Tag Archives: Reviews

A Quick Look at Penultimate 4

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PenultimateEvernote released Penultimate 4 late last week. (Unfortunately, it’s only available for iOS 6 at the moment, though support for iOS 5 is expected in the next update. Penultimate is currently not available for Android, though they’re apparently working on that.)

Heather and Ethan have mentioned Penultimate in this space before, and we’ve spilled a lot of digital ink over Evernote itself.

There are two major features to this release of Penultimate:

  • Automatic synchronization with Evernote (to which the user must deliberately opt in; it isn’t forced) and
  • Handwriting recognition within the application itself, not just within Evernote (though this feature does require Evernote sync).

The app is free, so it’s definitely worth checking out. As I experimented with it, though, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t going to work well for me.

The automatic synchronization with Evernote works flawlessly. If you make quick freehand sketches or take short handwritten notes that you want to be searchable and backed up automatically, Penultimate may be just what you’re looking for (and you certainly can’t beat the price tag).

In my case, the problem is that I take lengthy notes that are handwritten — quite a lot of them. Handwriting recognition seems to work best (at least in my experience) with printed letters. I write longhand. My penmanship is decent, but Evernote doesn’t seem to recognize it very well. Handwriting recognition, though nice, isn’t an essential for me, so that in itself isn’t a deal-breaker. But there are two other difficulties that mean Penultimate isn’t the app for me to use on a regular basis:

  • The application doesn’t have continuous scrolling. To add a new page when the current one is full, you need to tap the lower right corner (or upper right, if you’ve moved the toolbar to the top of the page — which I’d recommend doing to avoid accidentally selecting tools you don’t want while you’re writing).
  • There’s no zoom/focus that enables you to write normally in a window at the bottom of the screen, while what you write appears in smaller form above the area where you’re actually writing (Notes Plus and Notability both have this feature; neither is free, but neither is high-priced, either). It makes writing more difficult than it needs to be, and results in filling each page very quickly.

Penultimate may not be particularly useful for me, but for other usage scenarios it may work very well. So let us know in the comments: What kinds of things do (or would) you use an application like Penultimate for? If you’ve tried it, how well did it work for you? If you’ve tried other applications, what did you think of them?

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by deburca]

Digital Distractions: The Grading Game

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Exam resultsGiven the popularity of phrases like “grading jail” to describe the stress of the competing demands to offer meaningful feedback in the shortest amount of time possible, it seems unlikely that there’s any fun to be had in grading papers as part of a game, but that is the wager of The Grading Game, by modes of expression.

The Grading Game (iOS) makes you the TA of Dr. Snerpus, the meanest faculty member on campus, who demands that you flunk students for saying mean things about him on social media. You are then presented with a variety of papers with typographical and grammatical errors, and your job is to find them in a given amount of time. If you succeed, you will be able to pay off your (virtual) student loans. Game mechanics couldn’t be simpler: your finger is the red pen, and you tap errors to fix them. Beware, though: if you fat-finger the wrong line, or otherwise tap a correct word, you get a time penalty. And the pressure is on: If you don’t deliver average student grades in the C range or below, you don’t get paid!

Here’s what it looks like:

Screenshot of the Grading Game

Although they are very short and not very well-written, the essays are arguably the best part of this game, as they draw facts from reddit’s page of especially interesting Wikipedia entries (how can you not love this speech by Soggy Sweat, Jr.?) According the game designers, the typos and grammatical errors are randomly generated from lists of the most statistically common such errors.

The literal-minded might object to several aspects of the game, such as the fact that it imagines a world where TAs are paid by the error, where it’s possible to earn more than $1000 for correcting a three-sentence essay, and where grading is fundamentally a hunt-the-typo enterprise. And there’s no doubt that for people who actually do grading, it’s a bit disorienting to shut down your normal grading instincts and focus only on typos and obvious grammatical errors. (For example, errors of citation–leaving out quotation marks around quotations, for example, are not recognized by the game. Similarly, writing that is awkward or vague or misleading, but not outright ungrammatical, is fine.)

I also would have to agree with Phil Scuderi‘s observation that the game isn’t really about either grading or grammar, but is rather about tricking your brain to see what is actually on the screen, rather than seeing the correct grammar that it expects. And it’s also true that there’s not a ton of variety in the game: it offers you one trick, and you either enjoy it or not.

But I will say that The Grading Game makes proofreading surprisingly engaging. By organizing each challenge into three 30-second increments, the game is a fun way to kill little pockets of time. While it’s no Kingdom Rush, It’s currently priced at $0.99, and there’s also a free version that lets you play a few levels before you plunk down your dollar.

(I learned about The Grading Game via “The Fiver, which is The Guardian‘s daily tea time e-mail rounding up news, commentary, and videos about soccer football, and which is a fine digital distraction in its own right.)

Do you have a mobile game you’re enjoying at the moment? Why not share in comments?

Photo “Project 365 #231: 190810 The Proof of the Pudding” by Flickr user Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0

 

A One-Line Program as Book: 10PRINT

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10print[This is a guest post by Kathi Inman Berens, who curates electronic literature and researches classroom interfaces. This year, she's co-curating e-lit exhibits at MLA and the first-ever e-lit show at the Library of Congress. She teaches at USC, where she's a Fellow at the Annenberg Innovation Lab. Follow her on Twitter at @kathiiberens.--JBJ]

Lifting up the 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 hardcover, one’s first impression is: I’d better use both hands. It’s a heavy art book compressed to the physical dimensions of a typical academic monograph, though it is anything but typical.

Designed by Casey Reas (one of 10PRINT‘s ten co-authors, many of whom have been collaborating recombinantly for years), this glorious hardback is not just a container, a div for prose, but a beautifully realized art object. Check out these images on Reas’ 10PRINT Flickr stream. Even the book’s paper edges seem aestheticized, marbled by cerulean ink meandering from the book’s seventy-plus monochromatic illustrations and chapter breaks.

10Print x 2

Tactile and visually rich, the 10PRINT aesthetic experience is compromised for readers of the free PDF. Book pages displaying four mazes (116-17, for example), entirely lose their effect when stacked in the .pdf as a vertical pair. Are the aesthetics of the 10PRINT book non-incidental — are they in fact crucial — to the book’s argument? I think so, but I can’t yet fully explain why. The book dropped four days ago. For humanists that’s a nanosecond.

But it’s enough time for some of the book’s other audiences to already have logged many hundreds of lines of code and conversation, to have created, even, a “cheaty ProcessingJS” emulation of the BASIC maze (authored by Ph.D. candidate Kevin Brock). Humanists’ tools aren’t like that. Interpretation takes a while to warm in the fire. 10PRINT knows this. The book’s deft thematic weaving, its meld of ten voices into one, bespeaks patience, slowness.

For those familiar with the Commodore 64′s output, 10PRINT‘s dust jacket might seem a simple remediation of the maze produced by the book’s “mouthful” of a title. The cover illustration seems to be a white maze overlaying a blue screen, but it’s not. The white bits are made of shapes, Xs that shatter into repeating squares and broken rectangles. The “real” maze, made of forward slashes [/] and back slashes [\], printed on the book’s endpapers, is made to look faded and pixelated as if traveling through time: visually distressed like faux antiques whipped with chains to chip away at veneer.

Such a book coaxes humanists to open it.

Sure, there’s a lot of code. But if you were expecting 10PRINT to read as like a View Source window, you might be delighted (comforted?) to find familiar contexts and theories anchored in medium-specific practice of all kinds. Where programmers see forward and back slashes forming shapes that are functionally distinct — a maze is multicursal, with many paths through it, a labyrinth unicusal — the 10PRINT authors ask “would programming be meditating, dancing, escaping, solving, or architecting a maze? Would the user be Theseus or Daedalus?” (49).

Such questions seem like “bullshit” to some of the programmers on the Slashdot and Reddit 10 PRINT threads. But trash talking seems an ordinary part of hacker culture. It’s too early in 10PRINT’s reception to gauge the book’s success in creating conversations that “transcend” (xi) Twittersmack — er — disciplinary borders.

At the very least the book’s sudden and surprisingly popular reception indicates that 10PRINT is poised to be this year’s Debates in DH: a book regarded as field-defining, and about which conversation might continue all year long. Amazon’s stock of 10PRINT sold out in 3 days (see this handy chart to find your own hardback copy). The free .pdf available at 10print.org has logged over 12,000 downloads as of yesterday morning.

Though some programmers may deride BASIC as the language of “children and amateurs” (159), the authors were right to travel back to the future. They anticipated the overlapping needs of their various audiences accurately and with gusto.

Photo “Spread from 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10″ by Flickr user Casey REAS / All rights reserved.

Portable Scanning with the Doxie One

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Cat on Desk
While a paperless university remains a fantasy, it’s certainly the case that there has been increased interest in paperless workflows. We’ve had a series of posts on paperless apps and devices here at ProfHacker, and David Sparks’s excellent e-book, Paperless galvanized many workflow discussions. (A recent good one is Chris Holscher‘s.)

One of the devices we looked at last year is the Doxie Go, a portable scanner by Apparent that tries to unbundle scanning from computers. You could scan anywhere, saving the scans either to internal memory or to an SD card, and then sync later. You could even use an Eye-Fi card to sync wirelessly to your computer. I liked the device, but Konrad, who travels to archives a bit more than I do, didn’t like the fact that the device doesn’t work while it’s charging.

This year, Apparent is back with a new model of Doxie Scanner: the Doxie One, which partly addresses Konrad’s concern. Like the Doxie Go, the One is a single-sheet scanner that is both portable and inexpensive. Indeed, the Doxie One is $149, which is an excellent price for the portability, ease of use, and quality of the product. It even resembles last year’s Go:

Doxie One

Doxie will also cheerfully sell you skins that let you add some color to your scanner.

The Doxie One addresses Konrad’s concern by removing the internal battery altogether. Instead, it’s powered by a regular AC outlet, or by 4 rechargeable (not alkaline) AAA batteries. (Like the Go, the One will not scan while connected to a computer.)

Another reason the Doxie One is $50 cheaper than last year’s model is that there’s no internal storage. Scans are saved directly to an SD card. Doxie includes a 2GB card with the Doxie One, but it’s not an Eye-Fi card, so it doesn’t support wireless syncing out of the box. You can sync scans to a computer either directly from the SD card or with the included USB cable. You can also sync to an iPad, if you have one of Apple’s SD card reader adapters. (On the iPad, the scans open in iPhoto, rather than in a native app.)

It’s also the case that the Doxie One only supports 300dpi scans, unlike the Go which can also support 600dpi. (If higher quality scans are your priority, then you are probably not in the market for a $150 ultraportable scanner.)

The review unit I’ve been playing with works exactly like last year’s Doxie Go: it’s a dead-simple single-sheet scanner, capable of scanning a letter-size sheet in 8 seconds. As I said last year, this is a scanner you’ll want to use to process the daily onslaught of paper, not to reduce your archive of photocopied journal articles to .pdfs. The software is intuitive, allowing for edits, for combining sheets into one PDF, for sharing with Evernote/Dropbox (or, on a Mac, via AirDrop or iMessage), and more.

If price and space were not constraints, then the David Sparks-endorsed Fujitsu ScanSnap would be the scanner to buy. But it’s more than $400! Even Fujitsu’s portable models are in a different price range than the Doxie line. But the scanner that works best is the one you have with you always, and the Doxie scanners are portable and affordable enough to be a useful tool in digitizing paper–possibly even in the classroom.

Not everyone will want a scanner like this. After all, there are in fact apps for that, which turn your smartphone’s camera into a scanner, some even offering OCR. While I have used them in a pinch, right now I find the apps a little annoying to use–I’m always worried about the light, or the background, or holding my hand steady, or whatever. A simple little scanner that grabs the paper, runs it through, and gives you a nice digital copy is just the thing. And the Doxie Go and new Doxie One make it trivial to get rid of the paper cluttering up your office, home, or car–or to keep it from getting there in the first place.

Photo “Lila on a Messy Desk” by Flickr user Laurie Avocado / Creative Commons BY-2.0

Updates to Evernote

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Elephant slide

That members of the team here at ProfHacker are fans of Evernote is hardly a secret; we’ve mentioned it on numerous occasions. It’s very useful for storing and searching whatever information you want to keep track of, and it syncs across platforms, so all your notes are available to you, no matter what device you’re using.

Within the last few weeks, Evernote has released updates to the Mac and iOS versions of its client software. I won’t bore you with a list of the features; the posts linked in this paragraph (with their accompanying videos) provide a good overview for those who want it.

What I’d like to do instead is point out two of the new features that I find useful for my own work:

  • The new sidebar in the Mac version. I have a lot of notebooks, and a lot of tags, but there are only a few that I use with any great frequency. The ability to add them to the sidebar as shortcuts makes it very easy to get to them very quickly—even more quickly than using the search function. Being able to show or hide the Notebooks list, and otherwise customize the sidebar, is a nice touch. (An aside: the Atlas view available from the sidebar is interesting. I don’t expect I’ll use it much, but I can see it being very useful for someone who travels a lot.)
  • The tabbed view in the iOS version. This way of viewing one’s content makes it easy to find things quickly by notebook, tag, or place. That’s good, because while the search function is there in the iOS app, it isn’t particularly easy to find (you have to pull down on the grey bar between the green header and the notes list—but it’s not obvious, nor, I suspect, all that easy for someone with large thumbs). The app functions quickly and smoothly, even on an aging iPhone 3GS.

The Mac version runs on 10.6.6 and above; for the mobile version, you’ll need to be running at least iOS 5.0.

Have you given either of these new versions a try? If so, let us know what you think of them in the comments.


[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by sabotrax]