Ryan Collins

🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

  • How to record touches and gestures for iOS screencasts

    Tonight I was playing around with Assistive Touch on my iPhone. In the Accessibility Settings, Assistive Touch places a “button” on the screen. This button gives the user access to certain capabilities, such as the ability to push a virtual home button. Playing around tonight I went into the Favorites area. This lets you record a gesture, with which you can play by pressing a button in this Favorites area.

    So in my playing around, I created my first gesture, which was just a tap. Once I added this saved gesture as a favorite I turned it on. Lo and behold, I had a blue circle on screen, which I could move around and when I released it showed tap. I then realized that one could turn this on when recording iPad or iPhone/iPod Touch screencasts and the taps would show up.

    To get started:

    Open up Settings, tap General and on the left, select Accessibility.

    Accessibility

    Under Physical and Motor, tab Assistive Touch.

    Assistive Touch

    Turn on Assistive Touch and then tab Create a new Gesture…. To create the touch gesture, just tap. To save the gesture, tap Save in the upper right corner. Name it Touch.

    Create New Gesture

    Save Gesture

    Now launch the app you want to record, tap the assistive touch button, select favorites and your newly created gesture, Touch. A blue circle will follow your figure around the screen, showing a tap when you release your finger.

    Unfortunately, no other gestures work other than the current one selected. You also probably will want to create some sliding gestures, which would allow you to show a slide in the screencast. If you are switching gestures, you will probably want to cut out the selection of the gesture in your favorite movie editing application.

  • Suspend Chrome tabs with The Great Suspender

    The newer versions of Firefox has a great feature where upon startup, web pages in tabs aren’t activated until they are clicked on. It’s really nice when you’re restarting the browser with several tabs open. Unfortunately, Google Chrome doesn’t offer this feature. As I was searching for something like this for Google Chrome, I came across The Great Suspender.

    This extension lets you suspend tabs, either automatically after a time or from a menu option. I leave it set to auto suspend tabs after 5 minutes in the background. You can also whitelist web pages that should never be suspended, which I use for Feedly and IMO.im.

  • Solve BYOD consistency issues with VirtualBox

    In my district we are currently planning our 1 to 1 program. We settled on 11.6″ laptops running Ubuntu as the device. The problem that has arisen is how to we ensure consistency with students who wish to bring their own laptop. If they were Chromebooks, the BYOD students could just run Chrome. But with the flexibility of Ubuntu comes the complexity for BYOD. That is, until one considers VirtualBox.

    VirtualBox is a program that lets you virtualize operating systems on your computer. For example, your computer (host)can be running Microsoft Windows, and run a virtual machine of Ubuntu Linux. The virtual machine (guest) is separate from your current system, anything in the virtual machine does not affect the host. The guest can even be running the same operating system, running Microsoft Windows in a virtual machine on a host running Microsoft Windows. There are some legal implications to running Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X in a virtual machine. For Microsoft Windows you will need to purchase an additional license for each copy of Microsoft Windows that you would run in a virtual machine. Under Mac OS X 10.8 you are allowed to virtualize up to 5 virtual machines on Apple hardware. Since we are looking at Ubuntu, these licensing restrictions don’t affect us.

    With Ubuntu, a standard image can be created with the exact same set up as the laptops. Even management of the virtual machine would be the same. So for our students and teachers, it won’t matter whether or not they have a school laptop or their own laptop. Everyone will have the same setup. It’s a brilliant solution to issues that have been brought up on BYOD.

  • Take control of your notifications

    Interruptions are deadly. Well, maybe that’s a little bit of exaggeration. But even three second interruptions can cause problems. I’ve decided to take back the notifications on my phone.

    First stop was the phone ringer. Apple doesn’t have a silent ringtone on the iPhone, so I had to search. In my searching I came across the article iPhone tip: Use a Silent Ringtone to Screen Calls in Your Sleep. It not only contained the silent ringtone but also directions on using it. My default ringtone is silence, and a different ringtone is set for those people for which my phone should always right.

    Next up was text alerts. The iPhone has a silent text alert, so that part was easier than the ringtone. Then I also went in and added a tone for just a few people.

    Finally, I went into Settings -> Notifications and turned off the sound notifications for most of my applications.

    Now I have a nice, mostly silent phone which doesn’t interrupt me.

  • Don’t interrupt me

    Research shows that meetings and interruptions have a negative effect on our well being that may “…contribute to burnout, anxiety, depression and other negative emotions“. Combine meetings with interruptions from students, parents, other teachers, and principals, and you have a recipe for grouchy teachers! A person takes 8-10 minutes to get back into a creative state following one interruption. Here are some ideas I had to help you minimize or eliminate interruptions:

    • Students – Lay down rules on when a student is allowed to ask questions or contribute to a discussion. Create procedures for the student to follow to request help or use the bathroom. One idea to ask for help is to use a simple paper cup. If the cup is on the student’s desk or computer, he would like a moment of your time at your earliest convenience.
    • Parents – Notify parents when you are available, and distribute your e-mail address. Let them know they are free to e-mail you at any time. Keep the lines of communication open, but tell them that you are not available to take a call during the day. Sign up for a free Google voice account and give that number out to parents.
    • Teachers – A simple thing such as “If the door is closed, email me” can work wonders.
    • Office – Notify the office that you check e-mail twice a day, and that it is your preferred method of communication. Along the same lines, be sure to check your e-mail twice a day! Follow the idea for teachers above, and close the door when possible.
    • General Ideas – The best line of defense is a good offense. Let others know what interruptions are acceptable to you. You have e-mail, use it to eliminate as many interruptions as you can.

    The key is to put you in control of your interruptions, and let you take care of them when you have time. Everything above is workable (except for emergencies).

  • Pythonista, programming on your iPhone and iPad

    Let me show you something that will make you feel young as when the world was new. — Dr. Carol Marcus

    I feel like a teenager again while playing around with Pythonista (Universal, $6.99), an app for iOS allows you to program in python directly on the device. It reminds me a lot about when I was learning to program in BASIC on my Atari 800XL (my favorite computer ever, although my iPod Touch is a close second). With Pythonista, I can finally write little apps to make my day easier. A lot nicer than going to the App store, downloading a bunch of free apps, all which have obnoxious ads and don’t do quite what I want.

    My first script was written to automate my 365 project. A project that I am terrible at keeping up, but now my DOY script will make it easier when I post once a month. I always struggle with the text I add at the end of my description for the picture, where I calculate the day of the year:

    #365 (218/365)

    I’d end up having to go to a website to find out what the day of the year it was. Well, at least that’s what I did in the past. Now I have written the following script and created a shortcut to it:

    # We're going to need work with dates, access to the clipboard,
# and to launch an app (you use the webbrowser to do that).
import datetime
import clipboard
import webbrowser

# Figure out the day of the year
day_of_year = datetime.datetime.now().timetuple().tm_yday

# Create out tag line
clip = " #365 (" + str(day_of_year) + "/365)"

# Put it in the clipboard
clipboard.set(clip)

# Open Camera+
webbrowser.open('cameraplus://')

    Camera+ has a shoot and share mode, which is what I have set as the default. So now I click on the DOY icon, Pythonista does its thing and Camera+ opens up. I take the picture, type my witty caption, and paste the tagline. Very, very cool.

    Pythonista can also export your script as an XCode project, one that you can load into XCode and create an actual iOS app. I haven’t had the chance to try that out yet. A couple of negatives. Getting scripts into Pythonista can be a lesson in patience. Due to Apple’s limitations on loading code, you cannot simply load code from your Dropbox or other sources, you have to copy and paste. This also means that scripts on your iPhone are automatically synced to your iPad. There is a Dropbox workaround, but I haven’t had the chance to try it out yet. The other negative that I’ve found so far is that there isn’t a built in user interface library, so you’re limited to text or creating your own graphics for things like buttons.

    All in all, it’s well worth the price (especially since it’s universal!).

  • Drafts for iPhone and iPad is the app you never knew you needed

    On its surface, Drafts appears to be yet another note taking app for iOS. Once you dig into it, you begin to realize the power that it yields. After your start it (which is relatively quick even on my aging iPhone 4) you are greeted with a new note or your previous note.

    http://dl.ryancollins.org/blog/draftsnew-m.jpg

    Once you’ve finished typing your note is when the magic begins.

    Drafts has a bunch of built in actions, which allow you to process your note in various ways. The simplest actions do things like save your note to Evernote, or use your note as an email. You can also Tweet your note. I’ve found the Dropbox actions to be very powerful. You can apply templates to your note. For example, my blog posts while I’m working on them have a distinct format:

    Title: This is the title of the post
Date: 2013-08-01 08:00:00
Author: mr.rcollins
Category: Software
Tags: some,great,tags

This is the body of the blog post

    To create a new post in Drafts, I start a new note:

    This is the title of the post
Category: Software
Tags: some,great,tags

This is the body of the blog post

    When I am finished with the note, I use a Drafts Action to save to my drafts folder in Dropbox. The action names the file by the first line in the note, appending a .markdown extension. It then creates the rest of the formatting through the following template before saving it to Dropbox:

    Title: [[title]]
Date: [[date|%F %T]]
Author: mr.rcollins
[[body]]

    http://dl.ryancollins.org/blog/draftssavedraft-m.jpg

    And now I have the blog post formatted correctly. I do have two complaints with the program. The first is that it uses it’s own sync service instead of Dropbox or iCloud. The second is more of a pet peeve, the app isn’t universal, so I ended up paying for the iPad and iPhone version.

    It’s now such an integral part of how I work that I put it in my dock, alone, not in a folder of apps. I use it to send tweets, create emails, start blog posts, and append to notes in Dropbox. The price ($2.99 for iPhone, $3.99 for iPad) was worth it to me.

  • “Well, better get unconventional.” — Dr. Ballard

    “Well, better get unconventional.” — Dr. Ballard

  • Is there anything like Drafts for iOS for Android?

    Is there anything like Drafts for iOS for Android?

  • My work is done

    The daughter knows who Notch is. My work is done.