This Oct. 24, 2011 blog post is mirrored from an internal site at Lee Enterprises, my current employer, where I blog regularly about mobile, tablet and emerging tech. I thought it might be handy to those outside the company too, so I’m cross-posting it here.

While IOS 5 launched a couple weeks ago and has received much fanfare, Android announced their version 4.0 upgraded mobile operating system last week with several interesting new features for journalists. While there’s plenty of interesting interface improvements and futuristic-features like facial-recognition security, I’m going to talk about the two ways Ice Cream Sandwich (the Android project name for this release) is notable to mobile reporters and mobile and tablet publishers:

The most notable upgrade for mobile reporting is Android’s native camera app made some huge advancements:

• Near-instantaneous picture taking — there’s no lag anymore from when you click the shutter to when the picture is taken which is fantastic for sports and breaking news. The IOS5 upgrade also made similar improvements for taking quick photos.
• Single-motion panoramas are added to the options list along with photo and video for collecting visual content.
• Native video editing was available in Android 3.0, but now available across all devices, and photo editing too (much like IOS native camera app, you can now do basic editing in the app immediately after capturing the content).
• Google+ Hangouts with video are great for sending back quick streaming video reports and the new version of Android offers similar support to that of the desktop Google+ Hangout experience. TV affiliates have long used tools like Skype to stream back video from locations and organizations including CNN and KOMU in Columbia, MO have been leaders in using Google+ Hangout video for this same purpose.
• Wireless content sharing with other devices via Android Beam NFC technology or Wi-Fi sharing to send large files back and forth.

New publishing features in Android 4.0:

• The biggest change is Ice Cream Sandwich merges Android 2.x and 3.x operating systems, which were set up for mobile and tablet platforms, respectively. One of the major challenges that slowed developers/publishers to move to the new Android 3.0 platform was after Android 3.0 was just released this past Spring, Google had was honest and transparent about the fact that there was going to be a major upgrade, merging both mobile and tablet versions into one in Android 4.0 this Fall. Without an already established base of users, most developers held off developing for 3.0. Without the app developers, there’s been limited apps developed and that has also slowed consumer response and adoption of Android tablets. (Google recently said they had sold 6 million Android Tablets, Apple has sold 40 million iPads) With the platforms merging, in the future your app developed for 4.0 will be able to scale and function on all devices from tablets to mobile phones, hopefully providing a larger audience.
• Google’s web browser in Android 4.0 also added many features to support and extend HTML5 capabilities including advanced support for motion sensor APIs including the gyroscope as well as 3D transformations. The browser also has a performance boost, optimizing the experience speed by 550% in some tests.

Apple's Siri voice assistant offers the meaning of life

This Oct. 19, 2011 blog post is mirrored from an internal site at Lee Enterprises, my current employer, where I blog about mobile, tablet and other emerging tech. I thought it might be handy to those outside the company too, so I’m cross-posting it here.

One of your most basic reporting tools just got a whole lot more powerful with the help of your mobile phone: your voice.

Voice tools on mobile phones are exploding and offering new ways to communicate, multitask, interact and organize your life and work. Whether you’re running between assignments and need to send quick email or text message to your boss, get an address for your source’s location, checking the weather to know if you need rain gear for your lenses, Tweet news tidbits or one of the many other actions, your voice’s power just got amplified.

The new iPhone 4s offers a tool called Siri has a great number of commands it responds to. Unfortunately, the Siri program is only available on the iPhone 4s. Someone has hacked it to work on an iPhone 4 but it requires jailbreaking and might get shut down by Apple.

Google’s Android mobile operating system has been the pioneer in the voice conversion arena from their launch of Google Voice automatically translating voicemail-to-text to their Android keyboards which always include voice-to-text buttons. Available on all Android phones, Google also offers a handful of voice actions available natively within the phone.

There’s also a handful of third-party apps available to get more robust “Siri-like” personal assistant options (Vlingo is my personal favorite on Android, although I use the stock Google voice commands most frequently.)

Somewhat related and very interesting and useful for those of us that cover multi-cultural beats — there’s a new version of Google Translate with an enriched “conversation” mode (currently in Alpha, so it’s not perfect) and additional language support. The app can both listen and speak for you, translating the message on both sides. It’s breathtakingly amazing. So if you’re out on assignment and find yourself trying to communicate with someone who’s not a native English speaker, you can use this tool to help communicate in more than 50 languages from Afrikaans to Yiddish.

Apple IOS5 devices now offer a new quick way to win a photo shootout or capture a breaking news event at a moment's notice.

This Oct. 13, 2011 blog post is mirrored from an internal site at Lee Enterprises, my current employer. I thought it might be handy to those outside the company too, so I’m cross-posting it here.

If you’re an Apple iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad owner who uses their phone for mobile reporting, I’d highly encourage you take advantage of their free software update to the new version of iOS 5. There’s more than 200 changes in the software, one of the most basic benefits for mobile reporters is the ability to snap photos and video much quicker from the lock screen.

With the new software update, here’s how to quickly access the camera from sleep mode:

1 – Double tap the home button and a camera button will appear in the lower right corner. (Music controls will also appear at the top, if you feel the need to put on some motivational mobile reporting music.)

2 – Tap the camera button and you’re launched straight into the phone app.

3 – Shoot away!

This is much faster than having to swipe, type in your unlock code, navigate to the photo app, tap that icon and launch, saving at least 7-10+ seconds (depending on how quick your fingers are typing in your code). The time saved could mean the difference between catching the “decisive moment” or not.

Another bonus feature for mobile reporters: With the iOS 5 update, the hardware volume up botton can act as a shutter for the camera! That also includes the white earbuds with the volume rocker that come with the device and some Bluetooth headsets also activate the shutter by pressing the increase volume button.

Another double bonus feature for mobile reporters: With the update, the camera app also offers basic editing tools built in now. For photos, cropping, red-eye removal and “enhance” are available … although the enchance isn’t what you’d hope (it seems to do some color correction and toning, but can be really funky at times). On videos you can trim and preview the clips. Having these tools in the camera app can help you get basic editing done before you send the media in breaking news situations. To find these new features, in the Camera Roll click “edit” to get these features.

To upgrade your software, just plug your iOS device into your computer, open iTunes, and iTunes should prompt you to update your software and take it from there. Just a heads up: It’ll take a LONG time to update, the files are almost 1 gb in size, so don’t do this at the last minute before you head home from work.

The iOS 5 upgrade is available for free for all iPhone 3GS, 4 and 4S, as well as the iPod Touch 3rd & 4th generation and iPad 1 and 2.

Hey gang. Just a heads up, things are going to remain quiet around here for a while. I have a bunch of travel coming up through October and the big Society for News Design conference on Sept. 29-Oct. 1, which I’m co-directing. So I apologize for the quiet time.

If you join us in St. Louis though, I think you’ll find it was worth it and if you register for SND STL before August 31, you can save $100. Come kick it with me and amazing folks like Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan in a very rare, public appearance together, where they’ll be releasing a new project, exclusively announced at SND STL.

It’s going to be an amazing shindig with the most mobile and tablet training out of any journalism conference in the country this year. We’ll soon have more than 80 speakers representing organizations with diverse audiences from The Onion to ESPN, sizes from The Joplin Globe to The New York Times, and varied content topics from “Milk Eggs Vokda” to Readers Digest, in more than 40 sessions.

The entire conference and speakers will focus on presenting inspiring and/or practical tools and training with all sorts of fun stuff planned to make this the best conference, ever in the history of the earth: print and digital design, 10-story-slides, data visualization, comics journalism, interactive mapping, gooey butter cake, career advice, social media, pub crawls, news app development, bootstrapping media projects and much more planned — all of this for an amazing price, especially when you compare the total cost to other journalism conferences (and their hotels rates that for two days cost more than an iPad).

Learn more and please help spread the word: sndstl.com

So as the school year has come to an end I’ve had several requests form graduating seniors for advice on what gear they should purchase to add to their arsenal  to get them ready for the next step of their career. A long time ago I set up a gear guide to help people with this, but it’d been a while since I’d updated it, until this weekend. So take a gander if you’re curious, looking for some interesting summer reading or in the market for new multimedia, mobile gear or books, check it out.

I also added a couple more categories to better split out the topics into more clear buckets: Design, development, mobile/tablet tools, management & leadership, social media & community, video/audio/photo gear and video/audio/photo training. … Oh, and “Nerdtastic stuff”… my favorite category of quirky nerd tools and gifts.

Full Disclosure: That is an affiliate link, so if you make a purchase I’ll get a 4% kick back, which I’ll use towards hosting costs for the site. It doesn’t cost you any more, just sends a little cash my way for helping create the resource.

Flickr photo courtesy Stéfan Le Dû