Apple | Digital Dads

Posts About ‘Apple’

Send Your Kid to Apple Camp

Monday, August 22nd, 2011

It is no secret that I’m a fan of Apple Products. One look around my house and you might think that you’ve stumbled into a suburban Apple Store.

Earlier this summer, I got an e-mail from them talking about the Apple Camps that they do. I had heard about these in the past, but for one reason or another had not given them much thought. But, as my daughter does a show called Emily Explains It and I never seem to have enough time to put them together for her I thought it would be great to have her learn the basics.

I wanted my son to also attend because I think video editing skills are something that would benefit anyone and I know he has posed an interest before, but he was away the week that they were holding it so only my daughter got to go.

The camps are two days of 90 minutes each and then a Saturday film festival where they show all the kid’s work. Oh and did I mention that it is free?

Day 1: Storyboarding & Garageband

The kids arrive at the store and are given a t-shirt, lanyard and some Apple Camp pins. They also are assigned an iPad for the day and given a storyboarding template.

The instructors are great and really know how to interact with the kids. They go over the concept of laying out your story in order to help you focus your shots and think about how things are going to fit together later. It was fun to look at the variety of ideas the kids came up with.

Then they got an introduction to Garageband and each camper composed a piece of music on the iPads that they could use in their movies. If you’ve never sat down with Loops in Garageband, you’d be amazed how easy it is to come up with some simple music for your own use.

The homework for the night was to go home and shoot their video so that the next day they could edit it.

Day 2: Editing

Emily had grand visions of an epic squirrel adventure in the woods, but the downpour we had when we got home meant that it wouldn’t be. Instead she filmed hundreds of shot of her stuffed squirrel trying to find a place to hide his acorn. Heck, I even made a couple of cameos.

We returned to the Apple Store and they showed her how to plug in her camera and capture the footage on the mac and then walked her through the basics of iMovie and let her go at it. It was fun to watch her figure out how you can put together two completely separate scenes and make them work together. Then she discovered sound effects and really began to have a great time.

Suddenly the ninety minutes was up and here is the one part where the camp broke down for me.

Somehow they had planned that these little Spielbergs would finish their movies in that time, but never told them. Now, they were stuck not being able to finish the movies. This in my opinion is piss poor planning and you could see several kids a bit heart broken over it. They could fix this by letting them know up front and encouraging people if they have their own macs to bring them so that they can start work there and then bring it home.

We exported the movie and I knew we could make it work at home with some tweaking and that is what we did.

Day 3: Showtime!

Since there is more than one camp going on at anytime the store was packed when we got there. They had set up an area in the back of the store and of course were showing the movies on a big screen iMac.

Each kid would get up and introduce their film and then it would be shown. Lots of Lego and Barbies showed up, but there was only one stuffed squirrel which you can watch here.

So What Did I think?

If your kids have any interest in learning Apple software and there is a store near you I can’t reccomend this enough. The kids will have fun, you’ll have fun and you can’t beat the price. Emily walked away all excited about video editing and that is what I had hoped for.

It is also a genius move on Apple’s part because of course the parents get to play with all the fun gear while their kids are learning. They also did a nice job of on day 1 showing us the parental control features built into the Mac OS for those who didn’t know they were there. I saw more than one parent (myself included) walk out with a bag with some goodie in it before the end of camp.

Apple Camp is awesome and you should definitely consider it for your kids.

Tags: Apple, applecamp, kids, summer camp, training
Posted in Featured, Sons & Daughters, Technology | 5 Comments »

Family Friendly iPad Apps

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

In case you hadn’t heard the news, Apple released a new product called the iPad.

If you over simplified the description of what one is, you could call it a big iPhone and while that isn’t far from the truth it is really not an accurate description. It is their first true tablet computer and one that I believe does have a place in your family and I wanted to highlight some of the apps for it that we are already enjoying.

Now, please remember that it hasn’t even been out for more then two weeks and these are only the ones that we’ve discovered or have been told about that are made for the iPad.

There are a ton of great apps that were released before the iPad that are family friendly and they will work on the iPad, but I wanted to focus on applications that have been built to take full advantage of the new platform rather than just working. I’m also not including prices because I know many have special pricing when I bought them and could change at any time. All links will go directly to the iTunes store.

In no particular order:

Netflix
You will need to have a Netflix account in order to utilize this, but what is great is that a portion of their library is now available for live streaming to a variety of devices including the iPad. So as I laid on the couch last weekend recovering from knee surgery with a couple of clicks I was watching Singles in my lap on this application.
Artist’s Touch
One of my students at the University of San Francisco told me about this program so I checked it out because I knew the kids (and me) would want to be able to sketch and draw. Out of all the applications we have tried, this is the best for simple doodling with enough options to really let an artist grow in it. Allowing you to choose from a variety of papers, textures, colors and creation tools, I might never get the iPad back from Emily ever again. One word of advice, unless you are a finger painting master I suggest buying a Pogo Stylus that my friend Whitney Hoffman told me about. It does a great job working as a stylus and the ones that come with a Nintendo DS don’t work. I know because I tried! *laugh*
The Weather Channel
Every morning now when the kids ask us, “what is it going to be like today?” we tell them just to look at the iPad. If you share your location with it, the local weather comes right up and clearly shows in animated pictures what the day and the week ahead looks like. If you want more detail it also has live streaming video weather, radar and other goodies.
Epicurious
We love to cook and every family should spend time in the kitchen together. Pulling new content from the web keeps this app full of fresh recipe ideas with big, bold pictures and shopping lists. Although you can’t print them out yet (a failing of the iPad, not the app), I could easily see us setting this on the counter in a cookbook holder while we made dinner. They have the ability to star favorite recipes, so we’ve been going through starring some new ones to try. Great way to get the kids involved in what you are eating.
Doons
Laura and the kids love to play casual games and this has quickly become one of their favorites. You are presented with a screen of funny faced blocks and you must shoot up new ones to make groups of three or more and they will fall away. As you level up, it of course gets harder and harder. Simple fun that as long as a child can match colors they could play this.
Tumbles
Based on the wildly popular Scope or Pop’em style of game, this takes it further by taking advantage of the accelerometer in the iPad and physics. You can now tilt, tap and move around the balls on the screen to line them up before popping them. I’ve gotten so many laughs out of watching Laura tilting the iPad around and around while playing this game. It is her all time favorite style. While, not my cup of tea, I do like that it has a head-to-head option so that we can play against each other.
Labyrinth 2 HD
Remember those old wooden boxes in class, that you turned the knobs to navigate a ball through a maze without falling into to holes? Well that is this, but in addition to the classic vibe, has been updated with lasers, fans and trap doors. I love watching the kids try to figure out the puzzles and trying over and over until they figure it out. Sounds easy, but it isn’t. Frustrated me in no time! I’m not much a puzzle fan.
Marvel Comics
I don’t want to start a DC vs. Marvel fight or anything like that and personally I’m rooting for a third party like Panelfly to push forward and come out with one big comic reader, but for now this is the app to get. The panel by panel reading takes care of the “I don’t know what order to read in” that Emily told me is why she doesn’t get comic books. One warning though, they make it super easy to buy more and I found myself spending a chunk of change in no time, which I haven’t done on comics since I was a teenager.
GoodReader
While not the sexiest of apps, it is one of the most useful. Able to open up documents of every common type it also will connect with locations that you store your documents including Dropbox, Google Docs and iDisk. It sounds overly simple and not needed until you actually start using it and then that is when you realize you must have this.

I’m sure as we use it more, I will find more, but I wanted to give you some starter suggestions in case your house now has an iPad in it.

What applications have you found that you and your family like?

Tags: app, Apple, ipad, ipad apps
Posted in Technology | 7 Comments »

Sony Dads: Bravia & Blu Ray Reactions

Monday, August 31st, 2009

So, I’ve had my first round of gadgets from the Sony Dads project for a few weeks now and figured it was time to share some first impressions around the television and the DVD player they sent. As I talked about last time, they’ve sent me these to play with for a few weeks in return for sharing my thoughts on them.

The exact equipment they have sent me so far includes:

46″ BRAVIA Z Series LCD HDTV
BDP-S560 Hi-Def Bluray DVD player
VAIO VGN-FW465J laptop
A330 Digital SLR Camera

A little less then a year ago I was in the market for my first big screen television. I did a lot of shopping, asking friends and doing research before making a purchase like this. What I got asked by every sales person was, “what are you going to be watching mostly on it?” My answer was regular television, sports and movies. Whenever I gave this answer I was pointed away from Sony because “they are too dark.” I took this advice and went with another brand.

Since I’ve got a full surround sound system set up in my living room this means that the Sony got set up in my office. While it may not be Max’s man cave, it is pretty close with a great big leather chair and the world famous bean. I already had a television in here, but it was smaller so it was a welcomed addition to the room.

My schedule didn’t allow to have friends over for the night to play with it as we had hoped for, but I did plenty of playing with all the features. I had to go out and buy an extra long Ethernet chord to test out the Internet features and my television didn’t come with any form of manual so I was flying solo from the beginning. But, then again what guy is going to read the menu right?

My thoughts:

I love that the TV has the same interface as the Playstation 3 which I have always thought was extremely intuitive. (still don’t get why they didn’t send us one of these, but not my call)
The pre-selected options for Internet content are great and I was psyched to see my buddies Blip.TV front and center when I first launched the options. I wasn’t so impressed to see that there was only a few podcasts available and that I couldn’t add more like I can on my Apple TV.
The DVD player has built in WiFi which is SO smart and I wish my personal player had this option, but as Sass pointed out in his post the fact that you have to plug in a USB thumb drive to give enough memory to use BD-Live content doesn’t make any sense to me.
Having a widgets button on the remote makes passing the time during commercials fun, but they take quite a while to load.
It was cool to quickly check my @ messages on Twitter which I found very useful, but when I tried typing one to send it took me too long as I’m use to a full keyboard, but it was fun just the same. I’m curious to see what other widgets people are going to develop.
While Sony may not want to hear this, I will say when using my Xbox 360 with the television the games look amazing. Madden 10 arrived the same day as the television and WOW is all I can say. This TV has certainly raised the amount of time I spend gaming.
And what about being too dark? It is darker then any other TV in my house, but I watched Football on it the other night without any concerns. It did look different, but not in a bad way at all.

Overall I’m really digging the television. The Internet options are nice and we all know they are going to get better. I really wish that the TV had wireless access as well since I wonder how many people have an Ethernet drop in their living room. I had to run a 25′ cable just to hook this up across the office to my router.

The DVD player worked as advertised and my personal copy of The Dark Night looked awesome on it, but then again I don’t believe any Blu Ray player actually plays a movie different then another one. But, I could be wrong.

I’m very impressed with the equipment the kids are loving having a bigger television in the office (when I let them watch it). I might have to end up buying a new one when I have to return this one. Still not sure what brand though. More playing left to do.

This post is part of series called the “Sony DigiDads Project” by Sony Electronics where a group of dads, including C.C. Chapman, Jeffrey Sass, Max Kalehoff, Michael Sheehan, and Brad Powell, have been given the opportunity to test and review Sony gear. If you want to know more about this project, head on over to the Sony Electronics Community.