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  • AT&T says cell sites greatly improved in my area (twice). Oh, really?

    On Nov. 26, 2011, AT&T Wireless sent me a text message stating that over 50 cell sites in my area had been enhanced. Did I see better coverage or data speed? Actually, since then it appears that a section of the city of about 2 miles by 0.5 miles does not have any 3G data capacity (despite phones reporting it has a 3G signal) and often no voice coverage. In other areas, voice coverage has deteriorated to the point where voice conversations are difficult to conduct for more than a few seconds at a time.

    Yesterday, Jan. 25, 2012, I received another text message from AT&T Wireless stating that a call site in my “local area” (whatever that means) was enhanced specifically for wireless Internet access. Oh really? The Speedtest.net app reported a ping time of 432ms (very slow), 0.16 Mbps download (that’s 160Kbps) and 0.06 Mbps upload (that 60 Kbps or nearly analog modem speed). This is actually far worse than it was before the enhancement.

    To say the least, I am not impressed by AT&T’s “enhancements” to their cell towers.

  • Will iBooks textbooks need ads to support expensive multimedia book development?

    Apple’s multimedia iBooks textbooks fascinates me in terms of its development (Apple iBooks Author for Mac OS X) and the books themselves. One thing is clear, developing these multimedia textbooks is going to be an expensive proposition. Textbooks tend to be much more complicated publications that, for example, novels because of the the number of page components. Novels tend to be a stream of text in, for the most part, a single typeface and font size. Textbooks have sidebars, indexes, charts, photos, maps, and even objects requiring different ink colors. Adding audio, video, and interactive learning tools ups the ante for textbook development even more.

    The E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth project estimates that the production and maintenance (updates) will cost millions of dollars: Initial development of Life on Earth will cost $8.5 million. Continuing costs will be approximately $1.5 million per year, including continuing development, maintenance, and bandwidth expenses. In all, we will require continuing annual support equivalent to the budget of a very small municipal museum, yet we expect to deliver value on another scale altogether
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  • Students will need 64GB iPads to store multiple rich media iBooks

    Apple’s updated iBooks 2 app supports highly interactive multimedia textbooks created by the new free iBooks Author software for Mac OS X. iBooks Author’s EULA lock-in clause has raised a ruckus (see: Publish an ebook created using iBook Author & lock yourself in Apple-land forever). However, there’s another problem that may be a showstopper for students and other people who want to use these multimedia iBook ebooks: Their iPad may not have enough storage space to house the ebook.
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  • Sencha demos CSS3 animation support in iBooks created using iBooks Author

    Can you include CSS3 animation in iBooks created using Apple’s new iBooks Author app? That’s what the people at Sencha wondered about too. So, they created a CSS3 animation using Sencha Animator and included it in a test iBook created with iBooks Author. You can see the result above.

    How to Embed Interactive CSS3 Animations in an iBook

    You can listen to my discussion with Sencha’s Senior Director of Product Management, Aditya Bansod. in MobileViews Podcast 54 recorded last month.

  • Apps updated for my iPhone & iPad in the past week: 30


    Thirty (30) of the apps for my iPad &/or iPhone were updated in the past week. Apps that do not have comments in the list below indicates that the update is simply a bug fix release.
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  • RunKeeper Fitness Reports enhanced

    RunKeeper updated its Fitness Reports to provide more information. A premium account (RunKeeper Elite) is needed to view most of it. However, I found the the Total Distance information available for free accounts useful. It lets me look at my walking information in a variety of ways. You can see my totals sorted by day of week in the screenshot above.

    The free RunKeeper mobile app is available for a variety of platforms. I use the version for Windows Phone to track my near-daily walking sessions.