First, let me back up a second.

I’ve been getting a lot of calls and emails lately from vendors wanting to make me an app version of my University’s alumni magazine. The magazine apps I’ve seen have been mostly flip-book PDF style apps and they’re expensive to create and maintain.

While driving home in the snow last night, I had a realization. Yesterday, Apple released new software called iBooks Author, free software that will allow people to create multimedia rich books that can be read in the free iBooks app on the iPad.

The light went off. While Apple is aiming this at textbook authors and publishers, there’s no reason we can’t easily create rich multimedia versions of our college magazines using it.

So, last night, I did it. I downloaded iBooks Author and in 15 minutes had a story laid out including photos, an interactive slide show and dynamic image with hot spots and text.

The application is super simple to use, easier than Word, and creating the dynamic elements is very easy. Here’s the interface, I had a few extra guides turned on.

As you work, you can preview your work on an actual iPad, if you have one. You connect it, and a proof shows up in your iBooks 2 app. You can then scroll through the pages in the real app, interact with the elements, highlight, take notes and so on.

This just changed the game.

I made an iBook in half an hour. Imagine if I spent an hour on it.

If I’m not charging for my magazine iBook, and I imagine many institutions wouldn’t, you can distribute the file on your website. If you want to sell it, you’ve got to go through Apple (and they’ll take their 30% cut, thank you very much.)

iBooks Author requires a Mac running OS 10.7.

While meant for K-12 and textbooks, I think they’ve given us higher ed folks a nice present as well.

Are they overused in higher ed? Not so much anymore, but there was a time where the 360&deg tour was a big thing. I still get calls from vendors wanting to come shoot photography on our campus to do a “interactive virtual tour,” though I’m not sure what’s interactive about scrolling left to right, but that’s for a different post.

I saw that Occiptal’s 360 Panorama app was free in the App Store yesterday, and on a whim tried it out.

Making panoramic photos was suddenly very easy and I snapped a few in my house. When I got to work, I stood in our quad with my iPhone and took this panorama:

You can also view a full-screen version here.

So yeah, pretty standard stuff. Here’s what takes Occipital’s app to the next level. If you can view that last link on an iPhone or iPad, Safari will sense the accelerometer and let you move around the panorama, augmented reality style. It was strange yet cool to be standing in my office moving around but seeing our campus quad moving on the iPad as I went up, down and around. Very cool use of the sensors.

If you’re producing a mobile version of a site or an app, this would be a cool addition.

I really want clean pages with nice photography and the ability to get a quick overview of programs/majors, with the ability to learn more and dig deeper.

We often try to cram as much information into a main academic area page as possible. I would like to do a better job at informing prospective students of the strengths of our academic programs.

I found a great post at Neven Mrgan’s Tumblr about how three companies present their all-in-one computers: Apple, Dell and HP. Here’s a side by side comparison:

This is not just me being an Apple fanboy. Apple has made their iMac page clean, compartmentalized and easy to get key points at a glance. They’ve used several photos of the actual product, the top marketing points and made it easy to buy. The HP page on the right was probably sent through a myriad of committees then through the marketing wringer. The best they came up with is a small image (in Flash no less) and 4 tabs of information, with the main one including 18 bullet points. 18. If I gave you the 10 second test with both of these pages, you’d be more apt to remember more points from Apple’s page.

I would guess that many academic pages have “18 bullet points.” Maybe not bullet points, but a ton of information thrown on the index page because some felt it needed to be there.

Mr. Mrgan also makes one other very good point.

Look at the URL’s for each of these products:

Apple’s iMac page URL: http://www.apple.com/imac

HP’s 200xt computer page: http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/computer_can_series.do?storeName=computer_store&category=desktops&a1=Category&v1=All-in-One+PCs&series_name=200xt_series&jumpid=in_R329_prodexp/hhoslp/psg/desktops/All-in-One_PCs/200xt_series

Which one do you think you (and your users) would be able to enter if they were looking for a specific program or area? Clean URLs are a very good thing. Many CMSes do an OK job at creating user-friendly URLs, but often I come across a college site with URLs like college.edu/29592.xml. That doesn’t help a user.

The series has been really informative and I’ve applied quite a bit of what I’ve learned in my day-to-day work.

Tomorrow’s sessions include on on managing up and one on performance management.

I wanted to blog the sessions, but I may be sans laptop for the trip. I picked up a new power adapter for my Macbook and while I was at the Apple Store in Crocker Park, Ohio, the genius said he could also replace the case around the trackpad as I had cracked it. I said sure, and 15 minutes later my laptop was done and good as new.

I didn’t use it until last night, when I wanted to live blog local elections results at ErieBlogs.com. I unwrapped the new adapter, plugged it in, press power and nothing happened. All I get is the sleep light blinking quickly.

I called Apple and with no store location nearby, I’ve got to mail it in. I’m going to try re-seating the RAM, as I’ve read some anecdotal reports on the web this has helped. Wish me luck.

I should step back a second and note that when I say iMovie, I don’t mean the most recent overhaul of iMovie that was released as part of iLife ’08. If you have a new Mac, you can download the last version of iMovie here.

Capturing is one of iMovie’s great strengths. Dumping from tape is easy but I actually capture a different way. For some shoots, I capture video live on location directly from the camera into iMovie. For starters, this is a good method for longer productions since you don’t have to switch tapes during a show and miss something. Second, it saves time later on when it’s time to capture video, again, especially for large pieces.

iMovie captures and edits HD with no problems at all. We’ve shot a few projects in HD and it’s been a champ. It takes more disk room and more time to render in HD, but the wait is well worth it.

Once you’ve edited your video, you can output to a variety of formats and media, including iDVD. Most times, we output MP4 H.264 files that we either transfer to high quality FLV and post online* (example here), or use this high quality file as the basis for what we upload to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, etc.

Here, for example, is a video we shot on location in downtown Meadville. The event was a fundraiser for downtown development, and our new president participated as a server at this 50′s-style event.

Allegheny Community Participates in Up With Downtown from Allegheny College on Vimeo.

If you want to see it in full HD, click here.

In the end, I move iMovie. It’s easy, yet allows me to quickly produce tightly edited pieces with graphics, music, cuts and more.

* – Videos are stored at Amazon S3. Of course, right?

I’ve also been thinking about how this will impact us as higher education technology and web professionals.

Après moi le déluge
With the price of iPhone now dropping to $199 for the 8GB model, I would be prepared for a large number of students arriving on campus this fall with iPhones. They will expect wifi access as well as websites optimized for browsing on iPhone. There are authentication issues and other wireless security options we’ll have to review.

Now’s the time to also create an iPhone icon for your school.

Automatic Geotagging of Photos
The new iPhone will allow users to automatically, via the internal GPS, to record the exact location a photograph was taken. While this is a neat, potentially useful feature, we’re going to have to be extra-vigilant in keeping an eye on what photos are attributed to our schools or taken on our campuses. Not that we can take them down, but as GI Joe says, knowing is half the battle.

Strain in server resources
If you’ve got an email setup using Exchange, you probably won’t see a huge bump but if a large number of new iPhone users are POP’ing their email every few minutes, we may see an increased load on email servers. If you outsource your email to Gmail, for example, you won’t see this.

Power Users
Many public spaces at our college, such as the library and one of our dining halls, offer power and network connections at many tables and booths. I’ve used the power a ton of times, but it would be really cool if we started to offer other connection options at these stations. The iPhone specific example is a powered USB port, so that we can keep our phones powered on and charging while we study, do research, eat, etc. Are anyone’s schools doing this?

What am I missing?

The Launcher is a true native Mac application. Installing the Google App Engine SDK, embedded in the Launcher, is a drag install. App Engine projects can be added to the Launcher with drag and drop. And your deployment password is saved in a Keychain (if you want).

I haven’t had time to even think about Python. Soon, I hope.

I’ve been thinking the last few days about how developers in higher education might use the iPhone and what kind of apps we could build. As the iPhone market share increases, more and more students will have them on campus and expect them to work with campus resources, like wireless and portal services.

I initially thought about Facebook application style apps that recycle existing content, but since the iPhone has a full featured web browser, it’d be a waste of time and $99 to have you app vetted by Apple and included in the AppStore.

I assume the major campus ERP solutions like Datatel and Banner will develop apps that will allow users to tap right into school’s back-end systems. If Datatel, for example, develops an application to allow access to campus services, there will be issues for schools, such as will each school need to further customize the app to meet their needs? Will it need to be branded by the school? Will there be a run on server and bandwidth resources if everyone starts connecting with their phones instead of web-based platforms like WebAdvisor or Banner?

I also thought about housing providers like CBORD and their potential offerings. I would imagine it would be convenient for RA’s and other housing officials to do their end of year inspections and carry an iPhone with them. They could punch in the room number, see all relevant information about the room including past damage, current occupants, service requests during the year, etc. They would mark new damage that was done, and could use the iPhone’s camera to take a picture of damage for proof (you know, to avoid the ‘yes you broke this, no i didn’t’ type fights that I’m sure arise every year). All that could be uploaded by wifi to a central server and repair bills could be run for students.

What other sorts of applications would make sense? What would be needed to be developed in the SDK and as a stand-alone app that can’t already be solved by a web-based version of any application? Will the $99 fee to get into the program dissuade schools to join and develop?