iPad and Flash

Although iPad does not fully support Adobe's Flash technology, a number of Web Browsers available for the iPad handle at least some Flash sites. The best of these is a free one called Puffin.

Here are pointers to further information about Flash and iPad:
… articles about different solutions for playing Flash: How to Get Flash on the iPad and Can I Play Flash on iPad? Yes!
… sample sites that “flash” browser should be able to handle: syfy.com/tinman, arome.fr, Monoface, Get The Glass
… sample sites that “flash” browser handle somewhat: friv

Other browsers with some Flash support are Skyfire ($5), Photon ($5), iSwifter ($5). I have tried all of these and prefer Puffin.

My reflections from Learning and the Brain conference May 4-6, 2012

Overall quality and content

The talks varied tremendously in quality and content: a few were excellent, some were ok, and some were content-free and/or erroneous. I'm not sure how they vet, but clearly it is not a rigorous process.

The best talks

• Cathy Davidson, "How the Brain Science of Attention will transform Schools and How Students Learn and Live"
• David Daniel, "The Dark Side of Teaching with Technology"
• Jay Giedd, "Developing Teen Brains and Multitasking"
• Paul Howard-Jones, "What is the Internet Doing to Our Brains?: The Impact of Digital Technologies on Student Learning and Well-Being"

A free screencast and whiteboard app for iPad

Came across this reasonably new iPad app: PageSend. It is free and does two important jobs very well.

1. It's a very nice screencast  app. It supports  writing/typing/drawing, provides choice of colors and line thickness and allows multi-page boards. The only downside is that it is not integrated with Dropbox -- the finished product can be emailed or viewed at pagesend.com


2. It's a great whiteboard app. You need to create pagesend.com account(s) then you and any other users you invite can use your iPads as a common whiteboard in real-time. Multiple users can write simultaneously. 

[Advanced] Fixing up a sluggish Win7 machine

Excellent instructions for a savvy techie on what to do to fix a sluggish Win7 machine:

2012: Fixing a sluggish PC link

Worthwhile additions to your Web browser

They go by many names: plugins, extensions, add-ons, bookmarklets. Whatever you want to call them, they are extra functions that you can add to your Web browser. The best browsers for adding stuff is Firefox and Chrome; the worst is Internet Explorer. But, even with Internet Explorer, there are ways. While you can certainly go crazy with these add-ons, be warned that they do take up extra resources. So, if you have an old machine and you like having a gazillion tabs open at the same time within your browser, you may want to severely limit your add-ons. Here are the ones I use on a daily basis:

• to make reading Web content easier: Evernote Clearly and Readability
• to capture screenshots (including automatically scrolling a long webpage): Pixlr Grabber
• to create a short URL for a webpage: bitly (if you are wondering why anyone needs this, leave a comment and I'll explain)
• to manage my passwords: LastPass

I also have an auto-syncing cross-browser bookmarks manager since I use a number of personal and work devices daily and want to have a consistent and organized set of bookmarks: Xmarks.


All the ones mentioned here have Firefox and Chrome versions. If you are using Internet Explorer and are looking for an excuse to switch, this post might be your ticket.

Distraction-free reading on the Web

This is a long-ish post because I have included examples to motivate and illustrate these tools. If you just want just the punchline, skip to the end.


Here's what a first page of a typical online news article looks like nowdays:



Here is each page with the story's content marked with a red rectangle:




What you do not see in these snapshots is that each webpage has at least one advertisement with motion in it, making each page even busier and more distracting when looking at it "live". If you would like a less distracting experience when you read content online, here is what you could have