David Winograd

David Winograd earned a Ph.D. in Educational Media and Computers from Arizona State University and an MBA from Fairleigh Dickinson University. He has been playing with online communication and Apple Computers since 1979. David started one of the first themed Bulletin Board Systems in New Jersey on an Apple ][ and 6 Disk ]['s and later wheedled a decade long gig with the CompuServe information service where he did everything from file checking to running the Macintosh Community Clubhouse Forum where his first Mac was an SE/30 with an external screen. His interests include home theater, film, live theater and just about anything that plugs in and lights up. He currently lives in Woodbury, NY and loves writing in the third person.

Articles by David Winograd

Found Footage: Darth Vader calls Apple Support
The idea of connecting Darth Vader and the iPhone 4 has become a meme. Videos abound on the topic, like the ones found here, here, here, and even here. The newest one comes from Russell Arch. It has its moments, especially the idea of the Death Star being run on a first generation iMac and OS 9. Take a look and see what you think.
Barnes & Noble's NOOKstudy coming to students in August
Barnes & Noble is diving deeper into the education market with an expected August release of NOOKstudy which will run on Macs and PCs and not require a NOOK or any other mobile device. NOOKstudy will act as a hub for eTextbook, class notes, syllabi, scanned handouts, and even non-educational eBooks. It will allow students to take notes as well as highlight passages in eTextbooks. Users will also be able to tag items for easy retrieval using common terms like: "for the final exam". It will provide full searches of anything, in the eTextbooks or your notes, and link into Google or Dictionary.com to look up terms. Multiple eTextbooks can be opened at the same time, or two pages from different sources can be simultaneously displayed. The program is currently being piloted at Penn State, University of Nevada, Queensborough Community College, and the Rochester Institute of Technology. [via Campus Technology]
Duke University to use iPads for field research
This fall, the Duke University Global Health Institute in Durham, NC will embark on a pilot project using the iPad as a field research tool. Masters students enrolled in the Research Methods in Global Health Sciences II class will be broken up into groups of three, with each group being given a 3G-enabled iPad. The course introduces students to a wide range of methodological techniques, including quantitative surveys research, interventions and evaluations along with qualitative techniques of ethnography, survey design and semi-structured interviews. Funding and assistance with the course will come from the Duke Center for Instructional Technology (CIT). Educational tech consultant Mark Sperber, who will train students on the iPad and decide upon the selection of software, notes that the iPad will allow students to collect and analyze data while in the field, where it's most meaningful. The do-it-nowability of the iPad was written about by mobile research blogger Tim Macer. Traditionally, field-collected research could not be analyzed until the researcher got to a computer off-site, but the use of iPads will allow data to be examined immediately. Having done my share of quantitative field research I feel that bringing immediacy to the field opens up possibilities that were never before imaginable. The primary goal, according to sociologist Jen'nan Ghazal Read who will be teaching the course, is to equip students with tools allowing them to make the most of their time in the field and master the complex methods on which they will base their research.
Violet for the iPad: an interactive children's book
Violet for the iPad (US$2.99) from My Black Dog Books is the latest entry in the emerging field of interactive books for children. Geared at children ages 4 and up, Violet is the first of a series of stories about a charming little girl with a big secret. The 20 page book tells a nice little tale, along with a moral, and it introduces elements that will be continued in future books. Allison Keeme's illustrations are beautifully drawn, and they take full advantage of the graphic capabilities of the iPad. If you like, you can take a look Allison's process of building the graphics. I'm positive that small children will enjoy reading about Violet and her secret identity. The world of Violet has a consistent look and a great attention to detail. When the family gathers around the breakfast table after one of Violet's exploits, they look absolutely exhausted, but you'll have to read the book to see why. There are two specific tasks to perform in the book, and I think it was a good design choice to have the book do it if the child doesn't. Unfortunately, I found a number of problems with the execution of the app, which may frustrate small children. There is scant interactivity to be found. With many possibilities for interaction, only a small number of things that you can tap on actually do anything. There are quite a few pages that are static. In fact, outside of credits on the first page, the first bit that does anything appears on page five, and you might easily miss it. There is a spider that swings when touched. If the accelerometer was used, as in Alice, it would be much more apparent. I can imagine small kids getting frustrated by tapping on everything and not getting paid off very often. A real design problem is that you need to tap on a page in order to display an arrow that, when tapped on again, gets you to the next page. I think the arrow should be persistent and eliminate an unneeded tap on every page.
Video relay calling breakthrough uses FaceTime to help the deaf
In the past, the only way for the hearing impaired to communicate was either in person or by way of the TTY (teletypewriter); the TTY is a device that's about as large as a laptop computer, and it allows the hard of hearing to type on a QWERTY keyboard and have the communication transferred. However, iZ breaks that barrier; it will allow the deaf to pull an iPhone 4 out of their pocket and effectively communicate. Now, another technical impediment will be on its way out. This is wonderful news. At first, the technology will only be available through Wi-Fi and the iPhone 4, but it's a safe bet to say that it will eventually filter down to other devices and be able to use cellular service. For now, though, it's quite a start. [via AppleInsider]
My trip through Time Capsule Hell leads to a different backup approach
I bought a one terabyte Time Capsule shortly after it hit the market, along with an external 1.5TB drive. I use the Time Capsule's internal drive to back up two smaller capacity Macs, while the external disk backs up my two larger capacity Macs. Working with Time Machine in Leopard or Snow Leopard, the Time Capsule updates its backups every hour. This makes perfect sense if you're just dealing with one Mac wired into the Time Capsule, since it really doesn't slow anything down. But if you are using it to wirelessly back up multiple Macs, hourly backups slow everything down to a crawl. TimeMachineEditor (a free utility that I highly recommend), allows you to set Time Machine to back up as frequently or infrequently as you like. I created a setup where, with staggered backups starting between 2am and 4am, each Mac gets backed up once a day. Outside of some errant sparse image problems that required a reformat, all was well. I had long beaten the 18 month Time Capsule funerals that were recently reported... but then things turned ugly.
Found Footage: Browsing speed compared on the iPhone 4 and 3GS
Thanks to Obama Pacman, here's a neat (audio muted) video comparison of web browsing speed over 3G on an iPhone 4 (shown on the left) and an iPhone 3GS (shown on the right). The test was done using only mobile 3G with Wi-Fi turned off, and it shows a variety of sites using Safari in a head to head comparison. In almost all the tests, the iPhone 4 was much faster in Web browsing. When you look under the hood at the iPhone 4's 3G performance, the improved browsing speed is not much of a surprise; CNET benchmarked the 4 against the 3G (not the 3GS) and found dramatic improvement across the board. Even against the more recent 3GS, the iPhone 4 delivered stronger download performance in Andy Ihnatko and John Gruber's tests. The processor is obviously kicked up a notch as well. MacRumors, running benchmark tests, found the iPhone 4 processor to be 31% faster than the 3GS using Geekbench 2.1. The iPhone 4 came in with a 2.514 score across routine tests like memory allocation and view drawing, easily besting the 3GS at 2.298. Both were tested under iOS 4. Benchmark tests are not really analogous to real life usage, of course, but they do give a basic indication for comparison purposes. So although it probably takes more muscle to paint the screen using the iPhone 4's high-resolution Retina Display, the faster A4 chip combined with the improved network throughput (when you've got all your bars, that is) seems more than up to the task.
TUAW giveaway for 10 copies of the soon to be released BuzzVoice 3.0
BuzzVoice is an app that lets you listen to the Internet anywhere, by reading stories to you from over 1400 sources that are selectable right in the app. It's something like Pandora for blogs. We reviewed BuzzVoice some time ago when it was first released and liked it quite a lot. Some time later, it was released for the iPad making it easier to use. Now a new version BuzzVoice 3.0 (US$4.99 as an introductory price which will be raised to $9.99) is about to hit the app store with some significant new features. Instead of being limited to a buzzcast running between 15-20 minutes. The new version will play story after story for as long as you want to listen, providing hours of spoken information. The number of sources has been increased by about 2,000 200, bringing over 16,000 sites available for your listening pleasure. To date, BuzzVoice has streamed over 2 million stories to people on the go.
The AutoVerbal Talking Soundboard speaks for those who can't
The AutoVerbal Talking Soundboard (US$0.99 for the next few weeks) is the latest in the growing field of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices available for the iPhone, iPod touch and (best of all) the iPad. An AAC device allows the autistic or vocally challenged to communicate without the use of sign language, which requires both parties to know sign language. As a universal app, running AutoVerbal on an iPad looks great and adds 9 backgrounds to choose from. A user can use the keyboard to can type what s/he would like the app to say or tap on one of over 100 pre-programmed picture buttons to speak a word or phrase like " I need help" or "blueberry." The 10 icons in the top row can be customized to say whatever you like. The screen is laid out in 16 topic-oriented rows (custom, medical, food, emotions, simple phrases like yes or no, people, places, things, vehicles, animals, activities, colors, shapes, numbers, letters, and days of the week and months). Scroll up or down to get to the appropriate row, and scroll left or right to choose between 8 and 19 buttons per row.
Microsoft pays Apple app devs to port to Windows Phone 7
Who would have thought this would ever happen? Microsoft, according to PocketGamer.biz, is throwing some substantial upfront money at developers of popular iPhone apps to port their products over to Windows Phone 7, which may be their last great hope of getting enough apps on the device to make it tempting. It doesn't seem to be going over all that well, since the word is that it's not really worth the money to go through the time and expenditure to port the C++ Objective-C apps over to Microsoft's standard formats of Silverlight or XNA Framework (C#). One of their sources did say that there was the potential for Microsoft to alter their development frameworks to include C++ Objective-C, but that remains to be seen. If if did happen, the time and labor factors would decline tremendously and the money would seem much better. But as it stands now, it's not going over too well in the development community. Update: Sorry for the mixup. Both PocketGamer and 9to5 are citing the challenge of porting C++ games to C#; however, if the point is to move iPhone apps to WinPhone 7, as our commenters have rightly noted, then it's a migration from Objective-C instead. [via 9to5 Mac]
Moodagent 2.0: A great app becomes awesome
A good number of us at TUAW love Syntonetic's Moodagent app; it creates instant playlists around a mood you select, fitting the music to your state of mind. We reviewed it in December, and caught up with Syntonetic's president Richard French at Macworld who told me that the app had created profiles for over 30 million songs and has had over 1 billion songs requested. I gave him a laundry list of feature requests. He told me that most if not all of my suggestions would be incorporated into the app in the next 3-6 months. True to his word, and right on schedule, Moodagent 2.0 is out including all my requests and a lot more. Richard seems to be passionate about listening to his user base and determined to give them what they want. Moodagent creates genius mixes from your iPhone/iPod touch or iPad music libraries (it requires iPhone OS 3.0 or better). The mood is based on 4 sliders representing emotions (Sensual, Tender, Happy, Angry) and a fifth for Tempo. You move the sliders up or down depending upon your mood and an instant mix is generated either automatically, or based upon a "seed" song of your choosing. Since Macworld, the number of songs requested has risen to well over 2 billion and counting. Moodagent is now 2 apps, a free one that in version 2.0 is supported by advertising, and a paid app (US $4.99), with the only difference being that the paid version doesn't have any advertising and allows you to see one more song on the screen. That's it. Read on to find out about all the changes.
Fast PDF brings iBooks functionality to PDF files
One bit of news from WWDC is that the new version of the OS formerly known as iPhone OS, iOS 4, will be released on June 21st. Along with it will come an iBooks app that will support PDF files. But you don't have to wait until then to get PDF support both on the iPhone/iPod touch and the iPad with an app that looks very much like iBooks. Fast PDF (US $0.99) does the job for PDF reading; it's a Unversal app (meaning that it looks great on both the iPhone and the iPad). This is really nothing revolutionary, since apps like Stanza (also a Universal app) have been doing this for quite a long time, but the virtue of Fast PDF is that it looks remarkably like iBooks and it is very simple to use. Just like Stanza, you can download PDF files from either the Internet (this was a bit confusing), from your computer using a built-in server, or via iTunes' file transfer feature. Unlike Stanza, there is no file conversion. Often PDF files imported into Stanza look horribly formatted, and saving the file as an ePub or other file type doesn't make it any better. Fast PDF (which only deals with PDF files) brings everything in, perfectly formatted. After transferring, the resulting file looks exactly like the source. %Gallery-94785%
FaceTime video conferencing coming to the iPhone
At today's WWDC keynote, a new feature of the iOS 4 operating system called FaceTime was announced and demonstrated, bringing iChat like video conferencing to the iPhone. FaceTime requires no set up or configuration and will work with either the front or back facing camera on the iPhone 4, but the front facing camera has been "tuned" for FaceTime allowing you to hold the camera at arm's length to get a perfect picture. It works in both landscape and portrait orientation, and allows anyone running iOS 4, if the hardware supports it, to seamlessly video chat with anyone also running iOS 4 on another iPhone. There will be a FaceTime button in the Contacts app and on on the Phone screen. Tapping it is all you need to do to initiate a video chat, even if you're already on a voice call. The recipient will get a message saying that a FaceTime session has been requested which can be accepted or rejected. Accept it, and you are video chatting.
WWDC 2010: Early iPhone 4 upgrades offered by AT&T
To find out when you can upgrade without a penalty you always could dial: *NEW# on your iPhone which will generate a text message telling when you can upgrade. I just did, since I bought my iPhone 3GS the day it was released last June, that and the text message that was sent to me said that I wouldn't qualify until 2/20/2011. This made very little sense in light of the new policy, so I called up AT&T to find out if I was applicable. They didn't know, telling me that since this is brand new information, it hadn't gotten to them yet. But they made a commitment to call me before the release date on the 24th. So, if you think the text message information you get is wrong, wait a few days before you call AT&T, so they can let the information filter into their system. At this point, they know less than we do.
Safari 5.0 and Mac OS 10.6.4 to be announced/released at WWDC?
According to French Apple news site Macgeneration, Safari 5.0 will be released at WWDC. We usually don't post non-verified information, but I think that this might be true since we were sent specific release notes. With the understanding that this is a rumor, albeit a very good one, here's what Safari 5.0 purportedly contains:
Incredibly cute fifth-graders are getting free iPads from Apple
Thirteen fifth-graders at the Watergrass Elementary School in Wesley Chapel, Florida are going to be very happy, and Apple just might get a new ad campaign out of it. Last month, according to the St. Petersburg Times, an iPad was brought into Susan Fischer's fifth grade class for the kids to take a look. They were entranced with it. Andy Dunn, a school district official who needed some pictures for a presentation on kids using technology in the classroom, took some snaps of the event. Brandon Maldonado, the instructional technology specialist for the school, saw the pictures and was also charmed. He sent some of them to Andrea Bart, the local Apple sales rep, who liked them so much she sent them to her superiors. Eventually they wound up on the desk of John Couch, Apple's VP of education, who was so enthused he said he was interested in using them for an Apple ad campaign. Although the school won't be paid for the pictures, the thirteen kids involved will all be getting new iPads mailed to their homes and may in the future be asked appear in Apple advertising geared to the education market. This sounds like a win-win situation for everyone... except maybe the other kids in Susan Fischer's class who weren't lucky enough to be in the pictures. I hope, if the ad campaign actually happens, the rest of the class can get involved and it'll be iPads for everybody. [via AppleInsider]
Apple won't support iPhone to iPad tethering
If you thought that when iPhone OS 4.0 gets released and you can buy the 2GB "Datapro" plan for $25, along with an additional $20 per month to tether your iPhone's WiFi connection to your iPad, think again. It's just not going to happen. This is consistent with Steve Jobs' answer to an email asking him about this possibility. His response was a terse "no." According to Apple, once enabled, you will be able to tether your iPhone to a PC or Mac either via WiFi, Bluetooth, or a USB cable, but they didn't make mention of the iPad. It turns out that WiFi isn't possible on the tablet: the required Bluetooth profile isn't enabled, and using the camera connection kit to connect to a mini-USB port on your camera won't work either, although it will work with a USB keyboard and headset. Not allowing iPhone-iPad tethering doesn't seem to be an oversight. It seems like a carefully planned decision on Apple's part to keep AT&T happy. It is very possible for Apple to make tethering work via a software update perhaps along with a new connection cable, but I really don't see that happening since it will interfere with AT&T's iPad cellular connection plan pricing while maintaining the value of charging an extra $130 for a 3G-enabled iPad. I understand that this is a business decision and that making as much money as possible warms shareholders' hearts, but to me this premeditated decision is dirty pool and another good reason to Jailbreak your iPhone. [via AppleInsider]
Found Footage: The iPad Comic
Adam Kontras, a comedian who claims to have the longest running video blog ever, has updated his comedy act for the iPad and is now The iPad Comic. Adam's act used to include four TV's that he interacted with. This was sort of video ventriloquism, timing everything perfectly so the screens would seamlessly speak with him on stage. He's now ditched the four TVs and changed his act over to talking with himself on an iPad. Getting the timing right must have been quite difficult, but it really works. His act is not only clever, but pretty funny. This shows a new use for the iPad: performance comedy. Adam is probably the first one to do this, but I'm sure he won't be the last since the idea is a really good one. Enjoy the video. I thought it was pretty impressive and his delivery is just about perfect. [thanks to Jeremiah Rich for sending this in]
The iPad could be the best mobile accessibility device on the market
In 1995 Dr. Norman Coombs, a blind professor of history at the Rochester Institute of Technology and chairman of EASI: Equal Access to Software and Information wrote that the rapid adoption of a graphical user interface (GUI) would close the door on computing for the visually impaired. This was in largely in response to the Microsoft's Windows OS, but his point was well taken regarding all GUI based computing. Speech output systems, at that time, were based on character recognition and didn't work with a GUI that relied on icons and graphics. He wrote that many impaired users had lost their employment or found their positions downgraded because they could not function in the new GUI based environment. Jump to 2010 and the introduction of the iPad. Many solutions were created along the way, but comparing that early state of affairs to what is now available on the iPad dramatically shows how far the field of assitive technology has progressed. ATMac, posted a round-up of disabled user's experiences with the iPad, which according to the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) in the UK was found to be highly accessible and probably the best mobile device on the market.
Found Footage: Honoring Apple from 1976 to the Italian introduction of the iPad
In honor of the Italian release of the iPad, iPadItalia has created one of the best Apple-oriented videos I've ever seen. In 10 minutes (yes, it's quite long for this type of thing), the video lovingly covers Apple from its origin in 1976 right up to today when those in Italy, and many other countries, can finally get their hands on the magical and revolutionary iPad. The video is totally professional and really deserves recognition. With frenetic energy, just about every Apple product is displayed. It is a valentine to Steve Jobs, even showing him age from 15 to 55, and ending up with rejoicing over the European introduction of the iPad. This is a video that will warm every fanboy's heart and really captures the excitement that we've felt about Apple over the last 34 years. Enjoy!

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