WTAM 1100 – IBM and Apple Partnership

Play Audio – WTAM 1100 Newsradio – Tech Tuesday – July 22nd, 2014

WTAM 1100 Newsradio Cleveland OhioIf you use your smartphone with your business, the recent news stories of IBM’s partnership with Apple may have piqued your interest.

IBM and Apple started out as rivals for the PC market in the very early 80s before it became Mac vs Windows. While IBM left the personal computer space over the next few decades, they continued to be a very important player in enterprise environments.

In the last 7 years, smartphones and tablets have become one of the fastest growing markets for what are really still personal computers. However, even though we’re more likely to turn to a smartphone to check our personal email, or use a tablet to surf the web, the support for these devices in a corporate environment is still a huge area of growth opportunity.

With Apple’s strength being consumer hardware and IBM still being a well-known enterprise systems developer, you’re likely to see a much more robust approach to helping companies supply, manage and support devices like iPhones and iPads.

When you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of corporate employees, often across different locations and even time zones, the ability to manage user accounts and access from those highly-mobile devices can be a nightmare for your company’s IT department.

WTAM 1100 – WWDC and Geek Squad Summer Academy

 
WTAM 1100 Newsradio Cleveland OhioThis week’s Tech Tuesday on WTAM 1100’s Wills & Snyder in the Morning focused on Monday’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) keynote in San Francisco. During the 2 hour presentation, Apple introduced upcoming software updates, including Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite and iOS 8, scheduled for later this fall.

This week also sees the Geek Squad Summer Academy landing in Cleveland. Geek Squad is partnering with University Settlement to host technology immersion classes for under-served middle and high school students. The 2 day event starts at Willow Elementary on Thursday, June 5th. The camp will have interactive classes in robotics, 3D printing, video production and other technologies taught by Geek Squad Agents and Best Buy Blue Shirts.

For more information and registration, visit http://academy.geeksquad.com/register.

iMovie and GarageBand on the iPad 2

When the current batch of tablet PCs came out last year, many in the tech community dismissed them as mere toys. They were labeled “consumption devices” because the conventional wisdom held that their lack of processing power and touch-based interface made content creation impossible.

With the release of the iPad 2, Apple has really made strides in proving this wrong with the iMovie and GarageBand apps available for $4.99 each. Using these two tools, I was able to both edit together some quick background music, as well as stitch together a series of photos into a video slideshow that could be edited and uploaded straight from the iPad to YouTube.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8mhgpBgHcs

Unfortunately, you cannot currently import music created in Garageband directly into iMovie. However, once you have transferred the music to iTunes on your PC, then back onto the iPad’s iTunes, you can use it in your iMovie projects. Hopefully, Apple will add this functionality in a future update, or a 3rd party app will find a way to help.

There’s no doubt that the more involved professional multimedia creation process will still require dedicated computers for years to come, but it’s amazing to me how quickly tablet PCs are opening up the world of mobile content creation for the rest of us.

I Didn’t Last Very Long …

Over the weekend, I lost my beloved iPhone to an inopportune 4 foot drop onto hard concrete. The case I had the phone in protected the outside of the phone reasonably well, as there’s not an external dent, nick or scratch anywhere on phone. However, the impact shook something up, because now the LCD display isn’t working at all.

Because of the accident, I decided to see just how long I could last without my little portable computer substitute.

I lasted 3 days.

Yes, I upgraded to a shiny new 32GB iPhone 3GS. Only this time, I made sure to purchase it through Best Buy so that I could get accidental damage coverage to prevent another long, dark weekend of iPhone withdrawal.

Panoramic Photos on the iPhone

I found a great little app called AutoStitch for the iPhone that came in very handy this week when I wanted to create panoramic views of the displays at the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio.

Click for full size:
Air Force Museum Panorama

Air Force Museum Panorama

The program works by allowing you to take a series of overlapping photos using the iPhone camera and “stitching” them together in one long, panoramic image. While you can find software to accomplish the same effect with more features for your desktop or laptop, I love the fact that you can create and save the panorama directly on the phone.

The only thing holding this $1.99 program back is the limited image quality available to my iPhone 3G camera. However, as you can see from the above examples, impressive results are still available despite the hardware issue.