I AM A-PAIN iPhone app

Okay… iPhone you win… My BB is certified to be no fun compared to the feature of this autotune app. I am not hating, but…

This app is a great novelty at first, but we don’t need a plethora of T-pain wannabes out here! Hey Jay-Z, I think that this app definetly twists the knife in the death of autotune. (BTW, I meant to replace the the ‘T’ with an ‘A’ in T-Pain of the title of this post.)

barcampCLT 2

I was very fortunate to be in the attendance of BarcampCLT2 at Area 15. It was great being around people that are so much more geeky than me. And to think that I was once on the path of coding righteousness. I don’t regret being an educator but I do miss the joy of debugging code and troubleshooting network/server issues.

I learned few off the wall things, such as Blackberry users felt the shameful of their devices. Also, Oprah seems to be the benchmark of your Twitter Coolness. (Anyone joined after her is to be considered unoffically lame.) Oh, almost forgot to mention that men that knit are way cool.

I will share a few takeaways from the sessions that I attended.

1. iPhone App Dev Roundtable

I received some inspiriation to get on board in creating iPhone
apps for education, however an Apple laptizzle is required.  It was mentioned the iPhone for Dummies book was a good read. The process of getting an app approved for the App Store was communicated as being very difficult. Pushing apps via ad hoc for clients was mentioned as a work around.

• Web Resources referenced:
  http://appceletator.com
  http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php
  http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/

2. Making $$$ Online

This session was a little similar to last year. Here’s a sample from YouTube…

3. 45 Questions in 45 Minutes

Some good info popped up here. Some discussions on Google Wave, FireFox, and Android took the show.

4. Managing Your Social Networks

Long story short, use an RSS new reader aggregator to gather all your Web2.0 sites. Outlook was mention as a good RSS reader becuase it allow you assess RSS feeds behind secure logins.  Also it was discussed the importance of adding value to tweets by linking your social networks.

• Web resources mentioned:
  http://ping.fm
  http://igoogle.com
  http://netvibes.com
  http://pipes.yahoo.com
  http://dizzysoft.com/rss/manage-your-social-networks
  http://feedtwit.com
  http://websitebiz.com

5. Simple Content Management

The presenter actually went through the stage of registering a site domain, hosting, and dumping CMsimple in a directory to making it live. Very nice… especially since CMsimple does not require having to deal with databases where CM packages such as WordPress and Drupal require.

• Web resources mentioned:
  http://dreamhost.com
  http://www.aweber.com/
  http://www.e-junkie.com/
  http://www.myemma.com/
  http://www.mailchimp.com/
  http://dotcomwebdesign.com/

Sessions that I wish I could have attended:

How to create webcasts that don’t suck
The Rabbit Hole
Google Page Ranking

Overall, this was another successful unconference. I highly recommend you to check one out that’s near you.

My upgrade to iPhone quandary

To upgrade or not, that is the question…

I am currently a Blackberry Curve user. I can do a lot on my smart phone already, so… do I really need to hand over my hard earned scrilla to Mr. Jobs? There’s a recession going on, son!

I am quite hesistant to go sans qwerty keypad. Since the 25th officially marks the end of my AT&T year (of 15 months), what will I really gain besides crossing over to the National iPhone Geek Society.

You’ve seen it…

Yes… the stare of death into their laps.

As a middle school teacher, it kills me when I catch a student doing this classic move. When confronting the student, they say…..”I’m not doing anything! What are you talking about?” You know without a doubt that they are TEXTING!!!! It has been known for some students to actually text without looking at the keys. Amazing memorization and dexterity, eh?

Also, beware of the silent/mosquito ringer tone. Depending on the teacher’s age, you will not be able to hear the tone; as illustrated by the graph provided below from http://john.maloney.org/

Fortunately I can hear it for now because I often play around with it on my phone during staff meetings to aggravate the younger teachers.

Due to the growing issues with cell phones in the classroom, we might as well use these devices to our advantage. I am looking forward to the bright engineers from Texas Instruments to team up with Black Berry to create the ultimate graphing calculator/smart phone. I know that there are free apps such as gCalc and XCalc BlackBerry that will allow this to happen now. In my humble opinion, I feel that if TI endorses/creates the product, I do believe that it would actually be embraced within our school systems…. maybe. What do you think?

Barak & I…. We admit our BB addiction…

Yes I must admit. I love my BlackBerry smartphone (and apparently so does President-Elect Obama.)

I current own a BB Curve (fiening for the new Bold.) I have found many uses for my phone. I have listed my top 5 reasons continue my BB usage…

1. twitterberry
2. image capturing w/decent quality
3. crime deterrant
4. access to work & personal email (using qwerty keypad)
5. on-the-fly gps

Yes, my list is very simple. However right now, the only feature that I am missing is the video recording capabilities which the Bold currently provides. I don’t need or use the MP3 functionality my BB has, because that is what my 30GB video iPod is for.

Before I laid my hands on the BB, I was dying for an iPhone. When the madness surged and problems arose, I diverted over to the BB. I have been thumbing my qwerty keyboard to death ever since. I can honestly say that I tried the iPhone touch screen keyboard, but.. ah ah… no go…

I can’t imaging trying to swiftly kick out a tweet at a stop light or replying to an email while driving on an iPhone. Not that I’ve tried or done that, but you get my point.

Sorry for going a little off topic but…RIM, my question to you is, why try to compete in the touch screen market? If so, keep the qwerty keypad! IMHO, the BB Storm will fail miserably. Before its launch, the Storm has already been put through the ringer per this article.

Oh well.. one day, I will look forward and share with you how much I enjoy my BB Bold (unless Apple releases an iPhone with a qwerty keypad!!!)