Inside View

Working around the self-imposed 3.5 limit

We have several flavours of headphones in the house and it's getting very messy to figure out which technology delivers the best sound. I may stay with Sony Xperia handsets to reclaim something close to the warm turntable tones I learned to love.

Clever Red Lines on Google Maps

GOOGLE MAPS ARE SO SMART. I use Google Maps to see all sorts of things, including red lines that show slowdowns of traffic.

In the screenshot accompanying this blog post, you can see red lines perpendicular to the railway line leading into Clonmel. I am the blue dot on the map. The blue dot is an Irish Rail train.

Anyone with an Android phone who has geolocation data turned on will provide Google data about relative speed on roads, parking spots and the time they go to cinemas.

I like sharing my movement data because I feel I am getting intelligent travel information in return. How about you?

** Bernie Goldbach uses a Sony Xperia Z5 running Android Marshmallow.

The 8yo Set Today in All the Phones

Reminder set by @miarosegold.

SOMETIME IN NOVEMBER, our inventive 8yo borrowed her parents' phones to set up an electronic reminder that her Christmas Play was at 2PM on 17 December 2015. I was surprised at the time because when she started clicking through the menus, she simply worked through all the prompts and returned my Xperia Z5 to me with the notification running in the background.

Processing Time to Extract Writing Process #LITdeveloping

Photo of writing workshop page from @topgold's Moleskine via Lumia to Flickr.

AS I WROTE a few takeaway thoughts (in the photo)  during a writing workshop at a staff development day, I realised my own process needs a peer review. That's why I expose my workflow to like-minded colleagues at events such as those run by Congregation and Dublin's e-learning summer school. [1]

I also ruminate inside social audio channels and as I started summarising my thoughts on my blog, Ian Kath in Brisbane offered a similar line of thought. Ian and I often share the same wavelength, crossing over spaces 12 time zones apart. Sometimes I feel telepathy at work.

Ian Kath: Forcing Some Form from the Mists [2]

Ide O'Sullivan from the Regional Writing Centre at the University of Limerick challenged 20 third level lecturers to reflect on their own writing practises. Some of those in the workshop might consider themselves "constipated writers", a term of endearment for some of the people with the most extensive array of pens in the audience. After five minutes of free form writing, we paused to share opinions. I offered thoughts about the value of unstructured audio recording because I know I can often extemporaneously explain an idea in complex terms better than I can write those same ideas. I use Audioboom for that process and Audio Recorder Pro on my Lumia 1520 for sampling lossless sound files.

Getting the spoken word to the written word can be a job for a stenographer or Mechanical Turk. Or if you have the pocket money, Read Write Gold (£320) or Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking (£145) might do the trick. I manually transcribe the core ideas and display main points as large (48 point or bigger) phrases on single Powerpoint slides. In many occasions, those Powerpoint slides form the basis of co-authored academic exercises for students.

I hope to compare writing workflows with other colleagues before the summer, possibly figuring out ways to consistently produce more than 1000 words of content every day. I prefer using Scrivener for my writing because it keeps me on projects, counts words and exports to Kindle and iBooks with a few simple compilation key strokes. I'm grabbing screenshots to show various parts of my writing projects as they unfold during the current semester. 

[Bernie Goldbach is the senior pilot creative multimedia lecturer flying out of the Limerick School of Art & Design.]

1. The highest value-for-money in any Irish event happens for me during the autumn gathering in Cong, County Mayo, Ireland.

2. This is the first time I've tried embedding OneDrive audio on Typepad. If you're reading this via subscription and discover the MP3 was enclosed with the blog post, please let me know. Thanks!

Geofenced e-mail. Venue-specific correspondence.

I GET A LOT OF MILEAGE out of Gmail and now I can boomerang a message to a specific location. This is very handy when I need to have petinent messages in front of me at the right place.

All my important meetings involve working through details connected by threads of emails. With Boomerang, I can push received mails to the top of my Inbox when I arrive at different locations. All I have to do is to Boomerang a message and also set a Location option.

When Boys Use Hair Salon 2

A Hair Salon 2 creation by Evan (9).

I CAN SEE creative work emerging on our different devices because all of them connect their photo albums yo my Google Plus account. Last weekend my nine year old nephew had a go at Toca Boca's Hair Salon 2 and left a few screenshots worth sharing.

The Toca Boca team understands how to build a compelling app and now that Hair Salon runs on both Android and iOS we hear the sounds of water showers and hair cutters running in the house or back seat.

Until this past weekend, I didn't know Hair Salon would engage a young boy. But the attached screenshot proves otherwise.

(Big props to Ruth Arnold for introducing us to Hair Salon 2 via the audio edition of her Geek Mummy blog.)

Mark Your Apps for K-12 Education #playedu

Screenshot from G+

IF YOU HAVE an education app written for Android, you can mark it for inclusion in the Google Play for Education program, which is being piloted by schools across the United States. Marking your app identifies it as targeted for the US K-12 educational market and queues it for evaluation by a 3rd party network of educators.

To mark your app for inclusion, go to:

Using VidTrim Pro For More Audio Too

The VidTrim Pro logo that has a place of honour on my Android screen.

I BOUGHT VidTrim Pro for two euro because its reviewers said it would help me cut, edit and upload strips of video recordings on my Sony Xperia. It also produces high quality audio clips too.

The most positive factor about the software is it allows me to use the two microphones on my Xperia handset and that means I get authentic doppler effects with traffic, wave action on the beach and the drifting sounds associated with lively pedestrian footfall across Ireland.

First Touch of Audio-Evolution

Screenshot from Bernie Goldbach's Xperia Z using Audio-Evolution.

BECAUSE JASON GOFF pointed to Audio-Evolution on Android, I bought the app. It lays down multi-track recordings with dozens of audio software effects in the menu.

First Cut by Audio-Evolution

I made the above audio clip for fellow Audiobooster Phil Sorrell, just to prove the app worked right out of the Google Play cloud.

Android Game Development on Campus

Bernie Goldbach in LSAD-Clonmel | Click the 5yo to see video.

ONE OF THE MOST clever evolutions of the creative multimedia programme in the Limerick Institute of Technology is how it has started to poke into app development. We're doing user testing with junior infants on an Android game that's currently in alpha.

You can click on the still image of this blog post to hear Mia's opinion about the mathematics game and the Space Junk game (her favourite). The games are the brain children of Ross Bolger, Patrick Broder and Edgaras Zvirblys on the Clonmel campus of the Limerick School of Art and Design. I like what's evolving with the game.

Mia, the tester, used a Motorola Media Tablet to evaluate the immersive game. One handy thing about the game is that its APK file can be emailed to anyone and it they're using Android, it just works.

We'll have an update about Space Junk and two other games as the Spring 2013 semester winds to its conclusion.

Review of Space Junk

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Watch on YouTube or listen on Audioboo.

Bernie Goldbach teaches creative multimedia to students at the Limerick School of Art and Design.