Keys in the Fridge

By Joe Puckett, director of recruiting and training at PC Helps

The Rave:
The people I work with can be charmingly absentminded, myself included. One of the more entertaining evidences of this was when I opened a refrigerator in the lunch room and saw someone’s keys on a shelf. At first I thought that they had been left there by accident, but then I realized that it was a brilliant compensation strategy for absentmindedness.

iOS 5's notification settings: Flexible and effective, but missing a universal on/off switch.

There was something in the fridge that they needed to remember to take home, and you can’t go home without your car keys. I bring this up to give you some context on why Notifications in iOS 5 is such a huge hit in our office.

It is in your face exactly the right amount. You get notifications even when the screen is locked. You can view a list of notifications by dragging down from the top of the screen. When you are busy working, you can set notifications to appear as discreet pop-ups, the way they are on keyboard and mouse machines, or you can set them to show up as the stop-the-presses box iOS has always had. Flexible and effective — who could ask for anything more?

Me, of course.

The Rant:
Could we please schedule a conference call between the people who made Notifications and the people who made Keynote? Keynote is a capable presentation app, especially for just 10 bucks. Notifications is a great improvement in iOS 5. Making an uninterrupted presentation with Keynote requires going into Notifications and turning off each notification individually. Then you have to go back in and turn them all back on. Maybe we should include the people who made Airplane Mode in the conference call. Notifications really needs a single on/off switch that puts a quiet little icon somewhere to remind you of what you aren’t getting.

The Conclusion:
I haven’t seen any keys in the fridge since iOS 5 came out. There is no way to prove that Notifications caused that, but it is good enough to have done so. Now if it could only keep us from forgetting our iPads.

***

Read Part 1: Using Gestures
Read Part 2: Wireless Sync
Read Part 3: One Day at a Time

About the author: Joe Puckett is PC Helps’ director of recruiting and training. He grooms the talent here, and creates our internal and client-facing corporate training courses. A 15-year PC Helps veteran, Puckett is the one to ask if you ever have a software question.

This week, PC Helps Blog is featuring Puckett’s series of “iOS 5 Rants & Raves” geared to end-users. Last week’s posts were geared to IT leaders and professionals. He has been researching and testing the new operating system as part of his ongoing efforts to build new iPad training modules for PC Helps productivity consultants.

Click here for a video of Puckett describing what makes a good productivity consultant.

Joe Puckett iOS 5 Rants & Raves, iPad, iPhone airplane mode, Apple, Keynote, Notifications

Multi-Touch Squared

By Joe Puckett, director of recruiting and training at PC Helps

The Rave:
The convenience and intuitiveness of the multi-touch gestures that helped fuel the skyrocket of iOS device sales just got a lot better with iOS 5. Four-finger up/down swipes to show/hide the multitasking bar and four finger left/right swipes to move among open apps make multitasking much faster and easier. A five-finger pinch sends the current application to the multitasking bar so you can get to the current home screen.

The Rant:
Still no widgets or a way to have the same app in multiple places? How will I know where I am without the weather widget on the home screen of my phone listing my location without me having to open anything? Most people’s digital life is not so neat that having mail in only one place is convenient. I’ve seen many Android phones with the mail application in four or more places. Being able to put the same app in multiple places enables people to group things by business function rather than computer function.

The Conclusion:
The convenience of having everything in one place is one of the primary forces driving the use of personal devices in business. The new multitasking gestures in iOS 5 make it much easier to move among all the things on an iOS device. Widgets and duplicate app icons would still be nice, but being able to leave a lot of things open and move between them so quickly is a good way to accomplish the same purpose.

***

Read Part 1: iOS 5 Rants & Raves for End-Users: Part 1

About the author: Joe Puckett is PC Helps’ director of recruiting and training. He grooms the talent here, and creates our internal and client-facing corporate training courses. A 15-year PC Helps veteran, Puckett is the one to ask if you ever have a software question.

This week, PC Helps Blog is featuring Puckett’s series of “iOS 5 Rants & Raves” geared to end-users. Last week’s posts were geared to  IT leaders and professionals. He has been researching and testing the new operating system as part of his ongoing efforts to build new iPad training modules for PC Helps productivity consultants.

Joe Puckett iOS 5 Rants & Raves, iPad, iPhone app icons, Apple, gestures, iOS, iPad, iPhone, Mac, MacIntosh, multi-touch, multitasking, widgets

Cutting the Cord

By Joe Puckett, director of recruiting and training at PC Helps

The Rave:
Can the day be far off when there are people who find the notion of connecting one device to another with a wire as strange as buying music on a vinyl album is to today’s high-schoolers? It is a wireless world, and iOS 5 makes it more so with iTunes Wi-Fi Sync. Connect the computer running iTunes to the same network your iOS device is connected to wirelessly and synchronization happens without wires. This has turned out to add more convenience than I expected it to.

With iOS 5 iTunes Wi-Fi Sync, wires are no longer needed.

The Rant: 
One of the things you could count on when conversing with an Apple aficionado was hearing, “Apple products just work.” iTunes Wi-Fi Sync has taken some of the shine off that apple. Getting it to work, especially the first time, can be very quirky. Things tend to get more seamless once it has worked over some network, but can still require more human intervention than we are used to with Apple products. It also exceeded its advertised performance in a rather disconcerting way. I had seen in numerous places that the device had to be plugged in to recharge for iTunes Wi-Fi Sync to work. It was a little surprising to see it working with my iPad 2 not plugged in. To prove that I’m human, I was then disappointed that my original iPad worked as I had been told to expect, which was for iTunes Wi-Fi Sync to not work unless the iPad was plugged in to recharge.

The Conclusion:
Reducing the need Read more…

Joe Puckett iOS 5 Rants & Raves, iPad Apple, iTunes, vinyl, wi-fi

Are We There Yet?

By Joe Puckett, director of recruiting and training at PC Helps

The Rave:
Ever since digital technology escaped its white-coated keepers in the computer lab it has become relentlessly more and more personal. The BYOD trend is a logical phase in the development of the personalization of digital technology. Users no longer want to be restricted to “your” hardware; they want to use the hardware they choose. It is natural that the companies creating those devices would deliver what people want.

Part 4 in the series:
Are We There Yet?

One result of this is that iOS devices have been very good at allowing individuals to standardize multiple devices to their own preferences. What they have not been good at is supporting standardization to an organization’s preferences. One new feature in iOS 5 makes significant strides towards organizational standardization — it supports downloading and installing multiple applications at one time. This is convenient for individuals, but also a great time saver for those provisioning multiple standardized devices.

The Rant:
Simultaneous download and installation is a start, but Read more…

Joe Puckett iOS 5 Rants & Raves, iPad Apple, BlackBerry, BYOD, consumerization, Research In Motion

Separate Checks, Please

By Joe Puckett, director of recruiting and training at PC Helps

The Rave:
The very existence of Amazon’s Kindle Cloud Reader is a testimony to how lucrative it is to have a direct connection between the consumer’s device and your store. Apple decided to enforce its rule that all apps on its devices that sell things directly have to give Apple a cut. Apple’s justification for this restriction is that selling directly from the app bills through the iTunes Store, a convenience for which Apple should be paid. The consumers could always go to the vendor’s web page in Safari as an alternative.

Amazon, wanting as direct a connection as possible without giving Apple a cut, created the Kindle Cloud Reader as a web page that replicates the functionality of the Kindle app through the Safari browser. It also, coincidentally, puts a shortcut on the device’s home page just like an app does.

Part 3 in the series: Separate Checks, Please.

What is lucrative for Apple and Amazon can be expensive for your organization. That is why it is good that iOS 5 includes the ability to shut off all purchases from within apps.

The Rant:
Wait just a minute! The Kindle Cloud Reader isn’t an app, but you can buy stuff through it!? While this is true, and at least some of Amazon’s motivation for creating the Cloud Reader, it isn’t quite the same. Read more…

Joe Puckett iOS 5 Rants & Raves, iPad Amazon, Apple, Apps, iTunes Store, Kindle Cloud Reader, Safari

iOS 5 Lets You Cut the Cord – Maybe

By Joe Puckett, director of recruiting and training at PC Helps

The Rave:
One of the ongoing frustrations with the iPad has been that, for a mobile device, it has been extremely dependent on being attached to a traditional computer through a wire. The most frustrating evidence of this was that there was no way to do the initial set up on an iPad except through a wired connection to a computer running iTunes. Quite time consuming if you are provisioning dozens of iPads. Day-to-day synchronizations, updates and imports were also wire-centric.

That all changes with iOS 5. Wireless activation and iTunes Wi-Fi sync go a long way towards making an otherwise delightful device capable of going it alone.

Part 2 in the series: Cutting the Cord with iOS 5.

The Rant:
Today’s forecast — cloudy. Tomorrow’s forecast — even cloudier. Google wants your data in their cloud. Amazon wants your data in their cloud. Microsoft wants your data in their cloud. With iOS 5, Apple makes an offer of putting your data in their cloud that you have to actively refuse if you don’t want it there. You want to back up the data on all these iPads, don’t you? Well, then, just accept the default of backing up through iCloud and all your problems melt away. What? Read more…

Joe Puckett iOS 5 Rants & Raves, iPad, Rants & Raves Amazon, Apple, cloud, Google, iCloud, Microsoft, security

Upgrading to iOS 5 is Like Going to the Gym – No Pain, No Gain

By Joe Puckett, director of recruiting and training at PC Helps

The Rave:
Once iOS 5 is in place, future updates are faster and much less disruptive. Key changes that contribute to this improvement are that the updates are incremental, run in the background and can be done without a wired connection to a computer running iTunes. It all starts with a shift from erase-everything-then-reload-it updates to changing only the things that need to be changed. This allows the device to remain functional during the update and reduces the size of the update package to the point where it can be handled wirelessly. Incremental updates are an improvement that makes everyone happy.

First in a series about upgrading to iOS 5 – No Pain, No Gain.

The Rant:
The update to iOS 5 is not very incremental at all and is more disruptive for many than some of the previous updates, mainly because the introduction of some welcome new applications requires icons to be added. However, the resulting effect on the organization of some people’s existing applications was not so welcome. Read more…

Joe Puckett iOS 5 Rants & Raves, iPad Apple, iOS 5 Rants & Raves, IT leaders, upgrades

Jenny Sweeney iOS 5 Rants & Raves, iPad, Rants & Raves Apple, iOS 5 Rants & Raves, iPad, IT leaders

With school in session and the summer officially over, we thought it fitting to take a look at productivity for this week’s post.

Two articles stood out among the rest this week.

Bernard Golden looks beyond the buzzword to what BYOD will mean for the workplace.

The first, on CIO.com, reports on a recent study that found that employees who were permitted to surf the web were more productive than those who weren’t.

The study, conducted by the National University of Singapore, included 98 participants with an average age of 21, who were divided into three control groups. Each group either surfed the web for 10 minutes, did whatever they wanted during the time period except look at web pages, or performed the task of bundling sticks into groups of five. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Consumerization of IT, What We're Reading, Worker Productivity Apple, BYOD, CIO.com, iPad, National University of Singapore, SAP

If you follow tech news, you know the big three trends: the cloud, tablets and consumerization of IT. It’s an exciting time in enterprise IT (depending on who you talk to, of course).

But some tech journalists aren’t sold just yet. Microsoft Office still reigns, they say. Tablets don’t match the PC’s versatility or durability, they add. Here’s a rundown from some of the naysayers. Read and make your own judgment.

He maintains that Microsoft’s biggest competitor isn’t Google Apps, but earlier versions of Office.

What Revolution?

InfoWorld’s Eric Knorr is on fire. In his recent article, “The IT Revolution that Isn’t,” he picks apart the three biggest trends bit by bit.

On the cloud: “[L]ast time I looked, Microsoft Office still had over 80 percent market share. Will there be a rush to the cloud when Office 365 launches later this year? No way: Office 365 puts Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync servers in the cloud, but Office itself is meant to stay on the desktop.”

He maintains that Microsoft’s biggest competitor isn’t Google Apps, but earlier versions of Office. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Cloud Computing, tablets, This Week in Tech News Angry Birds, Apple, CIO, consumerization, InfoWorld, Microsoft