Category Archives: Technology

4 Lessons in PowerPoint and Impress

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As I was preparing my presentation for The Server Side Java Symposium, I learned three valuable lessons about PowerPoint.

Note: If you are thinking about attending the conference, Coderanch has an extra discount.

Lesson 1 – Open Office goes crazy

As I have Open Office 3.0 on my machine, I just assumed I could create my slides in Open Office’s Impress.  I opened the template the conference organizers provided.  And Open Office went crazy.  I ran into two problems right off the bat:

  1. The template decided to use “random transition” between slides.  Which many people noticed when I asked for feedback on my slides.  I saw this in PowerPoint too so it might have been the template.  Or it might have been that my copy somehow got corrupted.
  2. The text sizes were different.  This did work correctly in PowerPoint.  In Open Office, indenting caused that row to be bigger than it’s parent.  Not a big deal as I don’t have two levels of bullets in my Presentation.  They were only there when I was gathering ideas, but annoying regardless.

I was able to recover from these quirks and go on to write my presentation in Impress.

Lesson 2 – Showing one row at a time

I asked some people for feedback on my slides.  Most people had a few comments. Norm Sutaria tore it apart provided by far the most feedback.  Thanks Norm!  I have two slides with comparison tables.  Norm correctly pointed out that I should set them to display one row at a time so the audience doesn’t read ahead.  Sounds easy to do, right?  Nope.

In Impress, I couldn’t find a way to do this.  I decided to move to PowerPoint where more help is available.  I learned that PowerPoint 2007 doesn’t make this easy because it was required to allow larger table sizes – 75 rows x 75 columns.  (Who puts so much data on a slide in a presentation?)  In any case the tip was helpful to copy paste as an enhanced metafile, ungroup twice and then regroup into rows creating a custom animation for each row.  Oh and text that spans two lines needs to be selected for each line.  Tedious.  I can’t believe this is the way to do something so common.

Then I ran the presentation through to check that it worked.  And I saw:

  1. Slide title, table header and first row – good
  2. Press enter a few times and see the next row appear until all are there – good
  3. Press enter to go to the next slide and see the original slide title, table header and first row – huh?

I couldn’t find anything on the internet about why this was happening.  I gave up and asked Norm.  Who couldn’t find anything either.  He solved it by deleting the animations and starting over.  I’m guessing it was a residual thing from the Impress/PowerPoint switching.  Thanks Norm! (again)

Lesson 3 – Highlighting text

While walking through the slides with Norm, I also realized I should highlight certain text.  Like when you take a yellow highlighter and run it over text to get a yellow background.  Another thing that sounds easy to do, right?  Of course not.

At first I blamed Impress for this.  After all, it is a free tool.  Surely real PowerPoint lets you use a highlighter.  Turns out not so much.  Both tools let you use a background color for the entire textbox, but not for part of it.  The “solution” is to create a box of the color you want and position it over the text and then adjust the transparency.

This isn’t important enough to waste time/patience on positioning boxes.  I decided to just change the color of the text itself.

Lesson 4 – The mysterious blocks when printing

I made a nice little graphic and put some text next to it.  I had underlines in three places in the text.  PowerPoint turned that into big black blocks that go down the rest of the page.  It’s not my printer, this happens in print preview mode.  I found out when I was walking through the slides with Norm.  Why would it do that?!  After all the time spent on previous lessons I used a “solution” of removing the underline and using indentation for emphasis.  The lesson is to look at your slides when printed and not just assume they look the same as on the screen.

Conclusion

Argh!  So much frustration to do simple things.  I have to wonder if (Mac) Keynote has these issues.  Anyone know?

managing my inbox

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Email overload!  Must change something.

Before

Up through November, I thought I had decently organized my gmail.  I had filters set up to direct certain kinds of mail to labels that could be read on demand/on the weekend/etc.  I was able to find most things that stayed in my inbox.  I did have a constantly growing inbox size, but it didn’t bother me.

The problem

Early this fall, I took a number of flights within six weeks.  My system sputtered and fell apart from that.  I learned I didn’t have a way to deal with “I’ll do that later” things.  I had been using gmail’s star for that, but there were too many.  When I got home from each trip, I had dozens of starred items and countless more I hadn’t even read/processed.  My inbox size shot up so I couldn’t find things.  I didn’t have a clear picture of what needed doing.  Clearly something needed to change.

What I tried – Active Inbox (Getting Things Done)

The first thing I tried was ActiveInbox‘s Getting Things Done style plugin to gmail.  Basically, you move each e-mail from your inbox to a state (action/waiting/someday/etc) and a project(javaranch/robots/blog/etc).  This gets them out of your inbox and into an organized state.  The plugin also contains some helper features like integrated access to previous mails to that person

What I liked:

  1. Forcing me to have flow
  2. Reminding me to get stuff out of the inbox
  3. Getting me in the habit of having flow

What I didn’t like:

  1. Gmail filters only let you automatically direct e-mail to  one label.  This means my filters are sending things to “S/Action/Robots” but not “P/Robots”.
  2. Gmail was very intermittent about showing me the ActiveInbox tree to view mails and the normal list of labels.  When the tree was showing, I had trouble viewing things because I couldn’t view the categories I created under “S/Action” individually.  I could only read “S/Action” in one fell swoop.
  3. When on another computer, ActiveInbox isn’t there and you have to choose the labels you want manually.

Overall impressions:

  • Active Inbox got me more organized.
  • Active Inbox trained me to think about state in my personal mail.
  • Problem #1 is bothering me too much to continue using Active Inbox, but I am creating state based labels and using them instead.

In other words, I used Active Inbox as training wheels for a bike.

What I tried – 0boxer (Zero Inbox)

While I still had Active Inbox installed, I tried the 0boxer game.  The game has a banner on top of your gmail that tells how many points you have.  It is supposed to motivate you to get to zero mails in you inbox.

What I liked:

  1. Blatant reminder to go through mails
  2. Counts of how well you do each day

What I didn’t like:

  1. It slowed down my gmail noticably.
  2. It said I got to zero inbox when I hadn’t.

Overall impressions:

0boxer was a good way to go through my “legacy” e-mails.  With Active Inbox, I declared triage and said I would only manage e-mails received after September 22nd.  0boxer helped me go through those mails.  I did uninstall 0boxer after about 900 deletions due to the negative performance implications.

Where I am now

I’m actually in a comfortable state now.  I still have about 50 pre September “triage” e-mails left.  (out of about 200 originally.)  I have a system that is working for me.  It still involves the inbox/stars for very short term things.  But now I have a consistent number of post September e-mails in my inbox and an organized set of labels for time/type of things.  Active Inbox taught me the importance of using two labels for the same mail.  Even without Active Inbox, it really helped!

Hands on with iOS 4.2 [iPhone4/iPad]

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I upgraded both my iPad and iPhone 4 to iOS 4.2 this afternoon, and with few exceptions, the results are quite positive. In short, “Find my iPhone/iPad” is awesome but creepy, AirPrint is seriously lacking, and the iPad updates are a long time coming. The only big downside is that Apple went ahead with its plan to eliminate the landscape/portrait lock button on the iPad, instead replacing it with a mute feature. Read on for more details of my hands-on experience with iOS 4.2 on both the iPhone and iPad.

iOS 4 on the iPad at last

One of the most long-awaited features for the iPad is the ‘missing’ iOS 4.0 updates that arrived with the new iPhone back in June. Five months later, Apple finally released updates to the iPad that have been available on the iPhone for months — including multi-tasking, Game Center, and folders to organize applications. Although some reviewers, myself included, have criticized the “faux” multi-tasking available in iOS 4, it is nice to see these updates finally released on the iPad.

New Feature: Find my iPhone/iPad

One of the newest, and possibly the most unexpected, feature is the new, free “Find my iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch” service, which previously was only available for paid MobileMe subscribers. Unfortunately, iPhones older than the iPhone 4 appear to be excluded from this service.

In order to use this feature, you must have an AppleId. If you purchase music on iTunes, you can use that same account. Once you have installed iOS 4.2 on one of your devices, you need to navigate to Mail/Contacts/Calendars, and add a MobileMe account using your AppleId. Once added, you just use a single click to enable this feature.

To track the device, remote-lock it, or remote-wipe the data, you can log in from the Apple MobileMe portal, again using your AppleId. You can also download the “Find iPhone” application and track the device from another iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch.

One issue I did notice is that you have to have your AppleId match your e-mail address. When I tried to set up my iPhone with an AppleId that was a nickname and not an e-mail it came back with a message saying “This AppleId does not support this feature”. Fortunately, you can log in to the Apple website, and as long as your e-mail isn’t attached to a different AppleId already, you can change the AppleId to match your e-mail.

One ‘creepy’ side effect of all of this is that since my wife and I both have an iPhone 4, they can actually be set up to track each other. In other words, you can always find out where your spouse is. For children, though, this would be an excellent feature, since you can find out where they are without interrupting them. The only problem is there’s no way to lock this feature as ‘always on’. Your children can easily turn this feature off and a stranger who finds your device can disable it before you have had a chance to remotely wipe your personal data. One major improvement would be a password requirement to enable/disable this feature on the iPhone.

Update 11/28/2010: One reader pointed out you can enable “Restrictions” under “General” settings that allows users to fully use the iPhone but prevents them from adding/removing accounts. This essentially allows you to keep the MobileMe tracking feature enabled at all times. In the event of a loss, the phone can be reliably wiped remotely although this does not prevent the user from wiping it themselves with iTunes. It does give you piece of mind, though, that you can block access to your personal data even if the iPhone is never returned.

AirPrint: Where’s Bonjour support?

Although Apple did add print capabilities with the iOS 4.2 update, they are limited to “AirPrint compatible” printers connected to a computer, of which there are few. Surprisingly, printing to a Bonjour printer connected via an Airport Extreme router is not supported. Also, direct printing via IP address to a networked printer is not supported. I am mystified that Apple released WiFi printing without either of those two obvious features, but we’ll have to wait for future versions to get more useful print options.

iPad: Screen-locking switch, we hardly knew ye

The most disappointing feature of the update is Apple reconfigured the screen lock button on the side of the iPad, the one that keeps it in the same orientation now matter how you hold it, to be a volume mute button. I have already heard feedback from friends that agree this was a terrible idea. Trying to use the iPad in bed can be problematic as holding any direction but right-side-up can cause the orientation to change. I would not have minded this change if they had at least left a software option to switch it back, but so far no such option exists. It’s a shame, as I suspect my iPad will be a lot less user-friendly without it.

Conclusion

Overall, the iOS 4.2 adds welcome additions to the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. I considered not updating the iPad to keep the screen-lock feature, but decided in the end that the benefits outweighed what I was losing. I really like the free tracking service, since losing an iPhone is not uncommon and it gives me some peace of mind that there’s a chance my iPhone will be recovered if I were to send a message to the phone offering a reward. AirPrint is a nice change to the architecture and should allow more fluid printing across the iOS devices, with Apple likely rolling out additional support in months to come.