Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Thing 4-Keeping Up

I actually ended up trying both of these apps.  I was having trouble with Flipboard so decided to give Zite a whirl.  I ended up liking Flipboard better though so that is the one that I used more for experimenting for this post.  I'm not sure I will really use either of these at this point in time. I just don't have that many blogs that I follow on a regular basis.  I did add the two that I check out from time to time.  They are Rule Number One: A Library Blog  rulenumberoneblog.com and the ACRLog  Blogging by and for academic and research librarians  acrlog.org .  Since I only check these two on occasion it is just as easy for me to find them in my favorites on my computer.  I can see, if a person followed many different blogs, where Flipboard could come in handy because it would be a one stop shop for all of your blogs so to speak.  I also only have one social media site that I use.  If I used more I can see where Flipboard would be helpful to check all of them in the same spot rather than having to login to each site individually.

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Thing 3-Utilities

I tried a couple different apps for Thing 3.  The first one I tried was Google Search.  I was really excited to try Google Goggles.  My family participates in an annual trivia contest that includes a visual trivia packet.  I thought Google Goggles might be a great tool to help find some info on some of these very obscure images.  It found 1 or 2 but wasn't as successful as I had hoped it would be.  It was fun to use though.  I will keep Google Search on my iPad because I like to have more search options than just one at my fingertips.  I didn't try the voice search but may sometime in the future.  I could do a comparison between the Google voice search and Siri since my experience with Siri has been a bit frustrating.

The other app I tried was called Stand Up.  This was kinda fun but I had it set to 30 minute intervals which were too frequent.  The other problem I had was that I don't necessarily sit still for 30 minutes at a time so I would get up to take care of something, come back to sit down and the alarm would go off telling me it was time to stand up and do an exercise.  I found myself ignoring it a lot because of this.  I did enjoy the different office/desk exercise videos and still make use of some of those from time to time.