iBooks Author and iTunes U

I’m very excited for the future of education after reviewing Apple’s announcements today.

After experiencing the hell that is creating and fine-tuning ePubs and mobi files, it’s exciting to see some real tools coming to market that focus on creating this kind of content – rather than cramming features into an already bloated product that was built for something else (InDesign and Quark I’m looking at you).

My 2-year-old has been a master of the iPad for over a year. Watching him learn on this device is simply astonishing. It’s the future. There is no question.

In the words of John Gruber: 

Apple: Digital transformation of your industry is inevitable. Here’s our plan; we’d like you to come along for the ride. But if you choose not to, we won’t hesitate to leave you behind.

From Dan Fromer:

It’s not going to happen overnight, but only a fool would predict that in the first place. But come on, do you think huge paper books are really the future of education? This is going to happen. And in many places, it’s going to start with us, not them.

OS X Lion Mail vs. Sparrow

I was really hoping I’d dig the revised Mail app in OS X Lion, but rather than feeling more “Apple-ish” it feels much more “Outlookish” — which is unfortunate. Until it has a “Sparrow” mode I’ll be sticking to Sparrow. That’s not to say Sparrow is perfect, but it’s much less intrusive and feels more intuitive.

Installing Xcode in Lion with iTunes running

About 3/4 of the way through the install of Xcode under OS X Lion, it requires you close (quit) iTunes if you have it running. The problem is, an exit of iTunes is not enough. The modal window still hangs there asking you to stop iTunes even after the application has terminated. You actually need to also terminate the “iTunes Helper” application running in the background. To do so, fire up the Activity Monitor in your Utilities folder. Find the iTunes Helper application and close it down. Xcode should resume its installation at that point.