Presenting "Going Paperless with iPad" at MMEA and OMEA Conferences Next Month

I will be presenting a new session of mine, Going Paperless with iPad, at the Ohio Music Educators Association conference on February 6th and at the Maryland Music Educators Association conference on February 20th.

If you will be attending either of these two conferences, I hope to see you there.

Here is a short description of the session:

Learn how to move your organization, planning, and paperwork to the digital world through the use of apps, cloud services, and connected devices. The iPad, with it’s convenient form factor and modern software, becomes the hub for consuming and interacting with all of your work.

Here is a longer description of the session:

Most teachers feel overwhelmed by organization, planning, and paperwork to the point that actual classroom instruction seems a tiny part of the job. In this session, I will detail my strategies for achieving a paperless workflow, where work is digitized, easily accessible, and manipulated through an iPad. The session will primarily focus on capturing, organizing, and consuming. More specific points of discussion will include: transforming physical documents to digital, PDF management, file organization, searching, cloud drive organization, tagging best practices, file backup, grading, automating, task management, calendar tips, iPad as a creation vs. consumption device, iPad as computer replacement, working with the limitations of file management on iOS, and more.

The session will emphasize how a desktop plays a unique role in the capturing and organization of data. Some software specific to the Mac will be referenced, but a Windows PC is completely suitable for taking advantage of the major points in the session.

To ensure that the session details the most powerful tools available, the session will include discussion of paid software and hardware, particularly premium apps and scanners.

Audio Hijack 3

Click here to learn more about Audio Hijack 3 I have only spent a little bit of time with this app and I already know it is going to solve countless tiny little problems with managing audio on my Mac. Audio Hijack lets you create custom “sessions” for performing what seems like an infinite number of possible actions for managing audio. In the picture below, you can see a few of these quickly accessible presets. One of them is set up to record the audio of my web browser, another to give the volume of my laptop speakers a boost, and the final one to record my microphone input and the other end of a Skype conversation (perfect for podcasting).

Save quickly accessible presets audio recording and management.

Audio Hijack in action, recording the audio of a video I am watching on the web.

Audio Hijack makes it easy to manage the audio you record from these sessions by organizing them in one, easy to find, place.

Audio Hijack Recordings.

You can even set timers for Audio Hijack to turn on and carry out operations by itself. Perfect for recording live screencasts while you are away from your computer.

Audio Hijack Schedule.

It is clear to me that this will prove an instantly useful utility for managing multiple inputs and outputs on my computer in a simple and hassle free way. These are just the features that are a click away. Check out the link above to see more of what it can do.

🔗 Paul Lansky's Three Moves performed by Jonny Allen

Never seen anyone make this piece look so easy before. http://youtu.be/DTliXQ0GxB0

🔗 Marco Arment sums up my largest concerns about Apple

Marco Arment sums up my largest concerns about Apple in his recent post, Apple has lost the functional high ground.

Below I have quoted a few highlights (but read the whole thing yourself, it is very short).

Apple’s hardware today is amazing — it has never been better. But the software quality has taken such a nosedive in the last few years that I’m deeply concerned for its future. I’m typing this on a computer whose existence I didn’t even think would be possible yet, but it runs an OS riddled with embarrassing bugs and fundamental regressions. Just a few years ago, we would have relentlessly made fun of Windows users for these same bugs on their inferior OS, but we can’t talk anymore.

And also…

I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing is too high a priority at Apple today: having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. Maybe it’s an engineering problem, but I suspect not — I doubt that any cohesive engineering team could keep up with these demands and maintain significantly higher quality.

I could not agree more.

In-App Audio Apps (Part II)

iOS 7’s new Inter-App Audio introduces universal audio routing between apps | 9to5Mac

Following WWDC this week Apple’s redesign of iOS 7 and Mavericks have been getting the majority of attention, and rightfully so, but there are a few new big features coming in iOS 7 that haven’t been discussed. This morning we told you about the new MFi Game Controller framework that will make using hardware game controllers a lot smoother in iOS 7, but another important new feature in the update is inter-app audio.

I found this after publishing my post on the subject yesterday. I am surprised to learn Inter-App Audio has been a feature on iOS since version 7. While this disrupts the context in which I set up the feature in my post yesterday (by explaining iOS 8 extensions), it confirms how quietly Apple added it. Judging from the picture in the linked article, it was announced at WWDC in 2013, but only in small text on a single slide of the presentation.

Apparently the feature was possible to achieve even earlier than 2013 using the app Audiobus.

I mistakenly attributed this feature to iOS 8 extensions yesterday due to “Inter-App Audio Apps” bearing a similar language to Apple’s documentation on the subject. They have certainly been quiet about the feature. I found a list of supported apps here. Given the size of this list, I stand by my statement that it is a shame we haven’t seen a truly great audio editor for iPad yet. Clearly the big players like Avid see software like Pro Tools as unsuitable for mobile devices. Apple’s own pro audio editor, Logic, has an iPad app, but it is just a remote for controlling elements of the Mac version.

The Future of Audio Plugins on iOS

iOS 8 brought App Extensions to the iPhone and iPad this past September. This means that apps are able to act in certain limited ways across the entire system. For example, an app can access your Notification Center in the form of a Today Widget, allowing the user to quickly see information and perform tasks on it by conveniently swiping down from the top of the screen. See below for an example of my Notification Center, customized to show data from my most used apps.

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Another example of this is the Share Sheet (See below). Now any app can create a button to share content with their app from within the one you are currently running. In the case of the image below, the web page I am viewing can be shared with apps like Pinterest and Evernote or any other app that has chosen to create a share sheet.

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Camera apps can also create extensions for their editing tools so that you can use them from right within the Photos app. Using an app like Afterlight used to require me to launch the app, import photos from the camera roll (thus duplicating them), make edits, and then save them back to the camera roll as a second copy of the image. No more! See below. Editing tools from other camera apps are available right from within the Photos app.

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All of the features I mentioned above were highly advertised by Apple at the launch if iOS 8. However, I do not recall Apple announcing that audio apps could create extensions as well.

I stumbled across audio extensions while noodling around in GarageBand recently. Apple has allowed other audio apps to run within, or rather, alongside GarageBand. Apple calls this “Inter-App Audio Apps.” Don’t be confused by this convoluted title. These are effectively audio plugins for iOS. And it appears that while there are not a ton of developers writing them into their apps so far, Apple has quietly laid the ground work for desktop class audio plugins on iOS.

See a demonstration below of me recording in GarageBand for iPhone. The drum track is created from a software instrument in the GarageBand app but the audio track is created from the entirely separate Animoog app. Animoog runs full screen but sends its output into my GarageBand project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snqDmLsG8r0&feature=youtu.be

What is interesting to me about these extensions is that they allow the opportunity for entire new types of iOS apps that could have never existed before. Apps like Animoog and iReal Pro existed as stand alone software before extensions were designed. Now it is possible for entire apps to exist that don’t do anything exepct serve as plugins for other audio apps. Software similar to what Waves and Native Instruments can do on a desktop computer no longer seem too far off on iOS. Now if we could just get a half way decent app for editing audio on iOS.

Note: Notice from the video that only a few apps I have installed on my phone are taking advantage of this feature. And I don’t find any of them other than Animoog really compelling. If you know of any other interesting apps taking advantage of these features, please let me know!

🔗 Rob Knopper: 12 Days of Delécluse

day 7: every piece of gear you’ll need for self-recording — ROB KNOPPER:

welcome to day 7 of the #12daysofdelécluse, in which we count down to the release of my new album, delécluse:douze études for snare drum. in addition to posting étude 7 today, i’m posting day 2 (of 3) of the complete guide to self-recording. see day one of the complete guide to self-recording here.

I am so impressed with these recordings and the entire presentation of Rob Knopper’s website. Every performing musician should have a website with a design and focus that represent their accomplishments so tastefully.

I will surely be buying the album and his clever Delécluse Starter Stickings™.

What iCloud Drive Is And What I Wanted It To Be

Apple’s new mobile and desktop operating systems are both out. iOS 8 and OSX Yosemite offer some of the best features to come from the company yet. Of these, one of the most exiting features to me is the iCloud Drive. Apple has finally realized that the way people actually want to manage documents in the cloud is what services like Dropbox and Google Drive have been doing for years.

iOS apps are no longer restricted to sandboxing which basically means that until now, your documents lived inside the applications themselves with no way to browse them beyond opening the application you created them within.

The iCloud Drive features a Dropbox style folder on OSX Yosemite. You can put anything in this folder, just like a Dropbox folder, and it will stay in sync across multiple devices. But Apple has made a few strange decisions as to how this all works. While creating a simple cloud drive folder seems a step in the right direction, they have maintained some baggage from the sandboxing model. For example, see the picture below. I can store any file I like in iCloud Drive. I can even organize them within folders however I want. However, the files I have created within various apps are saved into application specific folders by default. This is not a limitation as I can still get to those files from any app on OSX and iOS, but it adds a layer of unwelcome complexity. I see no benefit to keeping documents in these folders now that I can organize them however I want, so why do they need to exist?

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I am grateful that I can now open a file created in one app from within any other app. On top of this, Apple has allowed support for third party services to join the fun. They are calling these allowances “extensions” and the user interface you will see when you interact with them on a mobile device is called the “document picker.” See the images of the document picker below taken on my iPad. Opening a file from anywhere within my iCloud and Box cloud drives is now possible.

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I admit I have been reluctant to experiment with this a ton because it is all so new. The developers of software and cloud services need to code their apps to take advantage of these features. Not everyone has yet (I am looking at you Google Drive), and for some who have, the process is quite buggy at this stage (I am looking at you Dropbox). Even Apple’s solution, the iCloud Drive itself, does not work 100 percent bug free.

Time will tell how well these new cloud drive features work and to what extent they define the experience of managing documents between mobile and desktop devices. For the moment, however, I am still bothered that Apple has not taken what I feel is the simplest or most efficient approach to solving the problem in the first place.

Here is what I think Apple should have done:

Everyone is familiar with the Documents folder on the Mac. In fact, most people I know who use a cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive still store documents in the Documents folder unless they know they are really going to need to access it from somewhere else.

If Apple wanted to create a cloud drive for power users without changing the way OSX or iOS works, they should have taken the existing Documents folder and simply turned it into the iCloud Drive folder. I don’t even think they should have re-branded it. Why do that? The philosophy of iCloud is that the user doesn’t have to think about it. So why not just take the place users are already storing their documents and upload it to the cloud? There is little reason for the Documents folder to continue existing when the iCloud Drive folder is available on the same computer.

On the iOS side of things, Apple could have kept things just as simple. An app like Keynote, for example, could still show a grid of document thumbnails like it used to (see picture below), but these could be previews of the files the user has stored in their Documents folder on Mac. To avoid mass confusion, Keynote would of course only show thumbnails of the files in the Documents folder that it was able to work with. This process could be implemented with every app on iOS. Take away those silly app-specific folders in the iCloud Drive and make things truly simple without the user even needing to know anything changed. I doubt the average user will go to the trouble of learning about the new features of iCloud Drive this early on, but I bet they would notice if iOS apps started magically showing them the documents they have created on Mac.

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Of course, third party support for services like Dropbox would still be welcome. In fact, it is likely the average person uses more than one or two cloud services (likely Dropbox and or Google Drive). Why not offer the option to have that grid of thumbnails reflect the documents in a third party service by default instead of tapping through options in the document picker?

Since I have spoken of Dropbox so much, I think it is worth noting another major flaw in the new iCloud Drive. Until Apple provides a way to browse and manage files outside of the document picker (which can currently only be accessed from within another application), I will continue to use Dropbox as my primary cloud drive solution because they have an app on iOS that allows me to browse through my documents, move them around, share them, etc… Would it really hurt Apple to put a Finder app on the iPad and iPhone that worked like the Dropbox app?

Of course it is easy to be an “arm-chair” developer, sipping my coffee and thinking I know what is best for a company who has made billions off of their products. Still, I fail to see why Apple has gone out of their way to make something that doesn’t “just work.” Maybe someone with more technical knowledge than myself could explain a few simple reasons why my ideas are not feasible.

I will continue to watch the adoption of iCloud Drive as it unfolds in the coming months. In the meantime, here are some questions I still have about the service:

1. If I open a Dropbox document from the document picker on iPad, what happens if I switch to another task and the app I was using stops running in the background? Is my work saved back to Dropbox? Is it saved at all?

2. If I store a file created in Pages in the iCloud Drive, but not in the Pages folder, do all of Apple’s syncing and sharing features work the same way? For example, can I still collaborate on the same file with another user? Or, can I open the same document on iPad and Mac at the same time without creating conflicting copies?

🗒 The ABCs of Sibelius - Session Notes

Hello!

Welcome to my session, The ABCs of Sibelius. Click the link below to see a copy of the session notes including a keyboard shortcut cheat sheet.

Click here to see the notes.

iPads, Chromebooks, and the responsibilities of the post-PC educator

Below, I share some thoughts on the recent article in The Atlantic about why some schools are selling their iPads. Click here to read the article.

I was always skeptical of how quickly schools adopted iPads on a large scale. While they are easy to adapt as teacher tools for organization, proper training is necessary before they are put in the hands of an entire classroom. Generally speaking, educators are behind the times when it comes to technology because of how long it takes to organize and implement new hardware and curriculum. The iPad’s potential got hyped back in 2010 and though I know there are situations in which they are engaging kids, my experience tells me that many administrators are buying them out of the excitement of being seen as “technological” and telling interested teachers to just go right ahead without any plan how to enhance existing learning.

The examples in The Atlantic suggest some excellent points about the productivity of tablets vs. laptops. The idea that kids see tablets as “fun” devices and computers as “work” is of central interest to me. I wonder if American adults were surveyed, if the majority would say that their iPad is a reading, web browsing and light gaming device, or instead, that it is primarily used for email, documents and professional software. I use mine for both. However, I find myself leaving it at home from time to time. Though tablets are both productive and mobile, they are also playgrounds of varying different activities and amusements. I soon learned, for example, that if I wanted to get any serious reading done, I had to bring my plain old Kindle on the go instead of using the Kindle app on iPad where I would constantly get distracted by email, text messages and game notifications. For getting “real” work done, my Mac has the software features and keyboard for getting it done faster. Of course, I have seen many examples of iPads used in the classroom where it seemed the teacher intended them to be used as a fun gimmick rather than a tool for engagement or productivity, but that is a criticism for another post.

The question I raise is: do we as educators have a responsibility towards teaching students to manage the distractions that come with the utility of modern technology? Or do we “edit” real life, making school less like the real world but one in which getting positive results out of children is more immediate? I am talking about editing the classroom in the same way, for example, elementary school children get in line to travel down the hall or band directors give donuts to the section who has 100 percent sectional attendance. I understand why Chromebooks are favored in the examples in The Atlantic. There is something organized and concrete about putting your device in “listening mode” where it has to be in an objectively fixed position and no distractions can get through. I get it, but if we are truly living in a post-PC world, do kids need to learn how to cope with the distractions of a tablet as much as they did the inconveniences of a PC years ago?

As for IT management, Chromebooks make total sense. While I have known Google devices to be far more frustrating to manage for IT departments due to their open source nature, when kids are using apps as basic as Google Docs, the cloud is the perfect place to work. The nature of Google apps, Docs in particular, is to function entirely on the web. There are no software hassles, disk space shortages, or any of these other traditional “computer-y” ideas. Apple has to step up here. They are catching up, but I still have to think a little too hard about what is happening to a document when I save it to the cloud on a Mac or iPad. Google’s simple approach is a huge asset for students to share work with teachers and making sure that there are fewer management problems on the student end.

Chromebooks have appeared useless to me due to their limitations, but it seems these limitations are an advantage with large numbers of students in the classroom. I am interested to see if there is continued iPad fallout in the coming years or instead, an establishment of how post-PC devices are valued in education.