Cole W. Camplese

I ' m Actually Blogging About a Keyboard

Those who paid attention to Apple's latest round of announcements also saw that they released a new keyboard. I am using it to type this post ... let me say that I was/am a big fan of the keyboard design of the MacBook, so when I saw the design of this new number I was excited. With that in mind I plunked down the $49.00 for the new wired version and it showed up today. I have to say I like it quite a bit. After I got my bluetooth Apple Keyboard I thought I would never go back to a wired version, but this is nice. They do have a wireless version, but it is much more like a laptop keyboard -- without dedicated number keys ... it just doesn't do it for me. This is not a review, you can find those everywhere online ... but let me summarize, I like it and you may not.

This thing fits me well. It takes a slight amount of getting used to, but I am really liking the feel. I beginning to notice what a difference it makes to have input and output devices that work for you does. Typing faster means greater productivity when you live in a blogging/searching/writing world ... it is like finding the right mouse, it just helps. I switched to a 24" display at work several months ago and I can't tell you how many cycles that has saved me over a 20". Sounds crazy, but having the right gear makes a huge difference. I can imagine most people see that for someone like Tiger Woods -- having the right clubs makes a huge difference for him. Sure he would kick ass with my irons, but a stroke difference means being Tiger and not someone else. Trust me, I am not comparing us to Tiger, but all I am saying is that having the right tools for the trade helps!

Does this mean I will field requests from people tomorrow asking for 30" displays and faster machines -- probably. Does it mean we'll do it -- probably not. But, it does mean I am all for people making their home setups work just they want them. And that does it for a blog post about keyboard ... jeez.

Some New Stuff From Apple

As a long time Apple Fan Boy I was very interested in what would be released yesterday at the special event. The rumor has been churning for quite some time on new iMacs and Steve did not disappoint. The new iMac is beautiful machine ... great features, price, and performance. I have a 24" iMac and I love it, so I can only imagine how nice the new ones are. Not quite compelling to buy one yet, but really a great all in one machine -- but, let me be clear, if I could justify it any way it would already be on its way.

As an interesting aside, Steve at one point made the comment during the presentation that we live in an all in one world from a computing and digital lifestyle perspective. I tend to agree. For work I switched to being a portable user as my only machine a few years ago ... and if you look at our faculty, staff, and students' technology ownership you see that I am not alone. The vast majority of users on our campus are laptop users -- laptops are all in one. So, for the desktop I still see the notion of the all in one as a very important one. The iMac fills that category better than any machine I know of. When I look at my other technology devices, they could learn a lot from the way Apple makes this stuff happen. The iMac at the hub of a digital lifestyle is very smart -- especially given the way they have worked to align products to cover many phases of that life ... software that manages digital assets and encourages you to create new ones, distribution devices that wirelessly sling content all over the place to devices that allow you to walk around with all of it, or connect to a TV anywhere in the house ... just smart stuff. It is a strategy that has been brewing for a number of years now and seems to be working -- at least in my house.

A few of the other notable things are the enhancements to iLife -- the new iMovie in particular strikes me as being a major step forward in terms of all around functionality. It had always seemed to me that iMovie was sort of limited in that it was a production only environment. I guess in my mind I always felt that iTunes should never have been named iTunes, it should have been iMedia. What I was always after was a place to store and manage all my digital content (raw video clips, photos, music, compiled videos, PDF, etc) that could be manipulated and interacted with either internal to that application or via another one in a media viewer style. The rebirth of iMovie as both a production environment and a repository is very smart. I have perhaps hundreds of hours of digital video that is sitting on mini-DV tapes that I never watch, would not go back and import and compile, and have largely forgotten about. Now, with the new iMovie I can see myself spending the time to import all my video and having it at my fingertips ready to produce some nice short videos for the kids to watch. The other thing I need to do is buy a huge hard drive to store it all on.

The other thing that caught my attention was the overall enhancement to .Mac. I have been a longtime .Mac customer -- back when it was actually free as a matter of fact. I have used the .Mac model as a talking point with lots of people when explaining how we should be making digital services easily available on campus. I am struck by the shift in focus for .Mac -- the photo sharing utility, ".Mac Web Gallery" is very well designed. I spent some time this morning playing with an online example. Apple has brought forth some interesting, yet somewhat incomplete (IMHO), set of social opportunities to the party. Obviously .Mac always gave you a one direction distribution opportunity ... you can call it sharing, but in my book sharing includes some sort of reciprocal action -- not just me post pictures on a web page ... I get nothing in return there. The reason I use Flickr is that it is social at its core -- I have friends, family, and strangers who can look at my pictures and share with me their reactions to them. The new features of .Mac take sharing in a new direction -- one I am very curious to see how it catches on. It gives you the ability to share access to your galleries in a new way -- people can add their own photos to it. It doesn't do comments, which keeps it out of the traditional view of the read/write web, but this whole "add your pictures to my pictures mash-up idea" is really interesting. I see big potential for class activities in that. I also see great opportunities for event sites to spring up with user generated content being added from left and right. I also understand that once you get it all set up, it integrates with the iPhone nicely. At any rate, the design of the finished web site it creates is first rate and the whole change in direction here is a welcome one for me ... adding the ability to comment would be a next logical step.

Finally I noticed that Keynote received the ability to do voice overs in a native form. I don't yet know if the resulting files can be shared as enhanced podcasts -- if so, good stuff! If not, then I give it a WTF! The other notable (and very long overdue) is the ability to easily publish iWeb files to a space other than .Mac with ease. I have been begging Apple for this since before iWeb. I even wrote a whitepaper I shared with them about how the .Mac only publishing is a mistake in the higher education space where we give students lots of webspace to publish in. I am anxious to see how that works. So, yesterday I did something I don't usually do -- I ordered the new iLife, iWork, and the new keyboard with my own dollars becasue I need the software to bang on before the weekend.

All in all some very solid things. What do others think of the new stuff?

Being an Apple Developer These Days Must be Hard

I know lots of people were bent out of shape when Steve Jobs told the crowd at WWDC that they can develop for the iPhone as long as it is in the browser. The whole idea of providing access to build applications for a platform is typically at the heart of that platform's success ... when I think about Apple's business models (or product segments) for a second I see things in an interesting way. Apple seems to have a few core areas of focus these days in the hardware space -- the Mac, the iPod, the Apple TV, and the iPhone. Each one does some amazing things -- and to tell you the truth it occurs to me that only the iPod isn't running OSX ... they'll fix that. This is from a company who "ignited the personal computing revolution ..." Things are shifting.

The Mac has always been a platform where developers have been invited to play. You want to make some software for it? Go ahead ... Apple even has a whole developer relations group and associated services. WWDC is a developer's conference -- a developer's conference for the Mac. With that in mind I can see why the masses were irritated when Jobs told them to build web apps to support the phone. These are real developers who write real code. Not that web apps aren't real apps, but I think we all get the notion. I am quite honestly excited by the web apps I am seeing being revised to work really well on the iPhone. The Ta-Da List port is one that makes a whole lot of sense in the browser -- I am now testing it with my administrative assistant as an ad-hoc calendar tool.

The iPod is a closed platform from what I can tell. There isn't an open SDK for the iPod that I know of. I could be wrong about this one, but I don't know of one -- at least on the software side. I tell a story about a time I visited Apple right after the iPod was released ... I actually told an product manager that if they really wanted to make this product successful they'd release an SDK and let computer science departments use it as a platform. I guess my brilliant idea wasn't needed. Sure, Nike and a few other select feew companies have been able to release software that extends the functionality of the iPod, but for the most part it is a closed party. The Apple TV is being hacked all the time, but again, from what I can tell it is a closed platform. Yes, the Apple TV runs some sort of OSX, but it isn't a true Mac.

The iPhone is in the same boat ... it runs OSX, but it isn't a Mac. Apple has created a website that gives us the info we need to create the right kinds of web apps, but that is as far as they'll go with it. The funny thing is that the fact this thing has a browser opens up nearly unlimited possibilities -- at least from my perspective. It has to be hard for real developers though.

The whole paradigm shift happening at Apple is interesting to watch -- a computer company that is no longer just a computer company. How will this change developer relations? How will WWDC need to change to integrate the other three product lines? I have no idea, but I doubt Steve and Co. are done in the space that isn't occupied by the Mac. Imagine being a developer and being tempted by these other products ... just dreaming about what could be done. It must be so hard to step outside the Apple developer mindset.

iPhone Fever

So I've been out of the blog limelight (if that's what you can call it) for over a week now ... I have been writing, just not much and not here at all. Work has been crazy, travel has been crazy, and the iPhone hype has been crazy. On the work front we are running as fast as we can to launch the first five Digital Commons Studios, hire new staff for projects, and finalize plans for what will be an outrageously busy and exciting year. The Digital Commons project itself has moved faster than anything I have been a part of since the start-up days -- really spinning the whole project up over the last few weeks ... who says we move slow in higher education?

On the travel side, we've been back and forth to Bloomsburg, PA the last couple of weekends for lead up events to my sister's wedding. While there last weekend I got to play a little golf -- actually 36 holes -- with my Dad and some friends. I can't tell you how much I needed that. Last Friday I had a very bad day professionally ... one that really took the winds out of my sails ... crazy thing is it started with a call I got as I was getting on my bike to ride to work from one of my best friends in the world. He and his wife had their first child, a little girl. Wonderful news! The wonder of that news was instantly crushed by the reality that his Mother is close to the end of her fight with cancer. I stopped in to see her while out on a walk with my 9 month old son ... every time we go to Bloomsburg I try to find the time to stop in and see her ... it is heart wrenching knowing that my friend of 25 or so years is trying to resolve feelings that I can't even imagine -- the birth of a little girl who shares his dying Mother's name.

I feel like an idiot even mentioning the fact that the iPhone comes out today and I will be lining up somewhere to see if I can get one. I mentioned I have been writing elsewhere, well I started an iPhone blog to share my thoughts on the device for a research project I am a part of here at PSU. Several of us are investigating the way the iPhone plays in our enterprise and how we can see its value in education. Hard part is just getting one -- I'm a little too busy (and perhaps, normal) to feel good about standing in line for days or even hours. I'll see what I can do, but I am obviously thinking about it as I have had dreams about the damn thing the past two nights. If I get one, I will share thoughts here and over at my iPhone PSU Blog.

Sorry for the mad recap, but that's what has been up.

ETS Talk on the Directory

Every Friday Allan Gyorke, Chris Millet, Brad Kozlek, and I get together to just talk. We record these conversations and call them ETS Talk ... our little weekly podcast is really just an opportunity to take an hour every week to think out loud. We've recorded 27 of these which is actually sort of amazing given the schedules we all keep. It is honestly a highlight of my week.

How sweet was it to learn tonight that ETS Talk is featured on the new iTunes U directory from within the iTunes Store. Not sure we are worthy given the company we are keeping in the featured section ... hmm, let's see, yeah we're next to Coach K's Leadership Conference, an entry from the MIT Open Courseware initiative, and a few other notables. So, if you want to listen to four guys (with the occassional guest) talk about our perspectives on teaching and learning with technology and other stuff, jump on over and take a listen!

iTunes U and Discoverability

I've been personally involved in the iTunes U space for quite some time ... first as a member of the Apple Digital Campus group and then as a pilot University. For the longest time I have maintained that iTunes U is a good thing on a whole bunch of levels. iTunes itself is a very well designed cross platform media manager and player. It just works ... the integration with the iTunes Store takes the platform to a whole other level and that little iPod thing completes the eco-system. Most of what iTunes U gives us is very solid as well -- protected content areas that only faculty and enrolled students can access, subscriptions, public content areas, and really anything else that the iTunes Store can give you. It is a very nice environment that students and faculty find easy and intuitive to use and navigate.

My two biggest issues to date have been the inability to engage students in any sort of conversation (other than having them create a podcast rebuttal and upload it) and the inability to really navigate and find podcasts easily from the outside -- I'll call that last piece, discoverability. If you are in a given University's iTunes U space, life is fairly easy, but what if you are a student sitting on the outside and have no idea how to get to your files? You can't fire up a browser and google for it ... you have to know the right URL to get iTunes to launch and go to the iTunes U site at your school. It has been a problem. To compound the issue, it has been nearly impossible to find a way to easily take advantage of all the killer public content available across all the various iTunes U sites. Want some content from Penn State? Better know the URL ... ditto for Stanford, University of Michigan, and so on.

Today (or yesterday ...) that has changed. Apple rolled out an iTunes U directory from within the public iTunes Store. Jump over to Apple's Education site, click the link to launch the iTunes Store and take a peek at the little sites directory in the upper left ... notice that last item? Yep, it is a public landing page for a select group of iTunes U spaces. Finally I can easily show people what various spaces look like, access content from top schools, and feel like we are part of the iTunes Universe. I think this will help in a bunch of ways. One big one is the ability for Higher Education to get prominent placement in the World's top online music and podcast directory. Not too shabby, thanks Apple!

Apple Camp, What a Model

For the last couple of Summers I have watched Apple roll out the schedules for their "Apple Camp" program for kids. I know it is tied to their retail strategy and all, but what a great program. I really think it provides an excellent model for the kinds of things we could do in higher education to get faculty, staff, and students engaged in being digital. I just love the simplicity of the marketing and programs. If I had an Apple Store anywhere near me, I would go explore and probably sign my 5 year old daughter up to participate.

The podcast session, for example, is only a couple hours long but it looks like they'll learn really everything they need to know to be a podcast producer. I know we can pull that kind of stuff off, because we do, but the way Apple packages it all makes me want to sign up. I am still struggling with how we can align our services with simple yet engaging opportunities to learn ... what am I missing that would help us get over the adoption hump with our audiences? How do we tie the introduction of new teaching and learning tools to interesting learning sessions? I wonder what others are doing.

More Apple TV Thoughts

I am now a full on Apple TV user ... I know that shouldn't come as much of a surprise to those of you who know me as an Apple FanBoy. What has surprised me is how the device has really changed the way I use my iPod. For the last 4 years or so I have taken my iPod to work with me everyday and instantly dropped it in the cradle upon returning home so it could drive music throughout our house. I killed the CD collection years ago and have been living in a digital music ecosystem since my iPods' storage capacities started to match my old analog collection. The routine still includes me taking my iPod to work everyday, but I now walk in to music already playing throughout the house via the Apple TV ... it is easy to use and everyone seems to like it.

I do have an issue though ... my iPod is 80 GB and it stores all my stuff -- Music, TV Shows, Movies, Podcasts, and Pictures without issue. Last night I was syncing the Apple TV after purchasing some new content from Apple and noticed things getting a little tight.

As new podcasts, movies and shows that I buy come in daily the thing is syncing a lot in the background getting filled to the brim with content.

The thing that has me very frustrated isn't so much the ridiculously small 40 GB drive (which I am now considering upgrading via this kit) it is the poorly designed syncing limitations. I know simplicity is the goal, but what if I want all the episodes of the Office, but only the last 5 of another show? With the built in tools I don't get the kind of granular control that I need to make the most of the 40 GB drive. There's stuff I watch over and over -- like episodes of the Office -- and there is stuff I only want to watch once. One of the things my daughter loves is having all her Disney Channel shows at her fingertips ... but if I set it for all episodes just for that reason, I put my hard drive in a serious crunch time situation.

How about giving me the ability set a different sync schedule for each show? That way, the little lady can have all the episodes of Kim Possible ready to rock and roll, while I don't need to have every episode of Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia (great show BTW) taking up HD space? All I want is a little more control ... I shouldn't have to feel like I need to hack my device or void the warranty to use it the way I need to.

Apple TV Thoughts: The Wireless Content System

I've been using my Apple TV for close to two weeks now and I am really enjoying it. After some initial setup issues (with my old receiver, not the Apple TV) I have had nothing but good things to say about it. It has worked perfectly with my iMac in the other room -- wirelessly grabbing content any time something new flows in. All I have to say is that it just works. Not a surprise, but for a new space for Apple, this thing works like a second or third generation product.

Seeing that I am not into the hacks that so many people seem to be psyched about, I would like to share a thought about the Apple TV ... I think it could be a killer school-based content platform. What strikes me is how easily it all works -- plug it in and let it grab content wirelessly from anywhere. Imagine a school with one in every classroom all connected to not only a central iTunes library, but to any other iTunes enabled machine in the vicinity. Schools could subscribe to any of the thousands of available audio or video podcasts and be constantly playing fantastic educational content in their classrooms.

If you used it in combination with a school-based iTunes U implementation, individual teachers could easily subscribe and share their own content as well as student work. What an affordable way to create a high end "streaming" solution. I don't know yet if there is a limit to the number of Apple TV systems you can setup and connect to one machine (I know there are limitations in the other direction), but it all seems like an outstanding option for moving audio and video around in an educational context.

Here at PSU, our public broadcasting network is establishing a nice presence in the Penn State on iTunes U space we've been creating. Imagine schools simply connecting to that and the other Universities' spaces to grab resources that are now easily and affordably moved around a building. I think it makes the case for Apple to include an educational discount for this device. Talk about a new age wireless cart for content distribution! Am I missing something or is this a great way to leverage the emerging public iTunes U spaces as well as the podcast directory and the Apple TV?

With the Apple TV it seems like you could (un)wire access really well.

DRM Free Music

So I am guessing that when State Jobs posted his open letter on digital rights management two months ago he was well on his way to getting exactly what he wanted. With Apple and EMI's announcement of selling their entire catalogue on the iTunes Store without DRM it appears as though someone was listening. To say it out loud from the get go -- DRM Free music is the right thing to do. I can't tell you how happy I am to see at least one label getting it. I buy the stuff and I don't need to be treated like a criminal from the start. I don't steal music and I certainly don't provide access to my hard drive for others to take my music. I posted my thoughts on it at the time so I won't rehash it all.

Here's the rub in my mind however ... by charging a premium for the music I feel like they are saying something to the effect of, only those who can afford the right to purchase this will be treated like a law abiding citizen. In other words, if you can't fork over an extra 30 cents then you aren't to be trusted with our music. I understand the higher quality, but I don't see that as a legitimate claim -- data is data. Also it bothers just a bit to have to go back and pay an additional 30 cents for every song I already own to be unlocked. I guess the label figures that is enough of a sharing tax? I just don't get this.

Another thought after the original post ... I do recall reading that the labels had been putting pressure on Apple to raise their prices on singles. Was this the deal Steve was able to make -- if I raise the price of a single can we sell higher quality, DRM Free music? If you look at it, from what I understand album prices are remaining the same. Just pure speculation.

How does this deal make the rest of you feel? Will you go back and repurchase your tracks to be DRM Free? Am I barking up the wrong tree on this one?