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.

Word 2011 and Arabists

Time is slipping us by, and June 2012 is almost upon us. While it may not mean the Mayan end of the world (that is only in December), it means the end of MobileMe. And since everything is connected, at least for me that sets a whole lot of things in motion.

MobileMe means calendar synchronization. I cannot live without that in my workday, so end of June also means that I have to jump onto iCloud. It is possible to sync an iCal calendar under 10.6 with iCloud, but it also connects with Address Book, Back to my Mac and other stuff which is also very useful, and do require proper iCloud access. And sometime one must make the upgrade, so it will be iCloud for me. Which means that I must install Lion. Which means that I lose access to Rosetta programs (that is, programs made before the Mac became an Intel machine in 2006).

I have been kind of preparing for this for some time, checking out which essential programs will not run under Lion and which I will have to replace or say goodbye to. I have already discussed my old email program, Eudora, which I can no longer then use, and how to access my old email under the new system. I have upgraded those that require upgrading, and some things will have to go; for which I must either live without, use on an older Mac, or find a replacement program (like the useful Iconographer, a small specialized tool that will not be upgraded). And I hope that my favourite solitaire game, Solitaire till Dawn, will finally make the jump some day soon.

But, of course, willingly or not, our working day is dominated by Microsoft Office and its Word, certainly as long as we collaborate with others. Office 2008 has been OK for me, but I have kept the previous version, Word 2004, around primarily for one purpose: macros. That is where the "Arabists" in the title kicks in: In the mid-2000s, I created a fairly large library of Word macros that converted transliteration diacritics (which we who use non-Western languages need) to the modern Unicode fonts. They work in NisusWriter and Word, but the Word part (which most people need) was suddenly made obsolete when Word 2008 no longer could use macros. I still have hundreds of old Word files - some fairly important, such as book and article manuscripts - written in my pre-Unicode Jaghbub font, so I had to keep Word 2004 afloat to run my conversion macros in it whenever I was going to use such documents in a Unicode setting. And Word 2004 is Rosetta based, so it will not run under Lion.

Therefore, Lion means also getting hold of Office 2011, which was supposed to reinstate macro support, and also have some support for Arabic. I have not made the Lion jump yet (we are still in May), but I have now installed Office, to check out how it works for these our peculiar purposes.

First test, then, was: Would they run my old 2004 font conversion macros, or would I have to rewrite them (I really really do not understand macro language, it was all cut & paste; trial & error). Sigh of relief: they run just fine and exactly like in Word 2004, with no modification. (I have only tested my own Jaghbub version, but the code is the same, so they should all work.) However, installation is not as convenient; you can no longer just drop them in a "Startup" folder to have them always available; you have either to activate the macro file for each session, or install selected macros into your "Normal.dotm" settings file. But we can live with that, most people will only convert from the one or two old font they have used, so it is a one-off installation procedure.

Second issue: What was this thing about Arabic? Until now, Word has never been able to display Arabic on the Mac. It has of course been a major drag for Arabic users. Rumours said that in Word 2011, you could edit already existing, but not start writing new Arabic text. Sounded very strange.

And very strange it is. Officially, there is no Arabic support at all, there is no indication that Word should allow writing right-to-left. But it does, in a peculiar and limited way. I cannot say I understand it, but Word apparently "brands" text as either Arabic or Latin, irrespective of what it actually is. And if the word is branded Latin, it will never connect properly, whatever you do with it. But if you can get Word to see it as Arabic, then you can edit, copy, write more and all you want. The trick is to get to that point.
     The approved way, then, is to open some document which contains Arabic; then Word will recognize that and allow you to edit it. I tried that, and it worked! I typed a few Arabic words in a TextEdit document, saved as .rtf, and opened in Word 2011. The Arabic came up fine - wrong font, left adjusted, but I could correct that and keep typing Arabic in that section. Then, I added some English text below, and tried to switch to Arabic below that again - and no go. The letters remained disconnected, as in the old days. But if copied some of the "good" Arabic and pasted below the English, it remained OK and I could continue typing. So correct: edit imported, but not initiate new.
      That was on my Mac at home. But then, having posted this excellent news on my Arabic Mac web page, I tried the same at the office - and nothing worked. Same Mac system 10.6, same Word 2011, same procedure in every way. But it was absolutely impossible to get Word to accept any Arabic imported from either TextEdit, NisusWriter or Mellel. However, when I brought in the TextEdit document I had made at home, everything worked fine. So, I was stumped, I cannot TimeMachine my own actions back to what I did at home that was different, but I had to amend my advice to "this may or may not work for you". (But Word for Windows and OpenOffice Arabic documents did work, so it is may have something to do with the .rtf format used by Nisus/TextEdit.)

Anyway, the trick I did find, and which works is: if you at any point do get a workable Arabic text paragraph into Word 2011, create a Style from that text, and save it as a global "template", which is then available in all new documents. The Arabic sticks, and you can in that way actually write Arabic even in new documents you create.

The third "legacy" element was to see if Word 2011 still could open older Word 5 documents. In Word 2004, you just double-clicked on any Word document and it opened. In Word 2008, that gave a stupid dialogue box about older files being "blocked for security" (why? the only security issue is macros, and Word 5 didn't have such). But you could open older files by using the "Open" command within Word. Was that still the case, or had support for older files completely gone? Minor relief: the same "blocked" box on double-clicking, but Word 2011 opens old files just as easily as Word 2008 (back to about 1992; that is Word 5.1 and higher. Word 2004 can go a couple of years further back), and apparently with everything correctly displayed as far as I can see.

So, on the whole, Word 2011 is probably no worse, and in a couple of ways actually an improvement on Word 2008 for maintaining old documents from our past. They upgrade curve is also less onerous in that menus etc. are mostly identical to those we know from Word 2008. I have not used the 2011 version much yes, but on the whole it seems that the upgrade has been less wrenching than moving from one version to another has been before.

In other words, that Lion hurdle has thus been passed. On to the next.