Olive Tree Reader Beta

I did this video last week, and announced it on twitter.  The fact that I didn’t put it on my blog is a sign that my on-line activities are shifting a bit.  Though I would like to get in the habit of blogging more provided I have something to say, and don’t become a ranting loony looking for conspiracies in order to drive traffic.  We’ll see.

Anyway, if you have an iPhone or an iTouch, you really should consider picking up the OliveTree reader from the App Store.  Enjoy.

My First Kindle Experience

Shortly before I left for Seattle I finished Flickering Pixels by Shane Hipps through the Kindle Service on my iTouch.  The experience was pretty good.  I do have to say that the idea of purchasing a book on the Internet and being able to read it in just under a minute is a pretty impressive feature.  While it might be a killer feature for iBook readers, however, I’m hesitant to call it a killer feature for reading in general for several reasons.  Let me just say in advance that I’m fully aware that my age does cause some of these preferences.

• Getting eBooks from anywhere can’t be a killer feature because the Kindle suffers from one huge problem that kills it’s portability feature.  It suffers from the “please shut down all electronic devices” syndrome that affects all electronics on airplanes.  As an experiment I didn’t bring any books with my on my trip to Seattle, but I had some free eBooks (and my kindle book) with me in my iTouch.  Unfortunately, for significant portions of my time on plane, I couldn’t read them because reading them would have gotten me yelled at (or arrested).  Now, you might say, “Big deal, just talk to people.”  I’d agree, but on 3 out of my 4 flights people refused to talk to anyone on the plane, it was weird.  They also had books, which made me jealous.
• I finished Flickering Pixels without any problems.  The screen on my iTouch is beautiful and I found myself reading whole chapters without much difficulty.  Yet, mentally I’m hesitant to say that I’ve read the book.  I understand that’s completely a mental category, but it’s there.  There is just something about getting to the end of a book, flipping through the footnotes for interesting ideas, and then hearing the cover close knowing that I’ve finished something.  There’s just no sense of that tactile satisfaction with the kindle.  Yes, it’s mental – and yes, it’s a completely learned behavior that I can re-lean (and most likely will re-learn) – but it’s a hurdle for me nevertheless.
• I continue to get stymied by the fact that I can’t share this book.  I have this great book that I’ve read (sort of – again, my psyche is in the way here) – and the only way I can letnd them my copy to read it is to either give them access to my kindle account or lend them my iTouch (both of which are not happening).  Until this is addressed I don’t care how convenient the purchasing it – I’m not going the kindle route.

So, kindle on my iTouch has got some impressive features (the bookmarking is actually very good) and works great with the iTouch’s screen – but it’s not a “killer” app…yet.  When I can lend books and turn it on when I’m on a plane that is landing/taking-off then I might think differently (or be willing to train myself to think differently).  Until then, it’s an experiment I ran which let me read the text of a pretty good book – but it’s not going any further than that.

The World of Kindle

When you start the Kindle App you're greeted with your library

Amazon’s Kindle software recently landed in the iTunes app store and so I decided to download it to give it a spin.  So far so good.  Before I give my review of the software, however, let me point out that I’m in no way ready to make the jump into eBooks for three reasons:

1. Right now I’m locked into whatever annotation format Amazon has implemented in the Kindle (and on the iTouch/iPhone software, that’s none at all).  I don’t write in books a lot, but when I do the notes are indespensible and I like have the annotations work the way my brain does – which is weird.
2. I love books.  I love the smell of a book, and the feel of the pages in my hands.  I realize that the future isn’t in physical books – but even Captain Picard had physical volumes and if it’s good enough for Jean Luc it’s good enough for me.
3. DRM.  Jasper Fforde does a brilliant job describing the problems of book DRM in his second novel Lost in a Good Book (read it, really).  The main problem is, I can’t share a book!  Reading is a communal experience for me, eBooks destroy that reality at the moment for the sake of convenience – it’s not a bargain I’m willing to make.

Having said that, there’s some good reasons to switch to eBooks as the technical and philosophical kinks get worked out:

1. The evironment is better served with eBooks, no more pulped up dead trees to support my book habit!
2. Technology will eventually catch up to give people the flexibility in annotations they want, and when it does, we’ll not only be able to make annotations, but make them searchable (no more paging through a book looking for my great comments!).
3. Society will (hopefully) stand up to publishers the way they did for music downloads.  I say “hopefully” because it’s by no means a sure thing, there doesn’t really seem to be a free download culture surrounding books – without that there isn’t much of an impetous to drop DRM.
4. Portability and Convenience are eBook’s killer features.  Today I just downloaded a book and was reading it on my iTouch in about a minute.  Instead of twenty books in my luggage when I travel, in the future I’ll just carry whatever ereader I want to carry.

Flickering Pixels, by Shane Hipps

OK, so enough philosophy, how does Kindle work on the iTouch/iPhone?  Pretty well, actually.  The flexibility of the interface is pretty nice, and even though the iTouch screen isn’t a pretty as digital ink, the fonts look wonderful at every zoom level.  The application is snappy, and page turns are a simple flick of the finger (much the same way that I advance slides in Stage Hand).  Bookmarks are also easy to manage, and Kindle automatically saves your last position when you exit the app.  As it stands right now, I only have two major problems with Kindle on my iTouch:

• They’ve hit the same snage that Olive Tree first hit when they released their app – Apple is paranoid about applications selling content apart from the app store.  Right now to get something for Kindle you have to open up Safari, purchase your book, and then open up Kindle to let it sync.  In a word tedious.  Olive Tree eventually got around this, I hope that Amazon gets over this hump as well.  Otherwise, this would not be a way I’d like to purchase books.
• At the default text zoom, you really don’t get a lot of text on the screen at a time.  This is just a limitation of the environment, I know – but if you want to go back 5 or 6 paragraphs those flicks can add up.

Fonts really do look spectacular on the iTouch/iPhone, Kindle is no exception

What book did I get?  Well, given that I like to write on Ministry and Technology I decided to pick up Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith by Shane Hipps.  My friend Chris said that Shane was working on many of the same projects that I’ve been dealing with – so it seemed like an appropriate choice.  While it’s not my first choice for reading a book, the kindle edition saved me about $4 + shipping charges.  I can get into that.

Stage Hand 1.5

My favorite presentation remote is Stage Hand.  It’s slick, it runs on my iTouch, and works wonderfully with Keynote.  A few months ago I did a video review of one of the inital releases of Stage Hand and folks seemed to like it.  Well, it’s changed so much over the last several releases I felt that the time had some to show people the new version.  So here it is, Stage Hand 1.5 in all it’s glory.

ACTPrinter Review

This morning I discovered that an app in the iTunes app store was going to be on special starting on Black Friday.  The special had the enticing price of “free” and, given that I was just waiting to back some spending money back before picking ACTPrinter up, I immediately downloaded it and set it up.

This is an incredible idea for people who are tired of wasting paper in order to print things like e-tickets (bar codes are scannable right off the iTouch screen), directions, or even sermons.  A small helper app gets installed on your mac and you end up printing any document directly to your iTouch/iPhone as a PDF, and the transfer is seemless.  I normally print out my sermon outline so I can prepare my presentation slides, today I just printed my outline to my iTouch and went to town – it worked perfectly.  This will save me a great deal of ink and paper in the coming year!

I do hope that zooming features are improved in the ACTPrinter browser in future iterations, though, it would be nice to double-tap on a paragraph and have the document zoom perfectly for that portion of text.  Even without this, the ability to carry around anything you might want to print from your Mac is a great idea – and one that is well implemented by ACTPrinter.

Here is my video demo for ACTPrinter:

Olive Tree Bible Reader on my Touch

 

The text is beautiful on my Touch

If I keep writing reviews of iPod Touch apps I might have to start another blog!  Until then, however, here’s my review of the Olive Tree Bible Reader for iPhone/Touch.  A Video review will follow.

One of the things I missed most when I retired my iPaq in July was a decent Bible reader.  Sure there were web-apps out there, but I really didn’t want to waste by batter by keeping wifi on all the time – and their speed left a LOT to be desired.  Shortly after the App Store opened there were some Bible Apps listed, but none had the features I was looking for, and I had already invested in Olive Tree’s Bibles so I figured I’d wait patiently for their offering.  I didn’t have long to wait!  Olive Tree Bible Reader (v. 4.002) is a capable reader for my touch, and the Bible looks beautiful on my Touch’s screen.  I’ve already used it in worship, and can honestly say that this offering is already a more pleasant experience than using their PocketPC reader.  The capabilities of the iPhone/Touch just seem to be better suited for Bible Reading.

Unfortunately, due to some confusion with Apple’s SDK, the current iteration of the Olive Tree Reader for the iPhone/Touch will not allow users to have their own personal libraries.  Apparently, Olive Tree wanted to make sure that offering Bible downloads for their app would be acceptable to Apple, and were told that it wasn’t.  This set back Olive Tree’s development several weeks, as they had already started implementing library management – this lost development time also led to some frustration once the App Store opened as approved apps like the Mantis Bible Reader were handling library management in a very similar way to Olive Tree’s proposal.  Currently, Olive Tree and Apple are working out a solution – which I hope comes soon (I want my full NET Bible, BHS, and NA27 without having to buy them all again).  Olive Tree is cautiously optimistic that a solution will be found, but this opening confusion does not bode well for Apple as a “benevolent overlord.”

Olive tree is currently by-passing real library management by offering bundles of Bibles in the iTunes store which can be installed side-by-side.  The bundles, however, are completely different applications and cannot share files (due to limitations in the iPhone/Touch).  The free Bundle consists of the Free NET Bible, MKJV, ASV, Darby, YLT, Weymouth NT, and several other language translations.  The ESV bundle costs $24.99 and has all of the above along with the ESV and KJV.  Both applications behave the same way.  Because I am waiting for library management, I downloaded the free bundle (I’m also cheap).

The chooser works, but can get cluttered

As mentioned above, the presentation of the Bibles on the iPhone/Touch screen is simply beautiful.  One of the drawbacks of reading the Bible on my old iPaq was that my eyes often felt strained.  Not so on my Touch.  The means of scrolling the next makes clean use of my Touch’s multi-touch interface.  A simple swipe moves the text up and down.  The buttons in the book/verse chooser are large enough to be easy to touch accurately – but tend to get a bit overwhelming in longer books and chapters due to the sheer weight of the numbers displayed.  Still, Olive Tree has implemented their familiar interface from their other readers well on the iPhone/Touch and scanning the numbers in the verse chooser is still faster than typing in the verse reference manually (which can be accomplished by typing in the search bar at the top of the screen.

In the original release there was no ability to create bookmarks, and the search function was rather limited.  In current beta’s, however, support for complex searches and bookmarks have both been added and implemented well.  Auto-scrolling, as far as I can tell, has not been implemented yet – but is on the development map for the Reader.

If you are looking for a decent Bible App for your iPhone/Touch, you need look no further than the Olive Tree Reader.  It’s already capable, and the features that are already in the pipe will make this a powerful  application indeed.

Stage Manager

I kinda wanted to do something “just for fun” today.  So I translated 1 Corinthians 12 (yes, I find that fun), wrote some e-mails, thought ahead for my fall Sunday School class, and did this video of my new presenter remote.  I had been using Salling Clicker – but I just got an iPod touch and they don’t have a version for the Touch yet – Stage Hand is amazing.