Recently I have been doing a bit of research into
trends in mobile applications for a digital technologies course. In this post I
will discuss some of the more recent trends which I think will be of interest
to librarians, or anyone interested in the weird and wonderful aspects of
mobile apps!
One trend that has always both confused and fascinated
me is the idea of ‘jailbreaking’ iPhones. After all, you buy this nice new
Apple phone (at not a low price) and then you set about breaking it and voiding
its warranty – it doesn’t make sense! However, it turns out that Apple do place
some very high restrictions on the content and things you can do on your phone,
for example you aren’t able use Adobe Flash software on its devices! If you
jailbreak your phone you are able to upload some unsupported applications on
your phone. The following article by PC World provides some examples of the
applications you can host on your phone, some of it useful, and some of it
totally frivolous (hey - let’s change the colour of your keypad!).
I have to admit I am not a person that has joined in
the tablet and smartphone trend. I only have a smartphone because it cost $50
more than a regular cellphone. One of the things that has put me off the
technology is the lack of office software and ability to create documents, like
you would on a PC (or a word processer from the 80s)! Microsoft
Office applications only let you view, not edit you documents. There are a few
software packages that you can buy to edit documents with; examples include
Quickoffice HD Pro, Documents To Go and Polaris Office (which appears to be
popular with readers of PC World, see The
Best Office Alternatives for Android Tablets). However, apart from the fact that all these applications cost (usually
around US$15), the biggest problem with the idea of using applications for word
processing is that to type documents you need to attach a keyboard to your
device. There are two main problems to this; first you need to find a device
with a USB drive, which is not available on all devices. The second it that, as
far as I’m concerned, if your attaching a keyboard to your tablet, there is no
advantage to a laptop. You are basically attaching a keyboard to a screen, one
that doesn’t fold up, and has unnecessary wires to deal with. It is not exactly
portable! I see a bit of a wait before tablet devices become the computer
replacements they are currently touted as.
Finally, on an irreverent note, a computer science lecturer
at Miami University has designed a mobile application which can help shelving
library books.
Inspired by the
experiences of his wife (a university librarian), this application scans codes
attached to each book’s spine and indicates those which are miss-shelved.
Personally I can’t see librarians running over a shelf scanning each item to
see that it’s in the correct space, but this service shows that there are many
ways that digital tools can be incorporated into librarian’s jobs. I used an
online game on the Dewey Decimal system before I started my first job to
memorise how shelves are ordered and the system works. I think there are many opportunities here for
librarians to incorporated games and applications into staff training, to make
it more efficient and interesting for the trainee.
Join me next week, where I will be (trying to) create
and upload a Google Documents Presentation, another exercise for my paper on
digital technologies. Check back to see how I go :-).
