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The University of Illinois at Springfield is hosting an open, online course about online education and technology starting next week. Week 4 is about online learning apps and mobile devices, week 7 will discuss the cloud and it’s uses. The course will last for 8 weeks in total.
A lot of apps are on sale for easter weekend. Scrabble is $0.99 instead of $9.99 for example. Other notables I have seen: Inspire Pro (painting program, $1.99), SyncSpace (shared whiteboard, free).
Theresa E,
Cute elementary math game. Free over Easter holiday. Math Ball. http://appshopper.com/education/math-ball
I am comparing the iWorks suite with Quick Office and if I am reading things correctly it looks like iWorks has a better interface and more features in general (with twice the price tag, $30 for Pages/Numbers/Keynote). The one area where it is lacking is cloud support. Unless I am missing something in their documentation, it doesn’t look like the iWorks products have any built-in way to play nice with storage like Dropbox, which would be mighty nice for working on projects at home, office or on the go. My understanding is that I would basically have to Mail it to myself (the iWorks app can do this) or pony up for a MobileMe subscription account that Apple runs to bilk some more money out of me. This makes the iWorks suite somewhat less attractive for me. If I misunderstand or have missed documentation of an update could someone please point me in the right direction? Thanks.
I haven’t used Dropbox on iPad, but I’ve used it on my Windows computer, and all you have to do is put the files you want synchronized into a specific folder on the Windows computer and they get synched to Dropbox. It’s completely independent of the application that you use; it all depends on the folder where you store your files. But, I’m not sure how “folders” work on the iPad. Maybe I can play with it this weekend.
If you’re in the Dropbox app on the iPad, you can see your folders. Other apps like Writings, PlainText, and Noteshelf make their own folders in Dropbox so they have a dedicated place to sync their respective files. I think it’s also part of Dropbox’s API that they have to work that way.
Sorry, I should have tried to be more clear. I have Dropbox at home, at work, and on the iPad and it works great; everything is neatly synched. The reviews I’ve read suggest that the iWorks suite, however, won’t let you access (read or write) to anything contained in the Dropbox. Other apps do allow access. For anyone who has used iWorks, I am trying to find out if that is true or if there has been an update and they just did not update their documentation.
You’re correct – Quickoffice plays nice with Dropbox and the iWorks suite won’t. IWorks has a prettier interface, but I find that I like using Quickoffice in order to be able to use Dropbox. SSS has been using Dropbox since last fall. Each month our department meeting agenda is placed in a shared folder on Dropbox and we each open the agenda on our iPads. I usually take minutes on the iPad, sometimes in Quickoffice, sometimes with Pages, and once with NotesPlus.
If you have pretty charts in Excel, don’t be surprised when they lose something in the “translation” to Numbers or Quickoffice. The same is true of anything elaborate in Keynote.
Todd, you’re right – QuickOffice plays with Dropbox in a much smoother way than iWork. That said, you *can* use Dropbox with iWork on the iPad but it means going through http://dropdav.com/ – which is free if you’re using a free Dropbox account. You would use the WebDAV access in the iWork apps — the problem is, iWork doesn’t remember the WebDAV access so you have to log in each time you’re getting files in or out.
There are rumors that Apple will be making MobileMe free or way cheaper soon to compete with services like Amazon Cloud. Some techie bloggers are saying it might be announced at their WWDC in June.
All that said, I’m still using Pages, Numbers, and Keynote on the iPad because interface plays a high priority for me. In fact, I wouldn’t even touch spreadsheets until I started using Numbers. Now I’m making graphs and charts. But for most meeting notes, quick notes and such, I either use Evernote or Writings — simpler apps that can sync with all my other devices easily. For presentations, I do love the ease of making screenshots on the iPad and inserting them into Keynote. But I have a Mac at home, so I’ve been using those applications in other contexts anyway.
Ugh – not a fond memory of trying to work on a very spreadsheet in Quickoffice! To be fair, there have been several Quickoffice updates since then and I have not yet gone back to try it. I’m thinking it would be a little easier if a stylus were used instead of relying on fingertips! 😉 Again, the Numbers interface is much nicer!
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BCU iPad Pilot 
Sara 12:20 pm on June 22, 2011 Permalink |
I’m signed up. Thanks, Todd!