Andy Arnold - Monday, May 17, 2010
As a child I remember seeing TV shows like the Jetsons showing video-chat happening on a regular basis. There have been efforts over the years to make video-chat more and more popular, but most of these efforts require setting up a program or signing up for yet another online account. I use Skype and Google Talk with the video-chat plugin regularly, but not everyone has accounts with these services, and Google Talk doesn’t support video-chat with more than one person at a time. Skype is supposed to add multi-party conference video-chat service soon, but I haven’t had the opportunity to try it out.
I stumbled across a new service this week that doesn’t make you create a new account, although you can create one if you’d like. TinyChat.com lets any machine with Adobe Flash 10 support (sorry Erik - see last week’s post) video-chat with up to 12 people at one time. You can login with your Facebook or Twitter account, using Open Authentication support, so you don’t have to give TinyChat your password.
The thing that I liked the best about TinyChat when I tried it out was that it didn’t require any heavy lifting. I signed into Twitter, authorized TinyChat to have access to my account, and the room was created. I was given an easy-to-remember URL (tinychat.com/twitter/adnyla) and the option of having that automagically posted to my Twitter feed. I clicked Start Broadcasting and gave permission for Flash to use my webcam and microphone. You can require people to sign in with their Twitter or Facebook accounts to join the room, or you can allow unauthenticated guests.
You can moderate your chatrooms and do all the things you might find necessary, like ban people or make them moderators. You can use video, just voice, or just text. You can also share part of your desktop, open a whiteboard, share a YouTube video, or open a shared documents folder. I haven’t had the chance to test out all of these additional features.
If you decide to create a TinyChat account, you can gain a few more room customization options and a slightly shorter link - tinychat.com/adnyla. I went ahead and did this for testing purposes, but I’m more fond of the Twitter based chatrooms.
Andy Arnold - Monday, May 10, 2010
A couple of weeks ago Justin and I shared our opinions of the new Apple iPad. I had contacted Justin because I thought he might have a completely different opinion than mine. It turns out that we were basically on the same page (or is that tablet screen) when it came to the device. What may have shown up after you read it was a comment from Erik Mathre, a photographer that I’ve met running around at CSLYOPs and the ELCA Youth Gathering. So, with Erik’s permission, sent while he was lounging in a hotel room and surfing on his iPad, here are his impressions.
My impression of the iPad (so far) is simply "WOW!" With each passing day, I find more things to love about this magical device.
I have to admit -- before the January announcement -- when all the rampant rumors were about an Apple tablet -- I simply couldn't care less. It was a 'tweener' product as far as I was concerned. Something that would have to fall between the iPod/iPhone and a MacBook. I have them all so I didn't care and I couldn't imagine that I would even consider one. Then came the announcement and I knew right away I had to have it. The morning it was available for pre-order, I ordered two. (I had already talked a family member into getting one of these rather than a MacBook).
To help understand a little more about some of the capabilities of the iPad, I would like to share a little story of divine intervention. My big screen HDTV broke just before Ash Wednesday and that seemed like a good time to decide to give up TV for Lent. And since the iPad arrived the day before Easter, I still haven't worried about fixing the TV. The iPad has become my media delivery device. It's awesome to be able to stream movies through Netflix, watch and listen to baseball games through the MLB app, and watch current episodes of TV series on the ABC app. I just heard that CBS will be following suit this fall with an app of their own.
Gaming is also incredible with size of the iPad screen. I’m a flight simulator fan so the X-Plane app is one of my favorites. The combination of the size of the device, large screen, and tilt controls makes it an ideal device for so many genres of games.
A couple of apps that I picked up for reading documents include Readdle and Good Reader. Both of these apps let me load and read most any kind of document -- PDF, Word, Excel, text, etc. But one of the amazing things is just how easy it is to move documents onto and off the iPad for these apps. You see, the app runs a file server so you mount the iPad as a disk wirelessly and then you can drag and drop files to the iPad. This makes the iPad a sort of wireless form of thumb drive. I mention this because of a unique way I used it this past weekend. I downloaded all the PDF reports, candidate bios and word documents for our Synod Assembly. I loaded them on the iPad and my parents, as delegates for the assembly, used the iPad for all that "paperwork" rather than lugging around the huge three ring binder that everyone else had. That, along with things like calendars, notepads, and many other apps, it proved to be an invaluable tool for just such an event.
I know that the second generation iPad is probably not too far off. But even if it came as early as this fall with the release of version 4.0 of the OS, I have no regrets. Speaking of OS 4.0, I am a bit disappointed that Apple will not be releasing the iPad version at the same time as the iPhone. Personally, I think the iPad will benefit from 4.0 more than the iPhone.
I did want to comment on a couple of points Andy and Justin made in their article. First is the issue of the "walled garden" for iDevice apps. Personally, I have no problem with Apple's approach here. It has been an incredible opportunity for the small developer and it really levels the playing field. Every developer has the same access to the user base with little or no money spent on advertising and marketing and in turn, the price of apps is incredibly low. There are so many great apps that never would have made it to market if Apple didn't set it up this way.
There have been those that don't like that Apple doesn't approve every app -- but that's actually a good thing. There are app stores for other devices that allow anything and everything. As it turns out, there were trojan horse apps and other apps that did bad things or opened security holes the day those stores opened. This was one of the reasons that Apple took a year to open the App store after releasing the first iPhone. They wanted to come up with a system that protects the user and I feel that, although the system isn't perfect, it has been doing a pretty good job.
The second comment is about "Flash". I wish to offer a different perspective. I started this response to Andy and Justin’s article prior to the famous “Thoughts on Flash” article by Steve Jobs. I agree with just about every one of his points. (Okay, so maybe I’m a bit of an Apple fanboy.) First, some history. Do you remember floppy disks? Sony officially stopped producing them last month. What about USB? How many USB devices do you use? Well, those are two technologies that were deeply affected by the introduction of the Apple iMac soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple. When Steve announced that he was releasing a personal computer without a floppy disk drive, the industry said it wouldn't work. Also, he only put USB ports and ethernet on those iMacs. People thought that there had to be a SCSI for hard drives, serial ports for modems, keyboards and mice, and parallel ports for printers. Steve saw that those technologies were dying and he was right. USB would probably never have got off the ground had he included those other types of connections on the iMac. As soon as the iMac hit the streets, manufacturers saw an instant market of people that HAD to have USB devices and the industry finally took notice. He was ahead of his time. I think the same thing is happening here with Flash. Steve sees that Flash isn't needed anymore. It's a technology that programs to the least common denominator and as there are more devices that it works for, it tries to be a jack of all trades but a master of none. Flash has been something people have hated for a long time because of it’s tendency to crash and take up CPU for no apparent reason. Adobe has been slow to address these issues so I think Steve Jobs is right to simply draw that line in the sand. Just like with the iMac and USB issue, people are seeing that they have to adapt if they want to keep up. Video sites that want to stay around are converting the HTML5 which is an open standard (unlike Flash).
Just my 2 cents.
Erik is Vice President of Mathre Communications, a computer services business. He volunteers in Youth Ministry at Lutheran Church of the Cross and Day School. He also does does some photography under the name EventPixels.com, that specializes in youth events. Recently he was one of the official photographers of the ELCA Natonal Youth Gathering in New Orleans. His email address is erik at mathre dot com.
