Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Thing 16. Audio

I used Soundcloud for this Thing, and like the app a lot. It's cool having the ability to search for and follow music, artists, etc., and add streams. Of course, many music apps let you do that. But the super-cool aspect of Soundcloud is being able to record yourself. I use it for guitar practice. I can play a lick, or part of a piece, and hear if I'm getting close to doing it right. As for library applications, podcasts, sure. But I can visualize Soundcloud being useful for any time you need to record something: a bit of conference presentation, a story-time, comments about a library event. Soundcloud--nice work, developers!

Thursday, April 24, 2014

Thing 15. Infographics

I used info.Graphics for this Thing. At first I liked having the ability to browse infographics by subject. Lots of good infographics, on many interesting topics. But then, unfortunately, I couldn't get the search function to work. Being able to search for libraries as a subject would have been cool, as the app. would be an easy source for ideas. And it got worse. Info.Graphics is slow, and pretty cumbersome to use on an iPhone. Text was just to hard to read on a small screen. And I know the developers need to monetize, but I could really go without a Candy Crush ad running at the bottom of the screen! Rating: 2 out of 10.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Thing 14. Videos

I used Vine on my iPhone for this Thing. I like Vine, for how clean and simple it is to use and for its social media functionality. I think it's cool that you can browse the channels, or just search for hashtags or people. I did some looking around for libraries but didn't find a lot of them using Vine. I suppose that may be a matter of staff creating social media weighing the pros and cons on how useful a short video is for providing info. My thinking is that Vine videos are similar to a tweet or a Tumblr or Flickr post--the fact that it's a video just makes it more interesting!

Thing 13. Presentations

I downloaded Deck Slideshow Presentations for this Thing. I think Deck would be very useful for presentations that need to be created on the fly, or those that don't require much detail. The app. works well, even on my iPhone and I like its simple and clean functionality. The only drawback is a lack of real creative options to make a presentation more interesting. But what the hell--it's an app.

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Thing 12. Books, books and more books

As I'm not a fan of audiobooks, I didn't find too many of these Things interesting. The one app. that looked promising here, Free Books, turned out to want 3 bucks to download; only the audiobooks were free. Bummer. So instead of these apps, I guess I'll continue to download books from my library, using either Overdrive or Kindle. But as this Thing concerns mobile: the Kindle app. isn't very user-friendly for finding free, pre-1923 books from the Amazon website (golly jeez whiz--I wonder why?). Amazon calls this category "Free Popular Classics," but you can't search for this on your phone--once you type the word "free" in the search box, you immediately get locked into the free sample part of the site. Don't want a sample; want it all. Free. Get on the stick, Bezos!