Anyone involved in the sciences, whether it be graduate students/post-docs/professors/whoever, face a common problem: the organization of papers....pdf journal articles from peer reviewed papers. As a graduate student, one great solution to this problem I have discovered is Papers (http://mekentosj.com/papers/). Papers is like iTunes for scientific journal articles. It allows you to store, organize, annotate, etc scientific journal articles on your mac. It will also store all the relevant citation information in the metadata for each paper. This is really handy when it comes to writing. It is similar to Mendeley (free download from http://www.mendeley.com/), however I think the functionality of Papers meets my needs better. Furthermore, with the Papers for iPad app, I can wirelessly sync my Papers library on my mac with my iPad and access it offline anywhere in the world. I love this function. Mendeley requires setting up an account online and what not, something Papers does not. I wish the viewable screen area of the iPad were the standard 8.5x11, but I'm getting used to reading on it. Anyway, if you're working in science and have a Mac and/or an iPad/iPhone, check out Papers. I love it so far. Note: In order to wirelessly sync Papers for iPad and Papers on your Mac, your network needs to support bonjour traffic. If it does not (like my university), create a wireless network on your mac under the airport menu and connect your iPad/iPhone to your computer's network. Open Papers on the Mac and open Papers on the iPad/iPhone and it will sync. Google this if you have problems. Cheers!
Avid Pro Tools 9
Recently Avid released the latest version of their Pro Tools software: Pro Tools 9. Normally, these kinds of software updates are not a huge deal, but the release of Pro Tools 9 is important to project studios for several reasons. Pro Tools formerly had several limitations. First, the software would not work without a Pro Tools interface. To anyone that previously used Pro Tools, this wasn't a huge deal, but could be a MAJOR pain in the ass. Not being able to run the software without an interface made things such as editing on the run difficult. Sure, Digidesign (now part of Avid) released the MBOX Micro as a USB dongle to allow you to run the software on a laptop without your home interface, but at $250, this wasn't exactly a welcomed addition. Programs such as Apple's Logic run without attached hardware and dongles, making software such as this more attractive from an "editing on the run" standpoint. Second, Pro Tools used to only work with Pro Tools hardware. The interaction was proprietary and you could not use a third party audio interface to get audio into Pro Tools without some sort of Pro Tools hardware attached to your computer. This was great for Digidesign, but not so great for the consumer. I used to have a 002 Rack, the preamps on which were less than stellar, sounding thin. However, I couldn't run Pro Tools [LE] without it. If I wanted to use other preamps to pipe audio into Pro Tools, I'd have to hook up another interface via ADAT or coax digital input. With Pro Tools 9, the software works with ANY Core Audio compliant audio interface. This means I could use my Apogee Duet as I/O for Pro Tools! While this is great news, unfortunately the prior limitations of the software caused me to sell my Pro Tools system about 10 months ago. By making Pro Tools open, Avid has made Pro Tools a much more attractive option for the project studio in terms of flexibility. They also added other features such as increased track count and automatic delay compensation on plug-ins, previously reserved for more high-end Pro Tools HD systems. One bit of curiosity that still remains is will their line of controllers (Command 8, C24, D-Command, ICON) work with 3rd party software?? This would amazing if possible, the Command 8 I had was a great controller....I sold it only because it wouldn't work with Logic. I have to tip my hat to Avid for making product strides that so many of us have wished for. While I currently continue to use Logic 9 for my DAW needs, I will certainly consider Pro Tools again for my next setup. Cheers!
Website Work and the Beauty of Galleria
So this holiday weekend I hit the books/computers hard and decided it was actually time to get to work on a website....something I've been putting off for about the past, oh, 11 months. I guess I was somewhat intimidated regarding diving into html but after sucking it up I've got something I'm relatively happy with so far. It needs some tweaks/optimization but hopefully I'll be able to put a version of the website live at www.deveauphotography.com in the next week. One thing I wanted to discuss and laud so far is the Galleria Photo Gallery. This is an open source javascript photo gallery that can be found here: http://galleria.aino.se/. It’s a nice, clean, photo viewer that I was able to have up and running on my site in minutes. I’m new at all this web design stuff, sooooo the fact that I could have it up and running relatively headache free so quickly is awesome. Apparently it is highly customizable too. Oh, did I mention it’s free?? Anyway, if you’re looking for a photo gallery for your site, certainly check it out. Based on my understanding of javascript on iOS devices, it won’t properly view on the iPad and iPhone, but for me this isn’t a huge deal. I think when javascript it disable it just shows the pics in a list without the viewer GUI, which is fine by me. No clue how it would look on Android and Web OS devices, maybe I’ll look into that eventually. Anyway, a lot of progress was made on the site today and hopefully a version will be live in the next week. Til then, hope you all had a great holiday weekend, cheers!