iOS speech-to-text

 Posted on March 19, 2012  |  Erik

Up until now my experience speech-to-text applications has been relatively limited and not terribly good. But since the latest generation included with iOS 5.1, I am finding that the iPhone and iPad are becoming truly effective tools that can be used in this manner. Now I can take a coffee break and dictate a paragraph or two as ideas pop into my head which is considerably faster than doing this via the keyboard on the iPhone. [Read More]

Virtual Appliances

 Posted on March 14, 2012  |  Erik

An interesting article from the Lone Sysadmin concerning virtual appliances and his love/hate relationship with them. I agree with him pretty much across the board, but I’ve added (and he has graciously made a comment note of it) a fourth point regarding localization. Pretty much all of the virtual appliances out there come with the US QWERTY layout by default, but almost none of them include the Linux kbd package which would let me select an alternate layout. [Read More]

Hacking is important

 Posted on March 13, 2012  |  Erik

As usual, Rands in Repose is bang on the point in the latest article: Hacking is important. He points out what’s important about developing product and why there is an inevitable tug of war between those that create and those that maintain.

iPad points of view: Portrait vs Landscape

 Posted on September 9, 2011  |  Erik

An interesting observation from the field now that I’m using the iPad with a keyboard every day. When I’m in a “consumption” mode, that’s to say, reading stuff, I almost always tend to be using the iPad in portrait mode. This (to me) feels like the the most appropriate mode for reading, whether it’s ePub documents in iBooks or Stanza, or reviewing PDF documentation. However, the moment that I switch to “production” mode where I’m writing and manipulating data, I find that the landscape orientation feels better. [Read More]

iBooks bonus feature

 Posted on August 28, 2011  |  Erik

One thing that I really really like about the Kindle app and ecosystem is it’s ability to automatically sync your position in a book between devices. I use it extensively moving back and forth between the iPad and the iPhone, depending on where I am and what I’m doing (especially since my wife takes over the iPad when I’m at home). Currently the same feature is available in iBooks for books that were purchased in the iBooks store. [Read More]

InCase Origami Workstation

 Posted on August 28, 2011  |  Erik

If you’re thinking seriously about extended your capabilities for “producing content”, that is to say “writing” on your iPad there are a number of combination cases that include keyboards of varying quality and ergonomics. One other use case for me is a dedicated ssh terminal (using the excellent Prompt app from Panic) where I tend to hammer away on the keyboard. I’ve been happily using the Apple Bluetooth Keyboard with the iPad for a while now. [Read More]

Keyboards and iOS

 Posted on August 10, 2011  |  Erik

I’ve long been a fan of the software keyboard implementation in iOS, especially from the point of view of someone who frequently switches between languages. I do however sometimes prefer to work with a hardware keyboard since, despite the general accuray and flexibility of the on-screen keyboard I can go faster on hardware. Plus I get to use the entire iPad screen for content. However, this brings me back into the ugly world of hardware keyboards and the language based dependencies. [Read More]

Lion Server pain points

 Posted on August 9, 2011  |  Erik

After a week of playing with Lion on the desktop and Lion on the server I can safely say that the first is a very nice experience, and I’m absolutely loving Mission Control. It’s definitely best adapted for trackpad based machines, but even the Magic Mouse does a decent job as long as you poke around to find the gesture shortcuts. A two finger double tap brings up Mission Control for example. [Read More]

Why an iPad HD/Pro?

 Posted on July 11, 2011  |  Erik

Why an iPad HD? The rumour mill has gone back into overdrive with the possibility of an iPad HD coming this september. To be specific an iPad 2 resolution doubled in both dimensions, transforming the 1024x768 screen to 2048x1536. Why not just plain old HD? There are a lot of industry pundits going on about the iPad moving to a traditional HD resolution (1920x1080), but we’ve already seen Apple’s approach to handling this kind of issue with the iPhone 4. [Read More]

Two little things today

 Posted on June 18, 2011  |  Erik

Lion on older systems Just in case you were wondering about running Lion on any of your older machine, you can forget about it. On many previous system updates, you could do an end run around the issue by installing onto an external drive and then using that disk to boot the older system. Assuming of course that you were running the same processor technology. But I just tried this out with a 15” MacBook Pro Core Duo (the model before the Core 2 Duo) and it gives me a simple grey screen with a barred circle. [Read More]