Deep Ink dot org

I’m back after taking a break mainly from this site. I’ve been catching up on my reading and a few other projects which left time for little else. I’m still mulling around and planning to fix this site up since I’m getting bored with the current format. Hoping to get inspired but my day job is sucking up all my energy of late so not sure how much inspiration is going to happen.

Earlier today I came across a few more GIS apps for the iPad via Zite. Zite is a personalized magazine app I discovered when I first got my iPad. I’ve found a lot of useful info using this little app before and today I came across a field based GIS app ICMTGIS II you can read all about it at the link. I wanted to check it out so I fired up the App Store and searched for GIS and my gosh did the list grow from the last time I did a search. I found everything from an app I could not pronounce to an app called Wolf GIS. They range in price from “free” to $299.99.

I got distracted and downloaded Wolf GIS just to play around with it and it crashed after doing a search on some sample data you had to download. After launching the app again and searching it worked just fine. It’s rather limited unless you buy the app because you can’t import or export anything w/out a purchase. I was not about to purchase anything so I suppose all I can say is that it showed promise. If you need such an app read all about at at the Wolf GIS page. It seems that they are busy developing a sleeker sexier version to be released in June. Honestly I would wait for June before plopping down any $ on this.

If you need to do some serious GIS editing in the field then maybe that GIS Pro app for $299.99 is for you. There is a lighter version for $99 which lets you export KML and KMZ instead of shapefiles. It too looked promising but I wasn’t about to fork over $99 or $300 of money I don’t have to test it out. Has some offline editing features though.

I turned on my iDevices yesterday ad noticed that the red bad was lighted up instructing me to update my Apps. I hopped on my Wi-Fi, and looked to see what all the fuss was about and to my surprise there was an update for iBooks 2 featuring new interactive textbooks. Wish I had these when I was in school. After the update, I decided to have a look around and for some odd reason the first book I tried to find was an algebra book. Don’t know why I tried to find a book about algebra, was not my favorite topic in High School. Actually I did not mind algebra so much but had an awful teacher. On my way to browsing for algebra books I found a free preview textbook called  Life on Earth, a biology book by E.O. Wilson. The pictures looked really cool and it included videos. Its free so I pressed the download button. It was sort of late and the book was ~ 980 MB… that would take an hour or so to download… so I paused the download and went off to sleep. I resumed download earlier this evening and its still downloading as I type so I can’t say I’ve experienced the book quite yet. Just incase you did not get the invite Apple is now in the business of interactive electronic textbooks. Can’t wait until the download is finished to check this out. The textbooks are about $15 to think how much $ I could have saved on textbooks in College…  Mon $15 for a textbook? Granted you have to have an iDevice and Wi-Fi to download.  An iPad which is what I would use to view these books is ~$540, then you have to have Wi-Fi access to download which means some sort of broadband connection. These books aren’t exactly 10 MB so they are going to take a while in some of the areas with “crappy broadband connections.”  I hope that Apple release a cheaper iPad next Month or whenever the iPad 3 is coming out. It should not only be lighter in weight but lighter in price. If not to compete with the Kindle Fire at least to make the price point a little easier to swallow in these hard economic times. Perhaps the textbooks are a sign of more iPad 3 goodness???

I use my iPhone for quite a lot things talking on it comprise about 10% of the usage. The other 90% is emailing and text. I’m quite the writer not so much the talker. Anyway, one of my latest activities is taking photos with the iPhone camera, illustrating them  and sending said photos to various persons of interest. I used to snap the photo, then email it to myself, check my email on my laptop, illustrate and email the photo from my laptop. One evening after a few sips of something strong I decided that I was acting stupidly and that there had to be an iPhone app to take care of this business. I pushed the App store button and did a search and after trying a few apps that had awful instructions and a clunky interface I came across goSnap Photo editor for the iPhone. Unlike the other apps goSnap had a very intuitive interface and came with clear instructions. When you launch the app, your tools are at the bottom of the screen. You simply select a snap from you photo library or take a new photo, make sure you are in edit mode (select the pencil) and use your fingers to drag and draw. It’s that simple you can undo by selecting the  undo icon at the bottom of the sceen and select tool options by selecting the wrench. The icons should be very familiar to the average person who has used a photo editor in the past.
I’m really glad that I came across this app it will save me a lot of time in the future. goSnap also reminds me of Skitch one of my favorite photo annotating programs.

I remember playing SimCity when it was black and white. No idea which version it was but it must have been the first version way back when. We were actually required to play the game for one of my Planning classes in undergrad and I remembered my friend showing me how to get extra money. I also remembered creating a really nice City, the citizens being happy then some disaster would come usually an earthquake of some magnitude and wiped my city out and the approval ratings would go straight down. The approval ratings always seem to go up after you built a stadium for some reason. I haven’t played the game since trying SimCity 2000 a while ago and a friend of mine gave me a game called the Sims which I thought was SimCity. I ended up tossing that game because it was definitely not what I wanted… the guy was a game designer and lived in a world of his own.

Now SimCity is available as game for the iPhone on the iTunes store for $9.99. TUAW has a nice review and perhaps I’ll give it a try if I can scrape together the $9.99. Sounds like a nice thing to add to the Christmas wish list and send it to my friends but I already have a pretty significant Christmas gift on the way and I don’t want to spoil it.  besides I promised myself I would spend some time catching up on my reading this holiday and not logging so much screen-time.

A few months back I was checking out my colleague’s computer. Actually, I was upgrading his software to the latest and greatest version and I noticed that he had a big white sheet of paper printed out on his desk full of color and all sorts of interesting shapes and things. I asked him what in the world all that was about and he told me that he was organizing his thoughts for a current transportation project and introduced me to a piece of software called MindManager. It looked interesting and some of it reminds me of the stuff I did a while back on a project via Curio but I tend to want to map out more things at home than work so my first question was if there was a Mac version. There is Mandmanager 7 for Mac but I thought it looked a bit too much like just a Mac port so I was a bit leary and found Curio a bit more to my liking. If you are interested in Mind Mapping on the Mac there is a nice list of mind mapping software via Wikipedia. For those of you with an iPhone, there is a mind mapping software for the iPhone called Mindmaker that has me quite excited coz generally when I have a bunch of ideas floating around in my brain I’m mostly away from my computer. Its $5 for the App perhaps I’ll put this on the Christmas list…