More Arabic and Arabist stuff

Only a year has gone by, and another blogpost already! - But again, mostly for people writing Arabic or transliteration of it on Apple products. I used to have a full website of this (now at org.uib.no/smi/ksv), but I have not had time to keep that updated, and anyway; with Unicode and standardization, the use for it has decreased. Most things now on the Mac do work with Arabic, with the latest versions we can write reasonably well Arabic even in Microsoft Word (although I still prefer Mac-only NisusWriter for this).

So, I can rather use this blog for the occasional burst of insight I may acquire. Perhaps it will even turn up in google searches, so somebody reads it. However, for today there are two items, one for the Mac, the other for iOS (iPads in particular).

First: iPad: More on writing Diacritics.

Below, you will find a blog I wrote last year (2018) about using the Smart keyboard (i.e. the plastic hardware) for writing transliteration on iPads. This has not changed, except that Apple now makes these hardware keyboards for all current iPads, not just the iPad Pro. However, it is still a very expensive solution, $159 for all - probably not worth it, if you do not want to have this keyboard for other reasons. But too much just for the transliteration.

However, there is a simpler solution on the iPad itself, no hardware required, which only costs $5, and that is worth it. I mentioned it in the blog last year, but only in passing, because it was not terribly convenient. But now it is (or maybe it always was, I just did not notice). It is the app Unicode Pad Pro (“with keyboards”, it calls itself). There is a free version, Unicode Pad Express, but that lacks the crucial element, so splurge on the $4.99 Pro version.

The method is like this:

In the app, select «Notepad», and “click” in the open text field to open the on-screen keyboard. This has five tabs on top, named ABC, I, II, III, IV, V. Those named II - V are empty, and you can fill them with your diacritics:


(1) Go to «Catalog» (the cabinet icon top left of keyboard), and in the Unicode catalogue locate the characters you need. It is probably easiest to find them in the option «Unicode Blocks». Long vowels (āīū) are in the block «Latin Extended-A», while emphatics, ṣḍṭẓ, are in Latin Extended Additional. ‘Ayn and hamza are in «Spacing modifier letters». For each character you want, press and hold, and you will see «Copy». Do that, return to notepad keyboard, select an empty slot and paste the character (press the slot and hold). Repeat until you have those you want in the order you want.

(2) When you have got your keyboard set up with the characters you need, exit the Unicode Pad app, and go to the Settings app, to General, and choose Keyboards. At the top, you see a «Keyboards» item, click the > beside it, and in the following choose «Add keyboard». You should then in the «Add keyboard» window, find «Third Party Keyboards», and Unicode Pad listed there. Select it to add to your installed keyboards. You should probably also choose «Give full access» to the keyboard.

(4) Now, your custom keyboard has been added to your iPad. Open any text program that allows typing. Clicking on the globe icon on the onscreen keyboard will cycle through your installed keyboards, among them now Unicode Pad; and you will see the same selection of ABC, and I … V layouts. Thus, you can type directly using this keyboard layout into your text editor, rather than having to open the Unicode Pad app and copy/paste from there. For your regular text, you can select the ABC panel, and so switch back and forth between ABC and your Diacritics keyboard as you type, all within the Unicode Pad keyboard.

Have your Mac read Arabic to you

The second topic is on the Mac. Many may have discovered that you can have the Mac read out to you any typed text, using a “computer voice”. Many apps (like Nisus and Apple's apps) have a “Speech” menu item that controls this, others like Microsoft Word and Safari let you do it through a command key. However, this is of less use for multilingual users, as e.g. French or Norwegian text is read out as if the words were English, i.e. virtually incomprehensible. Useful only if your text is written in the same language as the “speaker” has.

It turns out that you can control this, however. It is just put a place you probably would not think to look. Go to the System Preferences panel Accessibility, and select the Speech (Text to Speech) panel. There you will find at the top of the panel, the menu System voice, with perhaps several voices, in one or more languages. Select “Add”, this will show you a large variety of voices in many languages, including French, German and - this is the point - Arabic. There are three Arabic voices, Laila, Maged and Tarik, available for download. Download those you think you will use. Then, you can use this panel to choose which voice, and hence language, your typed text (or Safari page) will be read out in.

For applications like Word or Safari that do not have a “Speech” menu, you can set up a command keystroke (default is Option+Esc) which will read out any selected text.
          Unfortunately, it does not appear that the Mac (or the apps, they rely on the system for this) is able to link this choice of voice to any language setting in the app. In Word and Nisus and many others, you can define your text to be in “English (UK)” or “French” etc., for spell checking, but this has no effect on the reading language, you have to visit the Accessibility panel each time to choose your language. There is an option, however, to make Accessibility a menu bar item, so you can quickly go to this panel and change language for reading when you need to.

In the same panel, you can choose the speed of reading. For non-native users of Arabic, you may slow the speaker w-a-y down, so that you hear every syllable clearly - you can then even hear its choice of iʿrāb. Because, yes, the Arabic voice will read unvocalized text, and even conjugate the words in the sentence (presumably only if it makes any sense). It seems to do this even if you are offline, so the grammar analysis must be done on the Mac itself. I have not tested how accurate it is, but at least it gives a suggestion for how words should be vocalized and the sentence structured - as long, of course, as the words are in the Mac’s Arabic dictionary (which it must thus have somewhere), and are meaningful. All of this may be pointless to the native speaker, but for any learner of Arabic it may be a useful little aid, to get a suggestion of how a text could be read. And it is certainly a useful tool, in any language, for proof-reading or checking that you have typed an original text correctly, looking at the written original while you hear the typed text being read out to you.

Diacritics on iPad?

This blog has been quiet for years, and I am sure nobody follows it. But who knows. I just downloaded a new blog editor, and since I had a topic that might be relevant, I could test it out.

The issue is relevant for those who (a) use iPad or iPhone, and (b) write in strange languages, to wit: write in transcription (writing e.g. Arabic in Latin script, with precise indication of long and short a, etc.). Most who have this need, have organized this on the Mac (see https://org.uib.no/smi/ksv/Diacs.html , e.g.). But what about on the iPad (or iPhone)?

As for Arabic transcription, we normally need line above some vowels (āīū) and dots below some consonants (ṣḍḥṭẓ). In addition most use specific characters for the two sounds ‘ayn and hamza, ʿ and ʾ, although others only use inverted apostrophes, ‘ and ’. I have not found any solution to produce the special characters, except using a special program such as Unicode Pad Pro, which gives you access to all signs in all character sets, but in a separate program. 

But how about typing directly on the keyboard?

As most know, you have different on-screen keyboard layouts on the iPad as on the Mac: Go to System Settings: General: Keyboards, and choose “Add keyboard”. That gives you a list. The English keyboard has some diacritics, while other languages have fewer, in my Norwegian one, e.g. I have only ā and ū, but not ī. The standard English keyboard layout, however, has āīū as well as š and ž, but not dots under. How to get them? When you are typing with the keyboard up on the screen, press the a “key” (button?) and hold. You will see alternative forms, such as á and à, and also ā; drag the finger over to the variant you want and let up. 

Other layouts may have more, I discovered I had one called “Hinglish”, which added ḍ and ṣ to āīū, but not ṭ ḥ ẓ, so not sufficient for us. 

However, I just now splashed out on a physical keyboard (“Smart keyboard”) for my iPad Pro, and that in fact adds a lot more options. It is a small plastic keyboard which you attach your iPad to as a cover, but can unfold to reveal the keys, with Command and Option key. You still can select different keyboard layouts, but even with standard English, you do get dot under, but by typing two letters: first the dot-under key, then the letter it should be under. These “diacritic keys” are the following:

Type Option-a  [option key and a pressed together], let up and directly type e.g. i - gives you ī. Same for most vowels, option-a and e for ē, etc. 

Option-g gives dot under: option-g and d: ḍ, option-g and s: ṣ. 

Further: 

option-x line under following letter: ḏ
opion-c:  cedille under following; ş
option-w: dot under: ș
option-p: dot over: ṡ
option-r:  hacek: ǧ
option-y: yumucak: ğ

and many more remote ones, I have not identified all:
option-h: ogonek under following, but only under a few relevant characters: ų
option-j: “tilde” under following, ṵ
option-k: tilde over, ẽ
option-l: line through, ł
Shift-option-F: yoruba ɗ ɓ

Shift-option in many cases give the same as option, only thrown back on preceding instead of above following letter. 

This may not be relevant for many, since the physical keyboard is expensive in itself (I have not tested if third-party keyboards give the same result), and it only works with the expensive iPad Pro, which restricts it further. But if you are in relevant category of people, check it out. I was surprised to see so many options for typing diacritics on the iPad.

Mavericks and Mail, update

I said in my previous post two weeks ago that I would wait installing Mavericks on my main Macs until an update for the Mail problems arrived. Well, it came out last week (it even installed itself), and seems to have solved the smart mailboxes issues - at least the Unread count was correct on my MacBook Air, where I had Mavericks, and all mails there were visible and accounted for. So, I went ahead yesterday and installed Mavericks on my main office computer (an iMac, large screen, fast Fusion drive, excellent).

Alas, I had not tested it enough on the Air and perhaps not searched enough on the Internet. It was to be expected that Mail spent more time getting up to speed on my main machine, with 200.000 emails archived, it seems to be working still a day later. In at least one set of mailboxes, all mails appear to be empty: itemized and dated, but with no content. However, it is there (visible in TimeMachine), so the program is perhaps still working its way through, if not I can replace them from TimeMachine. Similiarly, the "count badge" for unread mails in a mail box also needs time to update smartly, but in a day or two it will, hopefully. Again, my advice from last time, to recreate the smart box definitions probably holds.

So, patience will prevail. But there are other issues that actually have been widely reported on the web and are clearly bugs and design flaws. There are temporary ways around them, however.

Sending group mail
The main error concerns group mail, that is sending mail to many people at the same time. This is the way it used to be done: In the Contacts (address book) app, you create either a "group" (a fixed group, by dragging cards individually into the group) or a "smart group" (dynamic, defined e.g. as "address cards that contain the word "Class2012""). Either way, you can email collectively to the group by beginning to type the first few letters of the group name in the To: (or, preferably, Blind Copy:) field in Mail. Then all items in Contacts starting with those letters show up in a drop-down menu, you click on the one you want, and it turns into the blue "cartouch" signet of a addressee, with a drop-down menu like "Expand Group" etc. Send, the mail goes to every member of the group.

In Mavericks Mail, you can do this for individuals, but there is also a new method, familiar to iPhone users: To the right of the To: field, there is a blue + icon, which gives access to the Contacts book and its groups. Click on a name, and it is inserted into To:. But that only works for individuals, not groups of any kind.

Now, what happens if you use the old method of typing a few letters? It varies. For fixed groups, it seems to work as it should: You type, select the correct item from the alternatives, and get the regular cartouch, both in the To: and Blind Copy: fields. But smart groups do not work like this. Sometimes you do get the list of choices, but no cartouch appears, nor does it expand into individual members when you ask for this (in Mail's settings). At other times you do not even get the list, and nothing happens when you type out the name in full. Apparently addressing smart groups do not work, which it clearly is supposed to.

But, in fact it appears it does. The feedback you get varies. Sometimes, you do get the list of choices, and when you select it, you will briefly see the name in angle brackets afterwards: "Class2012 <Class2012>" - although the name in brackets disappears once you Ok it. At other times it does not show you anything. But it appears in fact that the smart group function actually does work in both cases: Select the name if given a choice, or type it out if not (making sure you type the name precisely), press Send, and the mail will really go off to all members. At first I thought it only went in the first case (I wrote that ten minutes ago), but when I tried it out also just typing it out, with no indication from Mail it understood it as a group name, I heard back that the mail did go through.
     Why some smart groups give you the minimal feedback, and others not, I do not know. And I have not tested all my smart groups to see if they all actually work - it certainly is an error on Apple's part that they give no feedback, and of course that you have to rely on (precise) typing of a smart group name to select it. I would certainly suggest adding yourself as a recipient to groups you use, to confirm that the messages actually go out to the list
       A workaround can be used to give you peace of mind that it was sent as usual: Go to the menu "Window: Address Panel", find the smart group in question, click inside the list, then select all (Command-A) to select all names, and click on the To: (Copy:, Blind Copy:) buttons to address them individually. Not elegant - not if there are a lot of names - but will work for the moment.

Clearly, this is a bug, but it seems to me also a design error, in that the apparently preferred addressing method, the blue + icon, does not seem to have considered how to include addressing group mails.

There are some other minor bugs: While you can choose Bold or Italics for text you edit, it does not hold: underline works, size change and colour works, but bold and italics are forgotten.

Still hold back?
Now, many people do not use either smart mailboxes or smart groups, so they will not be affected by these problems. But they are not really esoteric, but fairly important and mainstream functions. Every new OS has bugs, that is to be expected, but it is peculiar that Apple released a version of the important Mail program, one that everyone uses, without checking these standard functions better. Personally, I think I will still hold back a few days before I upgrade my last Mac, just in case I find more problems, but these issues can be worked around, as I mentioned, for the moment. On the plus side, as these bugs affect fairly many users and is kind of another strike against Apple, it is to be hoped that they are aware of them and put some pride into quickly solving them. There is indeed reported to be a 10.9.1 on the way, but Apple released the first Mail fix in advance of that (untypically, they normally roll Mail app fixes into general upgrades), so we must hope these other issues will be quickly solved as well.

Mavericks and Mail

New term, new operating system, new problems in the Mac Manor.

Last week, I and I guess most Mac users who had turned on Software update warnings, were invited in large friendly letters to upgrade to the new system, MacOS 10.9 or Mavericks, for free! A novelty, as we remember, it was from System 7.1 in 1992 that Apple started to charge for system upgrades, so after twenty years a more friendly approach is back.

However, before I got round to accept the offer (you must set aside download time and re-organizing time etc. for a couple of hours), I received a warning from TidBits that it might be adviseable to hold off - there were significant problems with in particular how Mail works in Mavericks one should be aware of, before taking the jump.
<http://tidbits.com/article/14219>

It seemed however to affect particular cases, especially those who uses Mail mainly for gmail (Google Mail) and had followed Tidbits' Joe Kissel's earlier suggestions for gmail, which now are broken. I never did that, and gmail is only a secondary address for me, so I thought I should on the one hand be careful, on the other test things out to see how it worked. As it happens, I have a travel Mac, a MacBook Air (on which I write this), with a full Mail setup, but which I do not use daily. I decided therefore to install Mavericks there first, to see what happend.

The install itself is smooth, as you could expect - click, and go away and read a book or magazine for the hour or so the process takes (check in at beginning and end for giving various permission, but in the middle just let it work). I forgot the very useful advice to first download the installer, then quit and copy that installer app on a USB, before installing, that would have saved me the time to download it again for when my other Macs are to be upgraded (the installer deletes itself when Mavericks has been installed). Would have saved me 15 minutes or so, but never mind.

On restart, you have to give various passwords, AppleID and the Mac's admin ID and so on, as usual. I think I made a mistake, because I use different IDs for iCloud and iTunes, and probably gave the wrong one at one point, because I got a blank square covering some window and which I could not click away. But once I saw what was below (System Preferences), I could quit that and reopen, and then (in the menu) of the new iBook app log out of my iCloud account and into the iTunes one, where I have my books. Worked.

Mail issues
However, the main quest was for Mail problems. And yes, there were problems, and yes, they are sufficiently important that I am holding off a bit to see if Apple will fix them with a "10.9.1" bug fix before I install Mavericks on my main machines. If Apple does not, however, it may be possible to work around the issues.

First, a simple one. Each time I openend Mail (which was a lot, in the testing), it kept bugging me for my iCloud password for getting @me.com mail (like everyone, I have such a passive account). It would not remember the password I put into Mail's Accounts pane. The answer was quick, and cited in the TidBits article above: Open System Preferences, the iCloud pane, and then first uncheck the Mail item, and then immediately check it again - that forces Mail to re-configure itself, and you will see that the password item has disappeared from Mail's own iCloud account setting - it now takes it from the general settings, and remembers it.

But then the major one. Joe Kissel's problem was, as mentioned, related to gmail, and had something to do with gmail's special "All Mail" mailbox. I had never messed with that, and could see no problems of the type he mentioned. Probably this, the major point of his article, only or mostly concern those who use Mail mainly for gmail.

However, the second point he briefly mentions, and which has been widely reported on the web, was a major stumbling block for me: Smart mailboxes, which were and still are mainly broken in Mavericks Mail. Smart mailboxes have got several new features, and are possibly built up differently from before, I don't know. However, to explain, this is how I read mail, and why smart boxes are important for my workflow:

I use Mail as a main mail archive, set up with dozens and dozens of mailboxes: for persons, for topics, for mailing lists, for countries or whatever. Anything that I can identity (mainly from regular senders) gets automatically filtered to its mailbox immediately on arrival, whether it is my students, from the department, or newsletters or mailing lists - everything disappears from the In box before I see it, but is of course still listed as "unread" until I read it. The In box only includes mail from irregular correspondents, or those colleagues I want to read first - I always first read through the Inbox, dump spam and answer requests. Then, I have set up a smart mailbox that collects all unread mail that is (a) not in the Inbox (b) not in the high-volume mailing lists, which I read at the end when I have time. But this "Unread" smart mailbox is thus essential, it includes lots of important mail from regular senders.

What happened in Mavericks, is that the Unread list gave a surprisingly high number of items on its badge: about 200, while it should actually be 10-15 since my last mail check. But when I opened the box, it was empty. The menu line said: "0 messages. 196 unread". Now, I could see down in the list of "real" mailboxes that there were a number of unreads down there, but the smart box did not list them. I restarted a few times and tried a few others things, like creating new smart mailboxes afresh, but with basically the same result, all apparently empty. I saw on the net many people who had tried various strange suggestions to no avail, so it was and is a real bug.

Finally, I found a solution that was supposed to work (in the same TidBits article; always check in Tidbits): "Kirk McElhearn found all his smart mailboxes empty, and was able to correct the problem by quitting Mail, deleting the three files beginning with “Envelope Index” in ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData, reopening Mail, and letting it reindex his messages." I did this,(*) and lo and behold, something happened: Mail put up "Welcome to Mail! For this new version, we need to process your mail to the present version of Mail" [or words to that effect, from my memory]. This is well and good, it is supposed to do this, but it never did when I first started Mail in Mavericks. So here was a possible bug, Mail had skipped its own upgrade process. Anyway, it went to work on my 100.000+ messages, and spent the next fifteen minutes on that. And did it work?

Yes! Or at first appearances anyway. The message count in Unread was down to about 25-30, a bit too many (it included a number of old messages from gmail's Unwanted mailbox), but they were all present and viewable in the mailbox. So, I could just walk through them as ususal and see the badge count drop by one for each. Down to the last. But that one did not go away. I dumped it manually, and it did go away from the mailbox, but the counter remained at 1. The same for the new boxes I had created just before, the all were stuck with one, invisible, unread mail. Now, I found a way to get rid of that minor issue: I went to Edit smart mailbox, took away the rule "Message Is Unread", and then added it again, and then the invisible 1 disappeared. Everything OK. Until the next actually new unread message came in - but not in the Unread box. This time, neither badge nor content shifted, the smart box had simply stopped working. Only the second (old trial) box, where I had not edited the rules, worked (with the invisible 1 in place), all others were broken again. But that one worked - or did it? It included several unread messages that were in the Inbox - which should be excluded. So, it seems to have found all unread messages, i.e. just the first line on the smart box definition, not the ones following.

Last ditch effort: To recreate a smart box afresh, now completely under a properly updated Mail. That kind of works: The invisible 1 was back, but otherwise it seemed to pick up actually unread messages in the mailboxes it should (although some have got strange names, like "Archive" and "Important", apparently from gmail which Mail formerly ignored) and only those. This morning, after one night, the invisible 1 even went away again, but now in the afternoon, it lists 3 after I have read everything. So the badge count is off, apparently haphazardly so, but I can live with that, I guess. I will keep watching for a while, and see what happens.

But the moral appears to be: Make sure Mail actually shows a Welcome to you message and spends time updating your mailboxes (you will notice, a lengthy process), and then re-create any smart mailbox you have had in the old version. For the monent, this seems to work, but there may be other bugs that could raise their heads (but I am very happy that Cmd-Option-T for "Move to [last used Mailbox] again" once again works, saves me a lot of menu trips).

(*) How to open your Library folder? Improvement: It is still hidden by default, but now you can set this to display in an option in Finder's: View: Show View Options menu.

Netflix and the new Macs

I don’t normally write about new stuff here, everyone else does, but yesterday as I was looking for baseball news (go Giants!) on my fairly recently acquired Apple TV, I noticed a new icon there, “Apple Events”. Wondering what that was, I was taken to the presentation Apple chief Tim Cook made only three hours earlier. So I got the early not-news of iPad mini. However, also all the other news, Apple presented new models across the board: MacBook Retina, mini, iMac. And something stood out: we are facing a shift in how Macs are equipped. One change is from hard disks to flash drives in most new models, not necessarily good for the checkbook, as flash of more than the minimal sizes are very expensive (but the new combo “Fusion” drive looked enticing, pricing to be seen).

Even more clear is that DVD is out, no new model has a DVD drive (thus the Air’s configuration has become the general pattern), and it was derided as “you old-fashioned people” at the presentation. The signs have been there, Mac OS has not been available on DVD for a while and hardly any programs are distributed this way. And in entertainment, streaming has replaced DVD.

Or has it? Is streaming the way to watch movies and TV shows outside the TV set? This links to the other big news in my country last week, which is related to the same topic. OK, what follows is not so much about the Mac, but about streaming in general, and is also a posting strictly about Norwegian matters. I might have written it in Norwegian, but let me continue in English since I started that way - the rest of you can see it as a case study from a small European country.

The advent of streaming TV

The big news, then, was that Netflix has arrived to Norway, and that HBO is due to follow in a few days as both streaming and a TV channel. This (Netflix) will change the way we watch TV, it was announced, now we will get all new series instantly online (legally) and not watch them on TV any longer. Of course, this is not true, and was a confusion of the two services: HBO promises immediate transmission of its new series to us, but that is not Netflix’s business. Netflix was originally an innovative video rental service, which switched to DVD rentals and then to streaming. Thus they do not distribute new series or films, only once they have arrived on DVDs, that is half a year or longer after original release.

I know Netflix from when I lived in the States, and loved it then for its rapid DVD delivery, and apparently bottomless catalogue; they seemed to have virtually every film or TV series ever put on DVD. They were just introducing streaming when I was there (2009), and that did not impress me so much; quality was low and selection meager. Netflix in Norway is streaming only, and is not the first such streaming service we have here, but arguably the most convenient to use, with a fixed monthly rate giving unlimited access to their catalogue. Of interest to us, Netflix is available on Apple TV, iPhone/Pad as well as on the web.

As for HBO, it does promise immediate release of new series, but it is unlikely to make any dramatic change in our viewing patterns, and in particular not for our main TV service NRK, as was darkly predicted. It will, to go into the national details, rather be a problem for Canal+ (now CMore) which has been the channel for new HBO shows. Currently, the pay channel Canal+ has sent these shows about three-four months after their US release, then NRK has re-sent the major HBO shows to a much wider public half a year or so or after that again. That HBO enters the chain as a pay channel will thus not make any significant difference for NRK, but the question is whether all these top shows will now disappear from CMore. Possibly for this reason, CMore has precipitated the new seasons for most of their HBO shows this autumn to send “just a week or two after the US”, so that most of them this fall will be finished by the time HBO itself opens later this month. But what of next year? Their “Series” channel will be very thin without the HBO shows, but is it possible to have a three-stage dissemination showing them first on the new HBO channel for their customers immediately after US release, then on CMore for their customers a month later, and then on NRK half a year after that? To be seen.

As will the form of distribution, HBO will both stream and become “a TV channel”. But how will that channel be distributed? As part of one of the three or four main “film packages”, CanalDigital (satellite + cable), Viasat (satellite) or Get or Altibox (cable / IPTV)? If HBO joins the first of these, CDigital which has most HBO shows already, it will mean hardly any change whatsoever from today, except perhaps a small price bump and slightly faster transmission after US release (perhaps cutting down on illegal file transfer, but little else), if one of the other it simply means the HBO shows transfer from one major channel package to another. Well, the answer will be revealed in the near future, but in neither case will this “change the way we watch television”.

Streaming movies: A comparative test

That clearly relates to streaming to our Macs, PCs or tablets instead of watching traditional TV channels. But how useful is that really today? We already have several such Video On Demand (streaming) services in Norway, and on the occasion of Netflix’s arrival, I decided to make a survey of them to compare with the Netflix offer. There are about ten of them, offering mainly movies, typically for ca. 30–45 kr per film (one service, Voddler has like Netflix a fixed subscription, but adds a per-film charge in addition). They all “suggest movies you may like”, but to be really a new experience, what I would want to is look up a movie I know about, and find it on their service. So, I set up a list of 26 haphazard movie titles from my shelves, mostly from 2005–2010, from LOTR and other Oscar winners to current comedies, and searched for them on each of the services. In addition, I looked for films by two famous directors, David Lynch and Woody Allen, and in those services that showed categories, I took their suggestions for “Science Fiction” to see how many titles they offered (the latter is of course less useful, as each service may differ in how widely they define this category. Unfortunately, few of the services tell how many titles they have in total, except “thousands”, two say specifically 3,000+ titles. In comparison, Netflix's original DVD collection had 35,000 film titles).

The ten are: Voddler, Comoyo , film2Home, Lovefilm , SFAnytime , Filmarkivet , CDON.com, Homebase, CanalDigital, and ViaPlay.
What I expected was, first that only a few of my sample titles would be available for streaming, and that it would be the same titles for all ten, since the limitation was distribution rights from Hollywood, which would be limited country by country. In fact, I was surprised. The first assumption held true, out of my 26 total no service had more than 9, and the majority only 4–5. But the second was not true, every service had a different set of titles, so that in total only six of the 26 titles were completely unavailable. I do not know the reasons for this, but it suggests to me that the limitation is not Hollywood (distribution), but investment from the services; evidently it costs money to build up a library for distribution.

As for my directors, no service had any film at all by Lynch (whose last major movie was Mulholland Drive back in 2001), while the score for Woody Allen was surprisingly good: almost every service had a majority of the movies he has made after 1994 (from Bullets over Broadway), but absolutely zilch for his earlier great movies. But of the new stuff, at least two (Comoyo, SFAnytime) had 17 out of a possible 18 titles post 1994. SciFi? Voddler claims 118 titles, Viaplay 59, Comoyo 55. None a terribly great number, when you think of how many movies can fall in that category. In total, which service “won”? Well, it is not fair, since my title list was so haphazard, but in this very non-scientific test, film2home and Viaplay scored best with 9 and 8 of my 26 titles, the rest stretching from 1 (Filmarkivet) to 6 (Voddler, Comoyo, SF Anytime, CDigital).

So how does Netflix stand up to this? As expected, pretty much the same, not dramatically better but not worse either. Of the 26, it scored 8 titles, which is good, less good on Woody Allen (6 of 18). But they had one old David Lynch. So, Netflix is certainly more convenient, in particular if you watch more than a couple of streamed movies a month (and even more if you have Apple TV), but it is not really a game changer for the great public. I must add, however, that Netflix also streams TV shows (those that have appeared on DVD), and I have found quite a few of my favourites that never came to any TV channel here, so that may be a noticeable advantage over the other services, only some of which offer TV shows.

Of particular interest - and gave me a great surprise - was the question if it is “Norway” that is bad - whether it would have been dramatically different if we had had access to US Netflix. I was able to make a quick comparison with Netflix US, and was astounded to find that of my 26 titles (all Hollywood movies), only 3 were available in Netflix US, and none of the later Allens (but three older ones); far more limited than the Norwegian store. I can hardly believe it, but unless I did something quite wrong, there is no reason to chase after Netflix US rather than the Norwegian version, in terms of breadth of catalogue.

So what is good? (Fanfare:) iTunes. That is, iTunes US - which I was incorrectly guided to before I logged in with my account. They had almost all of my 26 sample titles for rent or purchase (23 / 26), and most of the classic Allens (but only half of the new ones). But, unfortunately, once I had logged in with my Norway account, it all went away: only 4 of the 23 remained and a single Allen. Norwegian iTunes is basically of limited value. But what this shows is that all of my 1990s–2000s sample films do exist in streaming format somewhere (and not just illegally), it is just a matter of distribution and commercial choice to let us access them.

How does this link to the new Macs? I think this is clear: Streaming is not yet mature enough in width of offering to let us drop DVD. If I want to see a particular film or one particular show on my Mac, I will in most cases have to get it on DVD and play it from there. It is possible that streaming will, like Spotify for music, extend their choice so widely that I can get any current or non-current movie from a streaming service, even in a small market like Norway, but we are not there yet. So, buy the external DVD drive, if this is something you want to use your Mac for.

But I will keep my Netflix subscription.

Moving in with the Lion: the travails, 1

I just now got a text message: "MobileMe closes down in a month. Time to upgrade to iCloud". So, it is about time to prepare for the end and the beginning. It will probably take a bit to change, so the remaining weeks will be necessary. As I announced this blog to be about my personal experiences with Macs, and since I am in the process of making the big change, I guess I must chronicle this process day-to-day, diary style. For amusement or advisement, as appropriate.


Strategy: I have three Macs currently, an iMac at the office, and two regular MacBooks at home, all from 2007. Don't ask me why I have two MacBooks, long story involving lightning strikes and insurance policies, but that is what I have, and while it is a luxury, I decided to keep that setup, one of them is rooted to my home office, solidly tied down to external screens, keyboards, hard disks etc, and the other mobile for use on the road (e.g. powerpoints at lectures) and elsewhere in the house.

So, as you know, I only reluctantly move to Lion, since Lions means giving up things. As all my machines are five years old and have begun to feel a bit sluggish - the DVD in one has gone, and the Ethernet in the other - I decided that I might as well splurge a bit, and replace the two MacBooks with current models for great speed and comfort; some external funds will pay for one. Thus, I will still keep the existing two MacBooks running Snow Leopard and can use them when I need access to e.g. files that cannot be opened in Lion (I will probably just in case get a spare replacement battery for that model, as non-functioning batteries are what will eventually make them useless). The iMac, department property, I will keep and run it with Snow Leopard for the last month, and then upgrade the software only to Lion. I thus ordered a MacBook Pro for the home office, and a MacBook Air for the road and lecture purposes.
        According to my general philosophy, I go for "small and powerful", the smallest models (13" and 11"), but with the highest internal configuration in terms of memory, hard disk and processor (within the compact range). For memory, that means pre-fitted 4 GB for the Air, but for the Pro, I can add third-party memory. I saw earlier on that you could get 8GB for $56 from the US, which sounded like a good deal. However, I forgot to order at the time, and when I was checking up, I saw they are now selling 16GB modules for MacBook Pro (that is, 2x8GB), at $170. That is twice the officially sanctioned max of 8GB, but reports were that the modules work, and of course add to the speed of the machine. Is it risky? I worry a bit that these more tightly packed modules will generate more heat that over time may not be good for the machine, or maybe not. Shown the offer, I was greedy. I ordered them. They are in the mail.

So, this is a double upgrade: From 2007 to 2012 models; and from Snow Leopard to Lion.


Day 1: Both machines arrived today, and I took them home. I'll have to install them in order, and started with the MacBook Air. As we know, small (smaller screen than I expected, I'll have to zoom a bit, I guess), light and completely quiet. I wanted to open a webpage, but was told that "please install the latest version of Flash". Lion no longer comes with Flash pre-installed, as it used to (nor with Java-Script), in both cases you are told to install the first time you use a program that requires one of these. So I clicked on Download, and nothing happened. Again, still nothing. Then I realized (1) that Safari no longer displays the "Downloads" list when you download something, instead there is a small icon in the Bookmarks bar that flashes briefly, and (2) something had happened: the download had been so quick that I had not registered it with the naked eye. Impressive.

First, however, I had to set up the Air. While the flash drive of the Air is smaller than my previous Mac's hard disk, it could hold everything I actually had on it, so I wanted to use the Migration Assistant to move everything over, way way easier than any form of manual transfer of settings and identities. However, Air does not have the FireWire port that you normally use for direct migration, so I had to transfer over wifi. The Air told me to start the migration assistant program on the old Mac, which I did. However, neither machine could find the other, although they certainly were on the same network. "Cannot find other computer" both reported, and no resets or anything started that. So, I had to go through manual setup on the Air, and see if I could transfer manually after all - it would allow me to avoid transferring old files I did not need on the Air.

I would begin that by first setting up MobileMe sync, to get my email, Safari and address book from the server. It turned out that MobileMe wasn't happy about that, it just told me that it was "time to upgrade to iCloud", but there is still one month to go, and anyway, iCloud will not sync all I want to get. I was able to bypass that message and get into MobileMe, and set it to start syncing. It began, the wheel turned for a few seconds, and stopped. "Could not sync". Again, different choice, but same result. It refused again and again to download settings from the server. I still do not know why.

Then, I thought perhaps I could speed up transfer by connecting the Air to the Ethernet cable - it came with the USB-Ethernet adaptor (the Ethernet of the other was gone, so it was only wireless on that end). Try again the Migration Assistant - and now it found the other Mac! A bit back and forth about which machine should click the password accept, and it warned me that I had to modify the account name (as I had already created the first account with my regular name in the setup) but finally I was up and running.

Well, walking. But that was expected, migrating a full 100 GB hard disk does take time. Over FireWire probably a couple of hours, over the air, more like seven-eight. I left it over night, and by morning it was finished, and successfully: The MacBook Air had taken over the files and identity of the old MacBook. Time to call it a day and go to my paid work.


Day 2: Back home, time to play with the Air. I haven't come so far, but of course am amazed at the speed and usefulness of this new machine; also relieved that Migration Assistant seems to have ported most things across so I did not have change much except re-sign up with various passwords as it was a new machine. (On the old, I did two things to avoid confusion: De-install CrashPlan, the backup program I use, since the Air had taken over the old Mac's identity and backups and will be confused if the old starts to back up independently; and de-authorize iTunes, for which I can only have five Mac authorized to play/show copyrighted material I have bought. Of course, the old and new count as separate Macs in that respect.)

Nw things Lion: First unavoidable glance is that scroll bars, which we have used since 1984 ('86 in my case) have gone. Well, not completely gone, you can check a setting to display them, but they are still there only on occasion. Have not found the system yet when they appear and when not, but in any case, they do not look at all like usual blue scroll bars, but thin gray stuff like you have on an iPad. However, I understood the thing about the touchpad: Use one finger, and works like a touchpad used to; it moves the arrow / curser, like moving a mouse. Use two fingers, and it scrolls the text, as on the iPad (or the "hand tool" on the Mac). So, you must switch: first use one finger to place the cursor over the scrollable area (which would have had scrollbars before), and two to flick the text up or down as on the iPad / iPhone. Yes, OK, I can get used to that, but what I miss both here and on the iPad is the ability to drag the scrollbar very quickly to the bottom of a long text, here you have to flick and flick one screenful at a time. Tedious over 150 pages.

A couple of other less than fascinating things: On the old machines, I have held back from upgrading Safari beyond 5.0, because 5.1 broke with Evernote web clipper, which I use more than the things Safari introduced in 5.1. Lion's Safari is 5.1, but Evernote should have a new clipper for Lion. It does work, but ufortunately not properly (like the clip to bookmark alternative in Snow Leopard): It cannot collect a complex web page like an Amazon page, previously saved as it was, here it only captures some confused snippets of text. Not good, since I do that a lot, I hope they fix it, or I will have to find another method for saving web pages in a structured way.

The Air does not come with a remote, like all Macs used to, and which is important since I wanted it to use it for Powerpoints in lectures. So, I tried with my old one (the small white you can hide in the palm of your hand). No effect. And I quickly realized why (like so many before me): The Air does not have the infrared receiver to see the signals from the remote. It is physically impossible to use a remote with it. Strange, since that is surely one of the main reasons people buy tiny computers like this, to carry along for presentations. You can use your iPhone as a remote with the Keynote Remote app, but I could do that with the iPad, and the iPhone is not invisible in a lecturer's hand. So, I will probably stay with the iPad (or park one of the old MacBooks, which can use the remote, permanently at my office for this purpose, we will see). Kind of deflating to discover after you bought the machine.

Finally, for the same powerpoint purpose, or for connecting the Air to the TV, at least I did not need new connectors (I have a plethora for the MacBooks: for VGA, HDMI and S/Video); they still use the same mini-connectors; or rather, it is now Thunderbolt, but that can use the mini-to-VGA connector from before. So, I tried that then. No, it didn't - the connector's plug was twice as big and did not fit at all into the Air's Thunder socket. Consternation, is there such as thing as a micro-DVI? No, it clearly says mini, both for MacBook 2007, and Air/Thunderbolt. But they are clearly not the same! Then, dawn: read more closely: the old was "mini-DVI to VGA connector". The new was "mini-Displayport to VGA connector". Not the same thing, they switched over without telling me in 2008. So all my old connectors are out, I have to replace at least those I still use. Bummer number 2, although a minor one; it is acceptable that such hardware moves on after five years. But they could have found more distinctive names than call both "mini-Dsomething to VGA".

That ended Day 2. Spaces, Command Panel or whatever it is called and further new things left to discover, and probably more things that does not work as it used to.

To be continued.

iPad for academics?

It may have been gleaned from recent posts that I mentioned iPads as if I had one. And indeed I do; I made the jump last fall, with the then-newfangled iPad 2. I did not mention it on this blog because I thought I would use it a bit first to see if (1) there was any point to the purchase at all (I had previously weighted iPad vs. MacBook Air and found the latter to be a better investment in terms of weight vs. usefulness. And yet, I fell for the lure), and (2) figure out what kind of useful purpose I could actually put it to. A toy, certainly, but also for my academic work? Any point in bringing it in to the office?

So, I held back from commenting on "would I advise you to buy one", and in the meantime, that question has almost become obsolete. Each time I go to a seminar or meeting, some more of my colleagues are whipping up their new iPads (Apple only, competitors need not apply, apparently -- although most of my colleagues are PC people; some had not even heard of iTunes and therefore did not understand how to turn on their iPad, since the first question was "please connect to iTunes on your PC/Mac". What?) By now, iPad penetration in average teachers' meetings and graduate seminars hovers around 50 per cent, as far as I can see.

Thus, most of them have probably found their own way of working, their own apps. Also, apps reviews are all over the place, so the need for another may be minimal. Still, I will hereby give my own version. How do I use the iPad for academic work as a university  professor, and what apps do I currently prefer for each purpose?

Save a tree
My first purpose was exactly what my colleagues do; to use it as reading pad for papers at meetings and seminars. In fact, the final push for me was one of my phd students who sent me his third 700-page draft for his thesis, for me to go through before submission, and I just did not want to print that out again. So how does that work?

We are talking about two things, background papers for committe meetings, and student drafts for graduate seminars and similar. Both are distributed to participants beforehand by email, and I read and, at least for student drafts, make comments on the papers so I want them in front of me when we are in session.

In the meeting, I could just open and read them in Mail, then, but I cannot be certain that there is a good wifi connection in the meeting room, so I prefer to make sure they are stored on the iPad. Thus, I use a combination of the two stalwarts for the academic aspect of the iPad, DropBox and GoodReader. 

I have earlier discussed how I now use Dropbox as the hub for everything I do on my Macs; all current projects as well as Filemaker databases I refer to are stored in my Dropbox folder. That means that, with the Dropbox app on my iPad (free), I already have access to all these files. Unlike on the Mac, however, the app does not download everything automatically, since the iPad / iPhone normally has less storage capacity; so I have to remember to download relevant files while I am online.

I can read PDFs, Word documents, etc., directly in the Dropbox app, but its viewing tools are limited, and I cannot comment on the papers in that app. So I normally use Dropbox as way to get files on and off the iPad, and then pass the files on to the other relevant apps for further use. Many apps can also access my Dropbox account directly, bypassing the Dropbox app, so when I edit and save, the changes made on the iPad are directly available on my Macs.

The app I mostly use then, for this save a tree purpose (reading and commenting drafts) is GoodReader ($5). It is a very versatile app that can read many file formats, but of particular importance for me is that you can edit PDF files in it: Highlight text in a colour, write comments in the margin, and even use handwriting with your finger or iPad marker (I never do that, it normally becomes unreadable). PDF editing actually has become so practical that when students send me drafts as Word .docs, I normally print them as PDF (on my Mac) for GoodReader instead of as Word files. GoodReader only lets you edit & highlight PDFs, not Word files; and pagination etc. is also only preserved in PDFs, not in .doc files. On the Mac, I can do the same thing in Preview, it too, unlike Acrobat, allows you to highlight & comment on PDFs, so Acrobat has been scrapped here. It is actually more convenient in Preview than in GoodReader, the latter could make the editing process a bit more straightforward. Anyway, I thus go back and forth between working on the Mac and iPad, on the same file.

This is because GoodReader has a separate sync folder in my DropBox folder, and everything I want to read and comment on goes directly there (subfolders "Meetings", "Student drafts" etc.). Again, I have to remember to press a "Sync" button inside GoodReader while I am online to up/download the latest version I have edited on Macs/iPads. But that done before I go to a meeting etc., it works automatically.

So, that is the technology. How does this work in practice? Is it just a gimmick, and what do I lose by switching off the paper mill?

For committee meetings, it works swimmingly. I need to have the structure of the relevant papers clear before the meeting (everything in the same app / folder), because it is much more distracting to search through apps on the iPad than papers on my desk, but otherwise, the experience is no different from reading on a dead tree.

For student drafts, you do lose something. However cleverly done online commenting has become, it is still quicker and easier to correct a typo, cross out a word, or write No! in the margin with pen on paper than switching tools, opening a text box and typing on-screen. So, students get less feed-back of that nature after the digital switch. Clearly, they should not suffer, so my current solution is two-fold: For a seminar, where everyone discusses a draft orally, I go digital only; the students there need not see my notes, and I can present the same oral comment whether I have used one tool or the other (I remember why I highlighted a word). But when a student comes for one-to-one supervision, I want to give him or her a more detailed commented paper copy, which she can take away and understand even if she forgets what I said. So, there I still print out the paper, comment in "longhand" with my scruffy handwriting, and give to the student. We must not become fanatics.

There is still a loss; there had developed a habit in the larger seminar that all students made written comments on each others' drafts correcting typos etc. and gave their printout to the presenter at the end of the seminar, for her to ignore or not, as she saw fit. That does not happen anymore, since so few people print out the drafts. Of course, they could email their comments, but again a bigger hurdle, I doubt it is much done. How much is lost there (since the main comments on content and structure are always discussed orally), I am not sure.


On the road
The other big thing, is of course that the iPad is always accessible, because I generally lug it along with me always in my backpack (and if I do not have the backpack, I can access the same apps on the iPhone in my pocket). Here, Dropbox then gives access to current documents, but it is not the only way.

I discovered another only a few days ago, actually as a side effect of a backup issue I had a couple of weeks ago. My TimeCapsule has acted up on me twice in the last year, it has reported either "Problem with disk catalogue" or "Disk full" (when it was nothing of the sort), and just deleted all old backups, starting all over again. I wasn't terribly happy, although I do have alternative backups, so in addition to buying a new FireWire hard disk for TimeMachine, I also installed a separate backup plan, recommended by the always careful TidBits.
This was CrashPlan, a swiss-armyknife backup system that allows you to back up both to a local disk, for rapid access, and at the same time, to their remote server, for safety (at a price; I took the max plan of  "back up ten computers, unlimited space, 4 years storage", which set me back about $200, mostly because of the four-year storage). Backing up my complete Documents folder (it does only that folder by default, but that is enough), of perhaps 120-160 GB on each machine, took ... time. I pressed the settings for maximum throughput, but still it took ten full days and nights to complete the first backup. Once that done, however, it works quickly and unobtrusively.

Anyway, the point here is that there is also af free CrashPlan app on the iPad. And, since all your up to ten computers belong to the same account, the app allows to access your backups on all your computers, irrespective of whether they are on, off-line or whatever. Point to a file, and you can download it to your iPad. Not just your current project, everything on all your Macs. Then pass the file on to an app which can read it, and you have full access to your desktops Macs (or their backedup files, which comes to the same thing).


Assuming, of course that you are online. Here, mileage will vary depending on personal preference and what is offered in your country, on whether it is useful to go for the less expensive wifi-only iPad, or take the wifi+3G model. It depends on how you use it, and on cost. Wifi access is almost always less expensive (or free), faster and most convenient, so the iPad will always choose wifi if both are available. The 3G mobile phone net is more limited in use, but is available almost anywhere, unlike wifi which of course you may have in your home and office, but not when you are walking about in the wilderness. However, using 3G for internet access may be pricey, and while some companies offer "unlimited" access, there is actually almost always a real limit for how much data you can download in a month, a ceiling that it is often not difficult to reach if you e,g, watch movies online. (And just in case you wonder: 3G access is only for the data part of the mobile phone network. Even if you put a SIM card into an iPad, that does not turn it into a mobile phone - unless you use Skype or similar, like a PC/Mac.)

The thing is that you have to make that choice before you buy the iPad; you cannot later "upgrade" neither to add 3G support, or for that matter more storage space. The situation for me, and not untypical, was that I have wifi access at home and at my office, and more and more often in hotels, airports and other locations. Since I (correctly) assumed I would not be walking the streets with the iPad in hand, I decided I would not need 3G support. That has turned out, for me, to be a correct assessment, even if I use the iPad probably rather more than I expected I would (like reading newspapers on the bus), I have not missed 3G much.
       But on the occasion where I do feel I need it, I can easily use the iPhone as a relay. This is called "tethering", in the US you pay the phone company extra for some strange reason; in my country you do not. On the iPhone, you turn on "Shared Internet" in Settings; then on the iPad, you select the iPhone as nework, type in the password you see in the iPhone, and the iPad is online (the connection from iPhone to iPad is through Bluetooth). Once set up, the iPad will remember the password, so just slide "Shared network" to On in the iPhone to put the iPad online. It just drinks from your iPhone data subscription, the same way as if you had used the iPhone itself to access the same services over 3G. (I expect this will work also with other Bluetooth-equipped smartphones.)

One very useful thing for academics particularly in Europe, incidentally, is a continent-wide cooperation for wifi access. It is called the eduroam network, and seems now to include most universities and colleges in Europe, at least I have found it in all I have visited lately. At your home institution, if you see "eduroam" as a network option, connect to it (at my university, all staff and students are given access with their regular network password), and click Accept. Then, when you go to some other university in another country, you can connect to the local (free) university network under eduroam; the iPad will most often recognize and connect to eduroam directly. Hassle-free and a great boon. It started out in Europe and is most universal here, but is also spreading in the US, although more sparingly there so far.


Productive apps
So, I have access to my files, and I use GoodReader to read other people's PDFs. But what about my own work, what can I do productively on my iPad?

So, again: my experience over the last half year: I have honestly not done any serious word processing or spreadsheeting on my iPad. I can do it, but the screen is too small (half taken up by the onscreen keyboard), the app's productive options are too limited, and when I want to work, I generally have a proper Mac at hand. I do use the iPad quite a bit more than I thought I would, but mostly for reading and consulting, rather than for active typing and producing. Yes, there are stand-alone iPad keyboards out there (you can even use Apple's own wireless keyboard) which gives you a full iPad screen and a work experience probably not much different from a MacBook Air, but if you have to tote along the separate keyboard and stuff, you might as well bring a regular MacBook, at least an Air would be more convenient.

That means, then, that my hands-on experience is limited. But certainly, in need (in a hotel room where you have half an hour free and did not bring your MacBook), you can use the iPad for productive work, and with time I might even get accustomed to working with the onscreen keyboard. If I have to.

So I have at least tried to collect some apps that should help be with the process, and here is my pick - with the caveat of limited actual experience with most of them.

The most important activity is of course word processing; and since I have been a Word user since forever (yes, shame on me, but in 1986, it actually stood out in the crowd), I would see something that could work well with the Word documents I write on my Mac. There are several, I chose QuickOffice ($20). It can open and save files in my Dropbox folder, as well as Evernote account (and iDisk), which allows me to work on my regular Word documents, saving directly back to where I can pick up when I am back at my Mac. Or I can work off-line with documents on the iPad, of course. It has word processing, spreadsheet and powerpoint presentation support. Evidently, it has very limited functions compared to regular word processors; only basic word formatting. For my limited spreadsheet needs, it also takes care of those.

If I had used Pages instead of Word on my Mac, I would probably have used the Pages app ($10), which stores its files on iCloud, so I had a similar syncrhonization there. Another common type of synced word processing (or rather simple text editing) is with Google's online word processor, GoogleDocs. That is a web program, so you can edit GoogleDocs documents in Safari on iPad (I also have a separate Google app, but that seems to be have been withdrawn). However, I had earlier downloaded the Notemaster Lite app (free), and it will also sync with GoogleDocs and allow you to write and edit its documents.

I do thus not use either very much. The Office element that I do use on the iPad, however, is PowerPoint. Since I always carry the iPad with me, whenever I am giving a lecture (in particular off-campus, but even on), I also take the special iPad-to-VGA cable with me. That allows me to connect the iPad to any video engine anywhere, since they are all based on VGA cables, and (mostly) without any further ado, whatever I have on the iPad screen turns up on the big screen; it mirrors directly. So, the process: I prepare my lecture presentations on the Mac in PowerPoint (could have used Keynote, same difference), and save, of course in my DropBox folder. Before leaving for the lecture hall, I open Dropbox on the iPad and click on the presentation file, it is downloaded. I could then just present it from the the Dropbox app, but I prefer to use Keynote on iPad ($10, it of course opens PowerPoint files). So I pass the file over to Keynote, open it and off the presentation goes.

This even allows for some redundancy. Once, in deepest western Norway, the senior citizen's club to whom I was talking (about the Sharia), had a video cannon that refused my iPad. It was probably a reset issue or something, but instead of fiddling, I chose the second option - which I had not planned, but knew would likely work: The iPad cable also works for iPhone. So, I did the import thing there: Opened Dropbox on the iPhone; luckily, I was within 3G coverage and it took only a few of seconds to download the Powerpoint file, transfer it to Keynote on the iPhone, and connect that to the video cannon. Then I ran the the presentation from the iPhone instead, smaller screen for me, but there was no difference for the audience. (The iPhone does not mirror the screen as the iPad does, but Keynote does channel VGA out; so does ShowAnytime ($8, US store only), while QuickOffice's presentation module does not).

Incidentally, when you have this combo, Keynote touts a "Keynote remote" app. Before the iPad, I used to hook up my MacBook to the VGA video setup, and then use the Mac's remote so I could walk around in the lecture hall. That remote does not work on iPads (which has no infra-red eye to receive its signals), so in that respect iPads are more restrictive, you have to stand near the pad and stroke the screen. With the Keynote Remote, you should be able to use the iPhone as a remote for the iPad Keynote app. However, the iPhone is rather large and obtrusive compared to the tiny Apple remote I can hide in my palm. It should be able to connect over wifi if on the same network segment, but that generally does not work for me. I have been able to connect via Bluetooth, however, but I have not used the remote app in real practice (yet).

The third most important productive tool for me, is FileMaker. I have used it for ages to store more or less anything, from bibliographies to membership lists. I would like to have access to that information also on the road and on the iPad. That is however the least convenient iPad tool. As far as I know, the only way to read FM databases is in their own iPad app, FileMaker Go ($40; free for FM 12 databases). However, it does not allow any syncing (except through a FileMaker server which is beyond my needs). So, access is one-way: I download the database I want to read in the Dropbox app, then pass it on to Filemaker Go, where I can then read as well as edit - but the edits are only made on the local copy there. It is possible to copy that back to your Mac by linking it to your iTunes (always a way to transfer files between iPad and local Mac) or email to yourself, but that is not convenient. Since Dropbox syncs Filemaker databases effortlessly between two Macs, it is hard to see why FM Go cannot do the same and access the files in my Dropbox folder directly, but there it is. To stay in sync, I have to delete the older files in FM Go, then replace them with new copies along the same Dropbox route; I only edit and update databases on the Mac.

The iPad for reading
In addition to these active purposes, the iPad was of course meant to be an tool for reading; leisure or academic. Only yesterday, I bought my first academic book on Kindle. I was a bit in doubt whether this was a good thing. For myself of course I get easier access to the book (and reading leisure stuff on iPad is great), but my office bookshelf is as much in use to show to others; whenever a student turns up with a paper idea, my first instinct is to go to my shelves and pick out whatever literature I have on the topic to show to him or her. In theory, I can show him the Kindle book on the iPad screen, but I suspect it will not be the same thing. But perhaps that is a matter of habit. My actual bookshelves are many and full, and I do not know if I really want a similar full electronic shelf on my iPad. So, far that is not a big issue, only a handful of relevant titles are available as e-books, but a few are, and as we know, that may change soon.

One academic library I do have on it, however, is of academic articles. As I have written about elsewhere, I checked out bibliographic software on the Mac and settled for Sente as the most versatile program for collecting information as well as storing and organizing downloaded PDFs for articles. Sente is one of those sync programs, any PDF or bibliographic reference you put into it is synced to its server and back to your various Macs. So, it also has a Sente Viewer app (free for the viewer only; a full app for editing entries is $20). Installing that, I have all the PDFs that are in my Sente library (which is everything I have, since I use that for organizing them), is also available on the iPad.

In addition there are of course Evernote, and many other apps for various uses. For Middle East specialists, there are for example several Qurans you can download, with Arabic text, one or more standard translations, and / or recitation(s) of selected verses. Very practical for the non-hafiz.

So, in sum, how useful is it? In theory, anything you can do on an iPad you can probably also do on a Mac, and in particular on a MacBook Air, which is also very light and has a real Mac system, unlike the iPad non-file system that forces you to use Dropbox, passing files from app to app, or other roundabout ways to do what is easy on a Mac. So, that would make the answer no, go for the Air instead. But the iPad is certainly often more convenient, because of its size - large enough to get an almost-proper working screen, but light enough to carry around without thinking about it, and its huge plethora of apps makes it useful for so many things. I do carry it back and forth every day, and while I may not be using for a long periods at the office where I have my Mac, I will normally grab it at least once or twice a day when I run to a meeting or a lecture I am giving, or to do some other task which may be doable on the larger Mac, but is easier on the Pad. And the ability to have more or less your office with you in your backpack is certainly useful for any academic, if you can resist the pressure to whip it up and write a conference paper every time you are waiting for the bus. So yes, I do not regret getting it, I am using it a lot, and it is not just a toy for leisure, but has useful productive functions as well.