education | technology | ai & NOT A.I. | design | ICT-DESIGN.ORG | AI | DR. THOMAS JOHNSON

A New World Order: Short. Thoughts.

Two friends of mine have iterated the sentiment that ‘long copy’ might be a thing of the past. We are writing for new readers: SMSers & smart phone (both 420 characters), tablet, and netbook readers, Twitter (140 characters), Google meta-tags with their overview of websites (233 characters), Facebook status updates (changed from 160 to 420 characters), MSN updates 128 characters) and more. We are limited with characters. Therefore, we need to

Get to the point!

My friend, Christina Arenth, writes, “My favorite history writing professor always told us that if we couldn’t say it in two pages, we didn’t have any idea what were talking about”.

Another friend, Aloha Lavina, who used to be a journalist and now writes for a blog, was talking to me the other day and mentioned that Newspapers need to write in shorter format. She said, people don’t want to read long jargon anymore. Today is the day of single sentence paragraphs.

Short. Succinct. Just like this article.

WordPress blog from iPad2

09 Apr

I am writing this blog from my iPad2. I love it, but the App has it’s limits. In order for you to write your own blog:

Download the WordPress App from the AppStore
Go to your blog online. (not from the WordPress App)
Log in
Go to: “Settings” –> “Writing” –> “Remote Publishing”
Check “Enable the Atom Publishing Protocol”
Check “Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols”
Save changes
Log in to the WordPress App
Add or edit “Posts”, “Pages” and “Comments”.

I tried to add pics through the iPad2. First, I tried the Free Adobe Photoshop Express App. Surprisingly, it didn’t open PSD files. Huh?

My next step was to look at the PSD viewer from Adobe, but it seems just like the name implies… a viewer!

I downloaded Layersforipad for $5.99, hoping it would allow me to open and edit PSD files. I can create PSD files, but I cannot open my saved files from Dropbox.

I have a red border, that you see around every image in my blog, that I want to continue on the images. In order to do this I have to:

Download an image with the border (This is not the PSD file, which would be ideal)
Open the file in “Layersforipad”
Painstakingly, delete the inner image, but not the border, pixel by pixel. (This took about an hour or more)
Prepare the image I want to use with “moreBeaute2″ to soften and correct, and “PS Express” to crop
Insert the photo layer in “Layersforipad”
Save to photos
Resize the image in the “Resize photos” app
Upload the image through the WordPress app, which always places the image at the bottom of the post (it is necessary to copy and paste the HTML code if I want to move the image

Note about writing blogs through the WordPress App: There is no WYSIWYG editor. Therefore it is useful, almost crucial that you can edit HTML in order to have proper formatting.

2 Comments

Posted by Dr. Thomas Johnson | ict-design.org on April 9, 2011 in Technology

Tags: Blogging, iPad, Technology

Scan and directly Edit Text with OCR

05 Apr

“You mean all this time I didn’t have to retype my document?”

Correct.

OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, which most scanners on the market today have built right in to the software take a document that has text on it and converts it to editable text in Microsoft Word or RTF programs like notepad.

It is usually just the click of a button and then a scan option. It means going from here.

…to here:

9 Comments

Posted by Dr. Thomas Johnson | ict-design.org on April 5, 2011 in Technology

Tags: OCR, Scanning

iPad3, 4 and beyond predictions (requests)

02 Apr

I love my iPad2. That said, I have a few ideas for the developers. So listen up.

Here we go:

Thinner and Lighter – most obviously
Screen completely to the edges – I expect
Unlimited battery life (I can see this not being an issue one day. What is going on with wireless energy transfer anyway? Read more here and here) or built-in extendable plug
Unlimited hard-drive space (I bet one day in the near future we will laugh at the days ‘when people used to run out of space on their drives’. The notion of Cloud Computing is taking us leaps and bounds, but it is still in its infancy)
Super-flipping fast because of terabytes and more of RAM and super wicked processors
Two flashes built-in on the front and the back
Magnetic electric cord – Macbooks have them. Why don’t the iPods, iPads, and iPhones?
Ability to make phone calls with it – Hey! We thought phones were just getting smaller, but since maybe you only want to carry around the one device for that moment, why not?
Biometric or fingerprint scans to turn the devices on or login – Other computers are doing this, why isn’t Apple?
Water Proof
USB slots. We all want them. Give em to us? Or is there a screaming new attachment slot that is better? Actually, why not magnetic USB? We can do it with the power cord. Let’s do it with the USB or whatever we want to call the Magnetic Universal Connecting Cord (MUCC – Trademark Thomas Adam Johnson 2011 – hehe)
Auto-focus on the cameras and possibly even built-in OCR
The incorporation of Adobe with Apple – Like WTF? (Why the Face? am I not allowed to view Flash content on my iPad without serious tweaks? let’s get out schnizzle together and make it work for the peeps)