Day 8 – On being an iOS Warrior

Day 8 – An iOS Warrior

There are people such as Federico @Vitticci and Frasier Speirs who are true iOS / iPad Warriors. Federico does all his writing and just about everything else using his iPad. The only thing he uses a Macbook for is the podcasting, where it is necessary to record from Skype. As yet this can’t be done with an iPad. I wonder if you had two iPads or used an iPhone for the Skype end of it, maybe it would work? Frasier Spears runs a one iPad per pupil system in a school in Scotland. I interviewed him on the Mac20Q Podcast a couple of years back. He also does it all with an iPad. The two of these together have a podcast called Canvas to espouse the benefits and help people use iPads as the main computer. It flies in the face of those people who still say the iPad is for consumption and not for ‘real work’. Maybe when the iPad first came out that might have been the case. The iPads have got more powerful and more importantly the iOS operating system and the applications have improved hugely. In the latest Canvas episode Fraser Speirs talked about making Keynote presentations on the iPad and using the iPad to do the presenting too. I haven’t used Keynote on my iPad yet but I can feel a slide show coming. I’ll be able to send the presentation off to SlideShare.com. Another thing you can do with a Keynote presentation and an iPad is to have a kiosk style self running presentation. Great for getting information to people in an interactive way, you can be an iOS Warrior too.

Keynote app on iOS

Is Siri improving?

It is and you hardly notice because it is gradual. If you were to not use Siri for a year and come back to it, then you might notice the changes more. I like to ask Siri things in the morning when I am waking up. My eyes are not ready yet for looking at the screen, so Siri is just the thing I need. It is just easy stuff like what’s the weather for today? Will I need an umbrella? Asking “What time is it?” is still better than looking at the screen of the Apple Watch in a dark room. I did get a message in from my mother to tell me my niece had, had her baby. Weirdly, in this day and age she tells me that the baby weighed in at 6 pounds and some answers. So I was able to use Siri to convert this old-fashioned weight measurement into more modern kilos. There are plenty of other things that Siri can do. It’s a good idea to have a look at the help section on Siri where you see some examples of how you can use this helpful service from Apple. Siri is not perfect, but who is a good idea to keep asking questions to learn what it can do and to push Apple to give us better answers to those questions. I really do think it’s the case the more we use it the better it is going to get!

Asking Siri for help

How to be an iOS warrior

Sending Messages with Siri

Creating messages by talking to Siri

Strangle Siri at birth – Just in Case

I was just asking Siri questions about when is the next Barcelona football match. It didn’t get the answer for me correctly first time around but it worked okay the second time. It would be nice if it was able to do follow on questions. This is when you ask something and then ask a related question to follow that question and answer session. The funny thing is, just after writing this I listened to a podcast In which academics included artificial intelligence as one of the possible causes of the downfall of the human race in an Armageddon situation. Maybe Siri should be strangled at birth before we get to that situation! It did seem a little bit strange to me that artificial intelligence should be included alongside nuclear bombs and asteroids as well as health pandemics. as an iOS Warrior I’m not going to worry too much about that.

Always learning more

I downloaded an iTunes U course to see if there were any tricks I could learn. It is about automating using iOS. It has started off a bit basic but I did learn that it isn’t possible to send email to a group from Mail on iOS. Unless you do an automation using Workflow. Easy to set up and pretty cool to use Workflow when you’re an iOS Warrior.