Apple and Textbooks

As I am in the early stages of researching and writing an academic, university level textbook [which I hope will have some interest among general readers too] on the complex relationship between religion and society in the Atlantic world - and as I intended from the outset to publish this as a multimedia eBook - Apple's iBook Author is an unmitigated good for me.....but here is an early review focussed on its impact on the publishing world....

The Bookseller

Inspiration Part 2

I cannot remember where I read this: " inspiration is for amateurs, I just get to work." I agreed with this at first as I was teetering on the edge of the Black Pit - and I had not been there for a while. But now that I have drawn back after being doused with a pail of metaphorical cold water by a friend, I wonder if professional artists dispense with inspiration. I cannot imagine the good ones do - or at least I hope they don't. Maybe that is why there is so much forgettable art, including writing, around these days.

Limpid

She shimmered in the night
Sending sparks into flight
Her eyes were dark seeing deep
Her hands fashioned limpid mystique
She turned and vanished
Leaving scented petals
O so fair that floated gently
In the air

Tech Troubles - Avoid iCloud!

Apple's iCloud service sounds great and for me it was until March 25, 2012. I had difficulty setting it up initially as I discovered that my Apple ID I set up for iTunes a long time ago would not work with Apple's iWork suite because I had that linked with MobileMe - for which Apple had given me a separate account. But I managed to get it working nicely (despite the annoyance of calendars not syncing).

Last night I reworked a poem. When I woke up this morning I picked up my iPod to work on it before an idea vanished. The poem was not there! I wasted a goodly chunk of the morning trying to get my three IOS devices to sync with my macBook - no luck - some of them said files were 'updating' ( and still are as I write this at 2:17 p.m.).

So it seems Apple is having server problems? Who knows? Who cares?

I don't have the time or patience to bother. So what I will do from now on is send new versions of docs, or new docs as email attachments to myself, then upload to Box and use Box in place of iCloud.

Even should Apple get their crappy cloud system back up I no longer trust it. By using emails and Box my files will be backed up on the device, my MacBook and on Box.


March 25, 2012 UPDATE


By fiddling and a bit of intuition, I have managed to get iCloud to work again - but only by turning off iCloud for Pages and Keynote on my iPhone - it now works for the iPod, iPad and my MacBook Pro - which is annoying, but at the least I needed it to work on my iPad and MacBook where I do most of my writing. I still don't trust it, of course - so after each document revision on my iPad, I email to myself, then open the attachment on my iPad which causes a menu to pop us asking me where I want the doc - and one of the choices is Box... so I choose that and it then asks which folder in box I want the doc.  Then if I need to do revisions, I can move them easily from Box to Pages.  Annoying but iCloud needs fixing!  I don't know if the problem was caused by my iPhone, or whether iCloud was just down for a week and my turning the cloud off on my phone and iCloud coming back online was just coincidence.  Doesn't really matter which as I cannot trust the service anymore.

May 16, 2012 Update

Reading through MacForums I found many others with the same problems - especially with the calendars. In the Apple official help forums I found a 'sort of' work around - you can send individual documents to iTunes to back up there, and retrieve them from there.... so this can operate as a kind of secondary backup to Box.net. I don't know how many files and what size you can store on iTunes... and they won't be organized in any fashion that makes them easy to find....As for iCloud, I kept trying as above - but for about 20% of my docs it still does not work....so I will make sure everything is on Box and then turn it off on my iPod and iPad and ignore it on my MacBook. I wonder if anyone at Apple knows or cares? I grit my teeth whenever I see their ads! To paraphrase an old ad campaign of their's "It just does not work"

Experimental Writing

Recently I created a new Facebook page I call Experimental Writing. On it I am displaying some of my attempts to write in non-linear, multimedia style, from the ground up - not enhanced writing which I see as someone writing a standard, straight text piece, then enhancing it with music or videos or photos or fonts. Rather, the multimedia aspects are intrinsic to the work in progress. Tangent Alert! Tangent Alert! Tangent Alert! [all alerts should come in threes - that mystical number] Work-in=progress because one thing cyberspace removes is the necessity to have anything 'finished' some work can be left as is... for minutes, or hours or days or years - but is always there to be revised, expanded, shrunk or deleted or redone wholly. Ok! Back to my main thought..... So far I have posted only poetry - and also have added a new poem to my Book of Dreams web site Book of Dreams It is this latter that prompted me to write this blog post - I experimented with adding music to one poem in there already, but I am not satisfied with the outcome. To add a music file, iWeb allows you to drag from iTunes - but it wants a picture to go with it... so I picked one and did that - and the file sits there incongruous to the rest of the poem. So... with the new poem, I will add sound... but instead of dragging a photo to the music files place holder, I will use a jpg version of the poem as the place holder and see how that works... so a participant reader/viewer/listener will utilize both at the same time.... Tomorrow though... I am tired and it is late for an old guy

Slogans and Thinking

I am going slightly off topic for the general thread of my blog today... but feel impelled to set these inchoate ideas into print. And perhaps it is not actually far off my blog's theme - as I am in the early stages of writing a multimedia academic eBook investigating the relationship between religion and society in the Atlantic world - which will in its early stages take me into fields afar - everywhere from the British Isles and North America to the rest of the Americas, France, Spain and Italy.

In the final exam for one course, I set a common 'think-piece' question for all to answer that requires the student to 'cogitate' on the necessity (or not!) of religion as a component of society - drawing on a quote from the political philosopher George Grant “…unassisted reason is able to know that without religious beliefs and actions no society whatever can last”. I have just finished giving full marks to a student whose answer to this question was badly structured, somewhat incoherent, and not too grammatically elegant (to put it mildly) ..... but...... he was thinking!!!! You could almost smell the black smoke coming out his ears, and almost hear the grinding noises as his brain clunked into life. But the purpose of this question is to do just this - the primary goal of any teacher in the Humanities - to counter the all-embracing modern culture of the slogan. We are today in the West, a people content to shout slogans at one another - and he who shouts loudest and longest wins the game. Here I saw a student who, with difficulty, did in fact, weigh the different sides to this question in his mind. He thought!

Ted

Wisdom from John Ruskin

you have been so created as to enjoy what is fitting for you, and a willingness to be pleased, as it was intended you should be. It is the child’s spirit, which we are then most happy when we most recover; only wiser than children in that we are ready to think it subject of thankfulness that we can still be pleased with a fair color or a dancing light. And, above all, do not try to make all these pleasures reasonable, nor to connect the delight which you take in ornament with that which you take in construction or usefulness. They have no connection; and every effort that you make to reason from one to the other will blunt your sense of beauty, or confuse it with sensations altogether inferior to it. You were made for enjoyment, and the world was filled with things which you will enjoy, unless you are too proud to be pleased by them, or too grasping to care for what you cannot turn to other account than mere delight. Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance; at least I suppose this quill I hold in my hand writes better than a peacock’s would, and the peasants of Vevay, whose fields in spring time are as white with lilies as the Dent du Midi is with its snow, told me the hay was none the better for them.