Brief Thoughts on Apple’s Education Event

Well it has taken me long enough… This past week, Apple held an education event. Below are some brief thoughts on the subject. Chris Russell is coming on my podcast later this week to talk about all of the details. Keep in mind, I do not work in a school with 1:1 iPads or any kind of deployment strategy. But I am very seriously invested in Apple’s role in education and their vision for how their products fit into the classroom.

New iPad

This device looks great. Adding the Apple Pencil to this model will be an asset for schools. But will schools really pay 89 dollars for a pencil after just having purchased numerous 250 dollar iPads? 

The thing that gets me most excited about this device is its consumer potential. I am tempted to buy one for myself as a (more) mobile counterpart to my larger 12.9 inch iPad Pro.

iWork Updates

Apple Pencil support. FINALLY. This was my favorite announcement of the day. I anticipate editing Pages documents, scribbling on bus attendance lists made in Numbers, and annotating Keynote slides at the front of the classroom on a daily basis. I hate to be cynical (which the rest of this post will be), but Microsoft Office for iPad has had the ability to write on documents with an Apple Pencil since the Apple Pencil launched, two years ago. 

iBooks Author

Seems like the Mac app is no longer going to receive development. All book publishing features have been moved to Pages for iOS and Mac. It doesn’t appear that the new feature does everything that iBooks Author can do. Hopefully this is like when Apple rewrote Final Cut Pro X, took away some features, but then eventually added them back. Or when iWork was rewritten to be the same for iOS and macOS, stripping AppleScript features from the Mac, but eventually bringing them back. I would hate to see iBook authors unable to use workflows they have in the past using iBooks Author for the Mac. 

Classroom App for Mac

Apple’s learning management system comes to the Mac. Great! But what took so long? And can Apple keep up with the vastly more mature and flexible Google Classroom? (See conclusion below)

School Work App

An app for teachers to give assignments to students, check their progress, and collect it back. School Work can route students to other apps to do their assignments using the ClassKit API which is very cool. But why is this separate from the Classroom app? And where does iTunes U fit into all of this?

Conclusion

Apple is making a lot of solid efforts here but a lot of it it feels like too little too late, especially the student and learning management software. I really do hope they can keep up with Google Classroom who has been eating everyone’s lunch for years. Apple will have to be aggressive about adding new features to all of these new apps and making sure that their app ecosystem is flexible enough to compete with Chromebooks which use browser based software. Yes, there are way more apps on the App Store than there are Chrome based apps, but in education (and especially in music education) a lot of the big players are writing for Chrome OS. To me, the draw of Chromebooks in education is not their price, but the flexibility of web based software.

Apple’s software engineers seem spread very thin and unable to balance the release of various applications, consistently over time. This is true of many of Apple’s consumer apps. Mail and Reminders, two tentpole productivity apps have fallen way behind the competition. Calendar has not seen any more than a few major feature updates since I started using the Mac back in 2006. Apple’s apps are part of the “nice” factor of being in the ecosystem. Sometimes an app like Notes will get some major new features, but then we won’t hear from it for a few years. Google’s apps, by contrast, lack the same design sense, but are constantly being updated with new features. And they are not locked into annual OS updates like iOS is. In my opinion, this is Apple’s biggest problem right now.

Ironically, software is still my draw to Apple products. Even though their hardware is the most indisputably good thing they are doing right now (I am nearly without complaint of my iPhone X and the iPad 10.5 is perfect), it is the software that locks me in. In other words, I am much more committed to macOS and iOS than I am Mac and iPhone. This leaves me with some long term concern about my interest in continuing to use Apple products. And great concern about any educational institution who jumps on the iPad bandwagon just because apps are bright and colorful and demo well on stage. Apple has to show continual support for their education software if their dream for the classroom is to come true.

App of the Week: Sleep Cycle

From the moment I walk into school, chaos surrounds me. Tasks begin, busses arrive, students transition the halls, and classroom lessons never stop. It is important to take frequent steps back to monitor my physical and mental health as it relates to my stress and energy levels throughout the week.

In an ongoing effort to stay healthy, I have continued to explore health apps on the App Store that will help me collect data on my body. I one day plan to blog about this in detail. But for now, here is an app that I have used on and off for a while, but have recently been experimenting with again.

Sleep Cycle is an alarm clock app that is based on the following premise: that you will wake up the most refreshed if it is during your least deep sleep. Sleep Cycle allows you to set a time you need to be up by, and a wake up window. Using the microphone of the phone, Sleep Cycle uses advanced technology to listen to your movements during your sleep and wake you up within that window of time when you are in the least deep sleep. Sleep Cycle then records your movement (much like a Fitbit but without wearing anything) and presents it to you on a graph.

Sleep Cycle has many features. Amongst my favorites are: 

- Soothing alarm sounds

- Inegration with Philips Hue light bulbs. I can link it to the lightbulb in my bedside lamp so that it slowly turns on with a red tone as my alarm goes off. This way, my wife is not disturbed but I am gently woken up. 

- Integration with Apple’s Health app. Sleep Cycle records my hours in bed and hours asleep to the Health app so that I can see how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. How do activity and water intake influence my sleep? How does my sleep influence my weight? Etc... 

🗒 MMEA Session Notes

Thrilled to be back at the MMEA Conference this weekend. I am presenting my session, "Become a Mac Power User," today at 4:25 pm in room 306. Tomorrow, I am joined by my colleague, Ben Denne, as we direct the Ellicott Mills Middle School Symphony Orchestra at 12:50 pm.

Here are the session notes for "Becoming a Mac Power User"...

View notes for "Become a Mac Power User" (OmniOutliner | PDF)

I made the notes using the OmniGroup’s incredible outlining app, OmniOutliner. You can download their app for free here to open the outline (in read-only mode) in all its hierarchical glory. Or, you can simply download the PDF (its way less pretty and interactive though). It is worth mentioning that Omni also has a new 10 dollar "Essentials" version of OmniOutliner if you like what you see and want to create your own.

I am also excited to announce that my sessions are supported by both Sanebox and Hazel. Those who attend my sessions this weekend will get a 15 dollar credit towards Sanebox, in addition to their existing 14 day free trial. Sanebox, for those who do not know, is an essential service for filtering and organizing email. Two members of each session will get a free software code to download Noodlesoft’s powerful app, Hazel (32 dollar value), which automates the organization of files on your Mac’s hard drive.

App of the Week: Anylist —> Grocery Shopping and travel preparation has never been easier

This week’s App of the Week is AnyList.

AnyList is an app for making lists. Why use this? I already have Reminders for basic lists, Due for persistent tasks, OmniFocus for project management, and ToDoist for team collaboration. AnyList solves a grab bag of miscellaneous use cases for me, and offers a handful of other compelling features.

I started out needing a fuss-free list app that could allow me to manage reoccurring lists where I need to uncheck the entire list at the end of a process and start over, without recreating the list. This is useful for repeat grocery list items and a travel packing lists. AnyList was amongst the top recommended apps in this category, so I gave it a download.

On the surface, AnyList offers exactly what I wished for. The user-interface is not bad, but it at least looks like it belongs on iOS. A point in its favor. It works well for grocery lists, but also travel lists. As I continue to promote my book at state level music conferences numerous times a year, I am somehow still a really stressful traveler. Having a stock travel list that I can depend on has been instrumental in my ability to manage these trips and be a sane music educator at the same time. The simple feature of unchecking every item on my list and starting from scratch every time I am preparing for a trip is a game changer for me.

Next, I began to investigate the premium features ---> AnyList is also able to import from the Apple Reminders app, integrate with Amazon Echo, share lists with other users, manage grocery shopping, and manage meal planning. I decided to give the premium subscription a go. 

The Apple Reminders import is great. This allows me to keep my “Grocery” list in the Reminders app. I can say “add eggs to my grocery list” and Siri will add it to Apple Reminders. When I open AnyList, it imports items from that exact list into its own database. AnyList also supports Siri natively so I could say “add eggs to my grocery list with AnyList” and it would do the same thing more directly (though with a fussier syntax). Adding items from the Echo is very convenient as I am often in the kitchen when I realize I need something and can now just speak into the thin air, even if my hands are full while cooking.

Syncing a shared grocery list with my wife is a rock solid experience with AnyList. It happens very fast, and I have never had any duplicate copies. AnyList can also automatically organize your shopping list by which aisle of the grocery store certain items are grouped within. This orders them in a way that all allows me to check them off in store order rather than skipping around constantly. Bonus point! —> The Apple Watch version of the app is actually good, and allows me to interact with my lists smoothly and reliably without fiddling with my phone in the store. (Yes, I realize that describing an Apple Watch app as smooth and reliable is setting a low bar for watch apps).

AnyList is also a meal planner app that can parse recipes from websites, automatically add the required items to your shopping list, and walk you through the recipes step by step. (Though I still prefer the superior app, Paprika, for doing that kind of thing.)

Another bonus point! —> AnyList can be programmed to be location aware. You can tag certain shopping items by grocery store and have AnyList remind you when you are near that store. For example, some items I can only buy at Whole Foods. Therefore, I have tagged my precious Hex Ferments kimchi as such in AnyList and have set it to ping my phone when I am within distance. 

Needless to say, I am now subscribed.

Negative point! —> The AnyList Mac app is terrible and is somehow considered a “premium” feature.

None the less, try this app! 

App of the Week: Scanbot (and Scanner Pro)

This week’s App of the Week is Scanbot! 

As years pass, I solidify my mainstay productivity apps. I might try 100 todo or scanner apps, but many of the ones I depend on have been on my home screen for years. For a very long time, Readdle’s Scanner Pro was my scanner app of choice for getting documents and sheet music from the real world into my digital database. Scanbot has recently come to challenge it. 

Rather than explain all of the features, I have simply embedded a quick screencast below that shows it off. Both Scanner Pro and Scanbot allow the user to very quickly get paper into their phone, make the text searchable, neaten up the edges, and prepare the document for sharing. Both apps make it easy to customize ways to send finished documents to specific locations in your file system. Scanner Pro does this through custom workflows and Scanbot does it by remembering my most commonly saved locations in my iCloud and Google Drive (you can see this on the last screen of the screencast). But Scanbot has a few nice touches that ultimately push me over the edge, especially considering how tedious scanning documents with a phone can be...

Getting the final scan into a particular location is smoother for me in Scanbot because it always has my most recently saved locations one tap away. I also really like the way that when selecting the edges of the paper, Scanbot has handles that drag an entire edge, whereas Scanner Pro only has handles in the four corners. Notice in the video how Scanbot even detects the edge when I get close and automatically snaps to the edge of the page. Note that both of these apps have an automatic mode that detects the edges for you and bypasses this step. I just wanted to demo the neat snapping feature in the video.

Both apps also create a folder in iCloud Drive that will automatically save all snapped documents so that you can instantly run over to another device like your Mac and get to your new files.

Scanner Pro does have a few unique features. First, its custom workflows are very powerful and can do multiple things with your finished PDF (for example: save a document to Evernote with specific tags, add it to a specific folder in Dropbox, and email it to a coworker all in one tap). Second, it can scan your camera roll for things that look like documents (maybe a business card or a page you shot on your camera in a hurry) and transform them into PDFs on the spot. Third, it integrates with Readdle's other great productivity apps, like PDF Expert. 

Check out these awesome scanning apps and level up your digital organization!

App of the Week: OmniOutliner 3

I am kicking off a new series this week where I will highlight an app I am making use of lately. 

Hundreds of the apps I experiment with never make it into any of my conference presentations, longer form blog posts, or every day conversations. In effort to start sharing how I am taking advantage of these (and to get me posting here more consistently), I am going to do my best to write about one app a week. 

My goal is to very briefly explain what the app does and how I am using it in my life. I will leave full length reviews to the professionals. 

This week’s app is OmniOutliner. OmniOutliner comes from Omni Group who makes my task manager of choice (and number one most used app), OmniFocus. OmniOutliner is a writing tool that emphasizes features for creating outlines. It is far more intuitive, beautiful, and user customizable than what you are probably using to do this kind of work now, which is most likely a word processor like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. These traditional word processors are a clunk-fest of digging through menu options and formatting settings.

Hierarchical, list-types of documents are what this app handles best, though you can really do anything with it...budget, draft your next novel...anything. OmniOutliner has friendly keyboard shortcuts to make outlining fast. Pressing Enter goes to the next line of text. Command+Right Bracket or Left Bracket makes the current line of text you are typing go one level deeper or shallower in the hierarchy. Collapsible arrow buttons can be clicked to expose or hide entire sections of your outline. A theme can be stylized and applied across the entire document, or even just one level of the hierarchy.

Things I have used this app to write in the past few years: my book, every music presentation I have ever given at a conference, and lesson plans. The last one, lesson plans, I have especially come to love doing in OmniOutliner. My daily lesson plan is permanently left open on both my iPad and Mac. When I have something I want to add to my warm up or announcements, I add it from my Mac (or iPhone, depending on what is in front of me), type the extra line of text, and then wait. When I open up OmniOutliner on my iPad alongside my score reader of choice, forScore, the edits automatically sync to my iPad’s copy and I have an up to date version of my plan, ready to rehearse from.

For an actual review of OmniOutliner, check out this great one from MacStories. BTW, OmniOutliner now has a 10 dollar “Essentials” version that gives you most of the compelling features of the app without going all in on the powerful stuff I did not mention here (like cross-platform automation, for example). 

Download here:

OmniOutliner 3 by The Omni Group

OmniFocus 2 by The Omni Group

🗒 TMEA Session Notes - “Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers” and “Working with Digital Scores”

I am thrilled to be presenting at TMEA again this year. Both of my sessions, “Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers” and “Working with Digital Scores” will be taking place on February 17th, at 8 am and 11 am, respectively.

Here are the session notes:

Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers

Working with Digital Scores

🗒 OMEA Session Notes!!!

I am so excited to return to the Ohio Music Educators Association Professional Development Conference this weekend to present two of my very favorite sessions...

"Working with Digital Scores"

"Digital Time Management for Music Teachers"

And one new session ... "Become a Mac Power User"

I am also excited to announce that my sessions are supported by both Sanebox and Hazel. Those who attend my sessions this weekend will get a 15 dollar credit towards Sanebox, in addition to their existing 14 day free trial. Sanebox, for those who do not know, is an essential service for filtering and organizing email. Two members of each session will get a free software code to download Noodlesoft’s powerful app, Hazel (32 dollar value), which automates the organization of files on your Mac’s hard drive.

The session notes to the first two sessions come in the format of a live Evernote note. These are living documents that can be clipped into your own Evernote account, or simply viewed on the web. If I update them from my end, the edits will be reflected, real time, on your device.

The notes for my new session are a little longer, so I made them using the OmniGroup’s incredible outlining app, OmniOutliner. You can download their app for free here to open the outline (in read-only mode) in all its hierarchical glory. Or, you can simply download the Word version (its way less pretty and interactive though). It is worth mentioning that Omni also has a new 10 dollar "Essentials" version of OmniOutliner if you like what you see and want to create your own.

View notes for "Working with Digital Scores"

View notes for "Digital Time Management for Music Teachers"

View notes for "Become a Mac Power User" (OmniOutliner | Word)

🎙 Daniel Spreadbury and I talk Dorico.

In case you don’t subscribe to my podcast, I wanted to make sure you knew that I had the pleasure of interviewing Daniel Spreadbury, Product Manager of Dorico, last week.

Once we got going, this conversation ventured into great detail on the subject of Daniel’s start at Sibelius, using the different modes of Dorico, user interface design, the challenges of software development, the future of Dorico on mobile, and much more. 

I had a very fun time recording it and it is worth a listen if you have considered switching to Dorico. It is a must listen if you are in any way shape or form a nerd about user interface design or software development.

Here is a link to the episode: Listen here.

🔗 App Santa | Check out these top class and cheap apps!

App Santa | Amazing Discounts on Award Winning Apps:

App Santa is back! Enjoy savings of up to 80% on award-winning apps from independent developers through December 26th

Lots of great apps on here.

Twitterrific is an amazing Twitter client (although not the one that I use). Screens is a Mac app that allows you to tap into your Mac from your iPhone or iPad and control it as if you were sitting right next to it. Linea is a beautiful and simple sketch pad app. Alto’s Adventure and Mini Metro are two of the best iOS games I have ever played. Waterminder helps me track my water intake daily. I use Deliveries to track packages. I could go on and on. The list is just great.