iTunes U

This past week I’ve been testing out Apple’s new iTunes U App for iPhone and iPad. I’ve been wanting to dive into programming for a while now, but I haven’t been able to find a good way of getting the solid fundamentals I feel like I lack without dropping at least $500 on a course somewhere. I’ve watched several lectures on the iTunes U section of iTunes, but they always lacked the handouts and problem sets , so you could never really keep up with the courses. I’m sure they were great for people actually taking the courses, but to someone on iTunes they weren’t very helpful. The iTunes U app addresses that problem.

Thanks to iTunes U and the Open Courseware Initiative, I’m into my 2nd week of class on Stanford University’s CS106A Programming Methodology course. It has videos of all the lectures. You can download the handouts, the problems sets, and all the required reading material. All for free. I’ve even got the same version of the Stanford Eclipse Compiler with all the same example code from course. This is same course Larry Page and Sergey Brin took. Well, they likely took CS106X, but still I feel good about quality of the lectures and problem sets. Finally I’m ready to confidently lay a solid foundation for my programming skills, but I’m a bit worried about iBooks 2 and textbooks.

iBooks 2

Soooo, I’m watching the Apple Keynote, and I’m thinking to myself. OH Shit!, Physics textbooks with animated models to teach motion, Spanish textbooks with audio pronunciation, even World History textbooks with games like Risk built into them. Then I go to check them out.

While I laud Apple for upping the ante on the textbook publishing industry. If you go check out the reviews of say the Physics textbook from publisher McGraw-Hill you find that Quizes at the end of Chapters have wrong answers in them. Reviews for the Geometry and Algebra I are the same. While this might give us a glimpse into why Americans are really bad at math and science. It certainly proves the point that all the 3D models, and graphics, and videos, and integrated-server-side-datasets in the world don’t make any difference in teaching Math if they are mathematically incorrect. I hope this changes, and updates are made available quickly because those reviews are all over the place.

I got an iPad for Christmas. (Thank you Santa!) I’ve been finding it an amazingly useful device. Apps like Flipboard are great for News, but I was overjoyed today when I remembered that Lemur is now available for the iOS. I was going to try a quick demo and write a review, but I got sucked into the App and ended up killing my whole day DJing with Traktor and Lemur.

For those who aren’t familiar with the technology that was the center-piece of Daft Punk’s Alive 2007 tour, as well as others like Plastikman, Nine Inch Nail, and Justice, here’s the lowdown. Lemur is software that allows you to build your own touchscreen Midi controller on the iPad.

It takes a bit of doing to setup, but once you understand the workflow of downloading templates, loading them over wi-fi onto you iOS device, and then setting up your Digital Audio Workstation or DJ software to communicate with the App, you can get really precise with your mixing. No more mouse-only mixing for this guy.

After spending the night with the latest Beta Version of Spotify…. (wait that doesn’t sound right.) After fornicating with Spotify’s latest beta release. (That’s better!)

I found that there are some functions missing. You used to be able to dig through the libraries of your facebook friends, but now all you can do is send them one of your most listened to songs. That was one of the best features about spotify, and now it is gone.

Here’s what I mean. You could go to a friend’s house, access your playlists easily from their app, and drop one of your favorite songs into their playlist. It was great. At a house party you could seamlessly add songs from your library to your friend’s active playlist. Sure those songs had to be in the central spotify library not local files on your hard drive back at your house, but who cares at that point. It was so awesome, and now it is no more.

Sure the facebook ticker now shows up in Spotify. Which does the needed filtering of non-spotify related ticker posts. You want to filter out all non-music related ticker post. Go into spotify, and all you get is your facebook friends’ music posts. Since songs are so short it is still an onslaught of data, but at least it is all one type of data. The thing I can’t seem to understand is the removal of seeing your friends’ libraries. It just doesn’t make sense. I bet they think it is a way to force people to get the premium version. If you know you can’t access your playlists from your friends desktop app, maybe you will be more likely to buy the premium version. Who knows?

If you want to checkout the new Spotify Apps like Songkick, TuneWiki, or Pitchfork, go here.

The songkick app is pretty straight forward. It scans your library and adds the artists to your tracked artist list on songkick. Click on the App in the left-sidebar, and it brings up a dated list of concerts/shows from the artist’s you track in the main spotify window. Click on a concert/show to show a mini-google map of the venue and a few tracks from the artist. On the event page is a button labeled [Tickets and More] that launches that event’s page on the songkick website in your browser where it then links to whoever is selling tickets.

Moodagent creates playlists based on your choice of Sensual, Tender, Happy, or Angry. I found that it doesn’t seem to take into account what music you have in your library. It just sort of dumps radio friendly tracks into a playlist. I couldn’t tell much different between Tender and Angry, and a Sensual playlist started with I Love Rock’n'Roll by Britney Spears and moved into a Hollerback Girl remix.

TuneWiki is fun. It pulls in lyrics and does a sort of karaoke progression with them. It doesn’t seem to find everything I was looking for, but that’s cool because you can add lyrics if you want.