I’ve only played with the latest version of Apple’s Mac-only productivity suite for an hour or so, but these things I know:
- Keynote: I have the most experience with prior versions of Keynote, having adopted it over an increasingly crufty and frustrating PowerPoint:mac about a year ago. I’m excited about the new Record Presentation feature, which does most of the work of ProfCast but spits out file formats a little more useful to me–Flash, PDF, QuickTime (not iPod-specific), etc. I’m also curious to see how Keynote will play into the iChat update coming with Leopard this fall. And I’m not sure how often I’ll be firing up Flash in the future–
- Pages: Pages seems a little more like a word processing app that does some solid desktop publishing, as opposed to the other way around in the previous version. By the looks of things it may be ready to replace Word as my regular word processor. As a little aside, I really could have used the nifty storyboard template last spring. Oh well, maybe now I’ll actually do storyboards for my projects.
- Numbers: I’m a little intimidated, but I’ll figure it out. The examples provided look awfully slick, and I like the idea of marrying data with narrative and design to tell a story.
In sum, iWork ‘08 is a must-have addition to any Mac-using instructional designer’s toolbox.
I set up a tumbleblog several months ago. As you can see, I never did much with it and didn’t really see myself using it even from the get-go. It’s a neat idea, but I already had this going. So I moved on.
But that’s not the neat part. Last week I was introduced to 120 Minutes, a tumbleblog hosted at the same service I tried. If you’re anywhere around my age there’s a good chance you’re familiar with the MTV show of the same name–”alternative” music videos from the mid-80s through the mid-90s. In college we stopped whatever we were doing Sunday nights to watch.
Each entry in this tumbleblog is one video, uploaded by someone somewhere on YouTube. There are usually four or five added daily, so it’s like I get a mini video show each morning when I fire up my RSS reader. And the other night, I loaded up the site on the Wii and Betsy and I watched videos on TV. How novel! Music videos on a television!
Yeah, the copyright police are probably kicking and screaming–but come on. The unidentified person running this tumbleblog isn’t making a dime off of it, and MTV hasn’t shown any of these videos in a decade.
As expected, nobody thought too much of my second homework project from this past week, though this in-class work got good remarks from the instructor. So did my other homework.
I’ve been busy networking this week (dinners, conferences, etc.) and didn’t get around to my second homework assignment until tonight. I have a feeling it’ll get ripped apart tomorrow in my class, but really this is more along the lines of what I wanted my stuff to look like.