now since I got my iPod Shuffle and I don't know how I managed without it! My journey to/from work each day takes about 75 minutes and this is now the main time that I listen to music and catch up with my favourite podcasts.

My regular podcasts are all from BBC Radio 4, and they are In Our Time, From Our Own Correspondent, In Business and The Now Show.

I can now listen to my new albums several times to get to know them and the ones currently on my iPod are the latest ones from Jarvis Cocker, Neil Young, Rammstein and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. I fill the iPod up with old favourites and at the moment I am listening again to Kingdom Come (pictured), Bjork, Placebo, Rainbow, Sparks and various others.

I always listen to my music in shuffle mode which means that 1) if it's a new album then I don't know which track I am listening to and 2) the tracks on an album get played a different number of times. I have evolved a practise which may seem a little anal but which works well for me. Once I have listened to a track from a new album 5 times, or from an old album 2 times, I remove it from the iPod and I add another album once there is space for it. This means that some tracks stay on there for several weeks before they get their 5th/2nd play which leads to a wide variety of music on the iPod but all of it specifically selected at some point.