Mobile Devices, Applications, & My Future
What have I gotten myself into? Surely I signed up for this class while high on the adrenaline of the May Seminar. Create an iphone app? Sure! No Problem! Little I, blobject that I am, with no composing experience other than my hack job blog and one tiny web design in Composer ten years ago, am going to create an application for a mobile device - preferrably one that works. I couldn't figure out how to stop my screen from face dialing while I was on a call until a year after I had my Treo.
I am apprehensive about the plausability of this project.
Add to that, I have not the faintest idea what would be a doable, useful application. I use my phone to check email, text, tweet, and keep my calendar. Navigation, occaisionally, but it's usually too slow. I like to play the dots game when I'm waiting for appointments. I've seen amazing things for the iphone - the silly flute, the level, name that tune. These things are cool. These things are beyond my capability.
So, I'm whining, yes? Not exactly whining...just...processing.
The way I see it, I don't need another gadget just to have a gadget. It would have to be useful to me, something easy to manipulate, and fill a need that couldn't be more easily filled in another medium.
That said, I do have a few needs, which might produce something half-decent. For one, it would be nice to have a mobile way to access APA/MLA/Chicago styles so I don't have to cart handbooks around. My students would probably like this too. It might be nice to punch in the fields and have a source formatted. An electronic checkbook would be even better. If I could easily input purchases and see a running balance, that would be super cool. For my husband, a vocab word of the day would probably be nice too, since he is ESL - or for me, an Arabic word of the day, since I'm trying to learn it. And finally, a 5 times a day prayer reminder might be nice, if it wouldn't get bogged up by all the tweet messages and texts that bleep every two minutes - especially since I need all the help I can get with this.
The next step is going to be to flesh out what some of these might actually function like and try to decide what's doable and what's not - that is, if the programming book I ordered ever arrives from Amazon. I'm sure I'll come up with something!
2 comments:
I really like your idea for an app that generates citations. I hate doing them and it would be nice to have something that did them for me on the go and then emailed the list to me. The only problem I could see would be that I never like to type all that information in to begin with. You may want to look into the possibility of pulling the information from some sort of library feed directly into the app.
Hopefully when your book arrives it will aleeve some of your anxiety. I was like you a few weeks ago and worried about what i was going to be able to create considering the time constraints but since I have gotten into the book and completed some research of similar products I think it might be doable.
You might try approaching this like I did, have a pie in the sky plan and a scaled back step by step approach that allows you to tackle this one thing at a time.
Good Luck!
You can do it. If not an app for iPhone perhaps a tool that can be read on mobile devices of some sort. Vocab word of the day is a good idea. I like freerice.org, for instance. You'll come up with something, and do share what you're learning from your book here in your blog, through twitter as you go, and through our class call.
Post a Comment