K asks:

Any way to mark up text with Latex on the iPad? Or any other tablet? Without internet access (on an airplane)? I’m spending a lot of time on days-long international flights, and in economy class the risk is too high of the person in front of me lowering their seat and encountering my laptop at a right angle, so I was thinking maybe a tablet would let me get some work done on the plane.

Stay tuned for a guest post about how to minimize your time in cattle class, but in the meantime, the iPad LaTeX solution I’ve converged on is Textastic ($10). Most importantly for me are 1) syntax highlighting and 2) Dropbox integration. The syntax highlighting is crucial for being able to easily wade through and work within all the markup. And Dropbox is the best way to get the document synchronized between the iPad and your other machines. Just be sure to sync the document before you loose internet access!

What I haven’t figured out is how to compile the tex and generate the PDF, but I think this is actually a ‘pro’ since it forces me to work on the words and to not mess around with the formatting and figure placement. (There is an app for that, TexTouch, but it requires internet, a remote computer, etc. and is simply not worth it.)

Check out this post for an app rundown from a mathematicians perspective: Using LaTeX on the iPad: A review of the best and worst apps for writing mathematics.

What have other iPad users figured out? Do you really need to compile the tex in order to make progress on your paper?

(It would be great if one of you could update our iOS wiki page with Textastic, TexTouch, and whatever else comes out of this discussion! Only if we work together can we truly AstroBetter.)

I don’t tweet much these days (except about #bikenyc) but if there’s one place where I pile on the bandwagon, it’s at conferences, and AAS in particular. I’ve said all of this last year and
the year before last, but I’m going to say it again. And I’ll probably say it again next year.

Twitter is a great live backchannel for comments and questions during talks. Tweets about the conference should have the #aas219 hashtag in them so they are easy to find. I especially like to tweet during the policy-heavy Town Halls and Special Sessions where important and useful info is often lost in the dull of TMA (too many acronyms) and many folks are at lunch. I enjoy reading tweets during the big plenaries because they give me insight into science topics that I’m not super familiar with and there are usually lots of people tweeting. Twitter also makes it possible for people not physically at the conference to join in the discussion. There’s lots of ways to contribute and benefit, but you won’t “get it” until you try it!

You don’t have tweet anything yourself to join in. You can follow the action by just bookmarking this search: http://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/#aas219. But I highly recommend setting up a Twitter app on your handheld device! The apps are generally fast and use very little bandwidth. Most Twitter apps also have a Saved Search feature so you can setup the search for #aas219 once and then just refresh it to get a fresh fix: iOS, Andriod, Blackberry, and mobile for non-smart phones.

One request: To prevent duplicates from crowding up the search results, please use the Twitter retweet function rather than quoting tweets.

I plan to be tweeting as myself, not as @astrobetter. You can follow me and the other contributors:
@kellecruz
@janerrigby
@astrobiased (Eli)
@astrofrog (Tom)

Finally, I highly encourage everybody to attend Jean-Luc Doumont’s talk on Making the Most of Oral Presentation on Monday morning at 10am in Room 18A. He has great advice on everything from what to do with your hands, how to use your voice, and how to design slides. I think it should be a required course for anybody who is speaking in front of others…which is pretty much all of us!

Looking forward to it! Austin Forecast looks great with highs in the 50s and 60s!

Here’s a common workflow:  ”I want to overplot a curve from the literature on my new plot.  I could write the author and wait several days for them to dig up the plot file and send me the digitized version, but I want to compare now!” One solution is to digitize the published plot.

I used to use Dexter, but now I’m in love with GraphClick ($8, shareware.)  Just screengrab the plot, paste it

Cameron M. recently got an iPad and is frustrated by the lack of a postscript (PS) viewer:

I recently got an iPad that I’m trying to use for research (e.g., paper reading / annotations, outlining, etc).  It looks like it can be useful, but a major annoyance is no PS viewer.  I’ve even jailbroken my iPad.

If anyone knows some tools, or has updated comments on using iPhone / iPads for research use (beyond what is there), I’d love to read it.

We have talked about the iPad many times, including reading/annotating PDFs; but I could not find anything on PS viewers. Do you know of any such application? Is it easy to use for paper reading and annotating?

I wish I lived in a world without Word.  But I’ve finally accepted that, outside our little corner of academia, when you need to send 100 words of information, you send a Word document.  Every office party flyer, every travel authorization form, gets sent as 10 MB of Microsoft bloatware. (Why?)

I used to complain.  I used to write polite emails to secretaries in the Dean’s office, pointing out that there are perfectly good universal formats (.txt, .pdf, .rtf, googledocs) that everyone can read, that don’t require a Microsoft license.

I failed to change the world.

Have you all given up too?  Do you load it all on open-source or Apple products and accept the bad fonts and unreadable figures?  Or, what?  Or are you just assuming that the cloud and social networking will gradually render Word obsolete?  (Ye Olde Worde?)

Congratulations to all our randomly selected winners in our Stargazing Apps Giveaway:

Star Walk for iPad — John O’Meara

Star Walk for iPhone — Edd

Solar Walk for iPhone — Meredith Rawls

Solar Walk for Mac — Jordan

We hope you enjoy the apps!

Well, this is a milestone for AstroBetter: we’ve been given some promo codes to give away to our readers! They are for the Vito Technology iOS apps Star Walk and Solar Walk! StarWalk is one those apps that you can hold up to the sky and it’ll show you what you’re seeing. It even uses the camera to overlay the map on your real time sky. It’s pretty amazing:

These are the apps I’m able to give away:
Star Walk for iPhone
Star Walk for iPad
Solar Walk for iPhone (works on iPad, but not optimized)
Solar Walk for Mac

Leave a comment below with which product you’re interested in. Be sure you enter a valid email address when you make the comment (only I’ll be able to see it). Then I’ll use a random number generator to choose the winners. There will be one winner for each app. Contest will close on Sunday night, 7pm ET.

Update 11:30am Friday: For those playing the odds, as of now, chances of winning Star Walk for iPad or the Solar Walk apps are quite high!

The wait is over: Quicksilver has been updated for 10.7 Lion and now, I don’t think there’s any reason for me not to upgrade from 10.6.

Quicksilver is a launcher, like Spotlight, but, oh. so. much more. It can do pretty much anything except reduce the data and write the paper, and all without leaving the keyboard. Check out the About Quicksilver for a rundown of what it can do and my original post, Introducing Quicksilver, that demos the basics (but has old links). Here’s a list of the current plugins.

The new version of Quicksilver has lots of new features including auto-plugin update, plugin improvements, and a new interface. It’s all spelled out on the new official blog of Quicksilver: LoveQuicksilver Blog | Quicksilver Roars. I’m psyched about the update to the Calculator plugin, which I use all the time and now displays the results in real time (just like Google calculator)!

One of my favorite, and most oft used features, is instantaneous access to all my contacts info via the Address Book plugin. What’s your favorite Quicksilver ninja trick?

Quicksilver, free

This is a guest post by Cédric Foellmi, the developer of a Mac App called iObserve. After more than a year of development, starting almost from scratch, iObserve is now a stable and complete app aimed at planning and performing professional astronomical observations.

Like many software, iObserve is the app I would have loved to have years ago, when I was a support astronomer in La Silla Observatory, in Chile. This is my main motivation. Having left research, I am now a professional Mac and iOS developer in a small start-up during the day, and an indie one during my evenings.

iObserve ($12, Free Demo) is an app that I have developed to let you prepare your observations; bringing a wealth of useful information by simply entering the name of an object.

AstroBetter reader Eilat asks:

One of the reasons I got the iPad was because I have heard great things about giving talks and presentations using the iPad. I understand that you can actually write on the screen during a presentation. This makes me hopeful about the end days of the laser pointer! If you or any other AstroBetter readers have any thoughts or knowledge on this to share it would save me lots of effort!

This is also one of the many reasons I bought an iPad. After a bit of digging and asking around, it looks like there are presently only two apps worthy of consideration:

• Power Presenter ($2): only displays PDFs but allows you to mark and annotate slides and save marked up version. Remember, you can always export your presentation from Powerpoint or Keynote as a PDF.
• Keynote for iPad ($10): displays keynote slideshows (including basic builds), ability to do last minute edits, but does NOT support annotations (yet).

Power Presenter supports annotations

Female Science Professor has a nice article about displaying and annotating images with the iPad and she includes her likes and dislikes about Power Presenter (she calls it just Presenter). If annotations are really what you’re after, then PDFs with Power Presenter is probably the way to go. Also, consider a stylus. I’ve heard good things about the BoxWave Capacitive iPad Stylus.

Keynote

Since I prepare all my Astro 101 lectures in Keynote and am not so concerned about annotations, I recently bought Keynote for the iPad ($10) and tested it with a couple of my pre-existing lectures. Below I detail the pros and cons that I found.

iPad Keynote Pros:

• Getting the files onto the iPad was a breeze since I have already have them in my DropBox. (Use the DropBox app to download the .key then open it with Keynote.)
• Super cool laser pointer! While giving a presentation, touch and hold your finger the iPad screen and a red orb appears that follows your finger. It’s bigger and brighter than a real laser dot and has a tail when you move it quickly! (Video at 1:14, in German, i think.)
• Ability to see Presenter Notes and Slide thumbnails as shown below.
• Text builds and Move In and Move Out actions supported.
• Control with Keynote Remote ($1) on iPhone

Keynote Presenter Notes

iPad Keynote Cons:

• Action builds aren’t very robust. I can make an object move in or out of the slide from any direction, but I can’t make an object move around on the slide. For example, I can’t show a filled circle move around an ellipse, describing a planet in orbit.
• Not that many fonts are supported. My font of choice, Myriad Pro, is not installed. (Unlike in similar fonts, the ‘l’ and the ’1′ in Myriad are distinguishable.)
• Can’t see Current, Next, and Notes at the same time. Either Current and Next or Current and Notes.
• Yet another dongle to buy ($29) and keep track of.
• No live annotations on screen. This feature seems to have been in an early version (video at 00:48), but is not in the current one. At least that means it likely won’t be long before that gets implemented.
• No laser pointer with Keynote Remote.

Bottom line: Lack of support for complex moves and builds and the lack of the font I’ve already used in all my lectures means I’m won’t be giving Keynote presentations from my iPad in the near future. However, the app is very feature rich and I doubt it will be too long before it meets all of my needs. I suspect that for less formal presentations, with just plots and a bit of text, Keynote for iPad works splendidly. Check out this Apple article with the best practices for creating an iPad Keynote presentation. (Summary: keep it simple.)

What experience have you had with presentations on the iPad?