Mobile Mouse for iPhone and iPad
Creating content for Ubuntu November seems to be sucking up most of my time at the moment so blog posts on other subjects are going to be a little limited. But, I wanted to quickly write something today about my new favourite iPad app.
As soon as the 5 iPads arrived in school for us to test the first thing we wanted to try and look into was ways to get them connected up to our projectors, and a method of sharing content with a whole class while remaining mobile in the room. We experimented with VNC clients to connect to the classroom laptop, but Mobile Mouse has proved to be by far the best solution for remotely controlling your computer from the iPad.
Install is a two stage process, download an application to the computer you want to control (it runs in the background), and purchase the (less than £2) app from the App Store.
Opening Mobile Mouse you are presented with a large trackpad surface, mouse buttons, and a reproduction of your Dock at the bottom of the screen. Operation is as simple as using the iPad as a big trackpad for your computer. The dock makes launching applications easy, and buttons across the top of the app give you access to iTunes shortcuts & a keyboard.
Working with a web browser is an example of an application that has been enhanced by additional buttons. Opening Chrome I get a new top bar in mobile mouse that contains browser shortcut keys, allowing me to easily open new tabs, search, browse forward/back/etc.
In short- it’s not free (like Mocha VNC) and doesn’t actually show you what is on your laptop screen, but the additional features make this application so much more useable. This is the first app I have really found to be a massive improvement to the current way we teach, and one I would really recommend. Next step is to try the iPhone version.
Evernote for iPad
We have some iPads in school now… A set of about half a dozen out to members of our new techs school improvement group for trials up until Christmas. I’ll post some first impressions in a week or so once we’ve had a bit more of a chance to play, but I wanted to write about Evernote today.
Evernote has been part of my workflow for a little while now, and it is the first iPad app that I really find genuinely useful. Open up the iPad in a meeting, start a new note and I take down the key points I need. I’ve also discovered the iPad version has a nice little record button at the top so I can take the audio of important sections to refer back to later. All works beautifully, and is simple enough that it doesn’t interupt the flow of what I should be doing.
What is great about Evernote is what it does after I’ve finished the meeting. I hit the save button and don’t think about it again, but in the background it syncs it back to their servers and out to all of my other devices that also run the app. If I go back to the office and open up Evernote on my computer the notes are already there, same at home if I need to quickly refer to something. The iPhone app syncs as well so when I’m trying to quickly find that random one-liner I wrote down when out and about it is all there too.
If that’s not enough to convince you I’ve mentioned the text recognition on here before but it is worth saying again. Take a photo of a page of text on Evernote for iPhone and you can search the actual written content in Evernote. Cool.
iPhone apps for September
My regular list of recommended applications for iPhone that I’ve acquired over the month. In other news, I’m now an iPad owner so from here on the monthly post will feature those apps too. This month I’ve included two that have been around for a while that I’m sure most of you already have but I have only just really started to make use of.
Instapaper helps out with the huge amount of content you encounter on the web every day that you’d like to read but don’t have time to at that particular moment. You add a special bookmark to the browser on your computer, and every time you find a page you’d like to read later you click it.
Instapaper saves all these links for you, and the iPhone app presents these articles to you to read at a more convenient time. Really simple idea, but surprisingly useful. Makes those dead little bits of waiting time at stations/before meetings a little bit more productive.
The other neat little thing about the app I like is the tilt to scroll option. Work your way through articles just by tilting the phone.
Kind of on a similar theme actually, Dropbox helps you access your files wherever you are, whatever platform you are using. You install the app onto your computer(s) and sign up for an account with them. What you end up with is a shared folder on your desktop, you drop a file into it and it syncs to their servers and is accessible from any other machine you install it on. You can also access your dropbox via their website, meaning you can get to these files anywhere with an Internet connection. 2Gb of space for free, more than that and you pay.
I’ve got fairly organised recently in terms of making sure I have what I need everywhere (lots of Google Docs basically), but this has proved useful in distributing a couple of things recently. It’s also quite a nice way to safe store a few emergency things (backup presentations, templates, etc) that could help me out if things go really bad out on a job.
The iPhone app functions pretty much as you would expect. Open it up and you can access all the files in your dropbox. Works very well for files that the iPhone can handle. The other neat little iPhone function that I’m finding I use is the ability to email out these files. Good for quickly sharing that presentation.
And a little maths game to finish. Slice it! is one of those simple little ideas that proves really addictive. The game just asks you to evenly cut up shapes. It gives you a square and the ability to make 2 slices- you have to divide it into 4 equal parts. Levels get harder as you go, and I’m currently stuck attempting to slice these 2 triangles into 8 equal pieces using 4 slices…. Knew I should have concentrated a little harder in geometry lessons.
Image source- Instapaper. CC licensed on Flickr by Smoking Apples
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