So, it’s been just over a week since I went a bit mad and bought an iThing. I thought I’d update with a brief summary of what’s working, what’s not, and what I’m still to sort out.

Reading PDFs

I needed a simple workflow which let me download PDFs of papers to the iPad, read and annotate them on the bus (or while crashed out on a sofa), then sync those changes back to some sort of repository.

It starts with CiteULike. When I want to read a paper, I tag it with “*reading”, and download the PDF to my ‘toRead’ folder in my Dropbox. On my iPad, I open GoodReader, and tap ‘Sync’ to pull the latest PDFs.  Once I’m done reading/annotating, I move it to my ‘read’ folder which syncs back across Dropbox.

GoodReader’s interface is a little clunky for file management, and the rendering chokes when zooming and panning, but functionally it is brilliant, and it’s one of the ways in which the iPad’s screen comes into its own. Even small print two-column papers look great at full size, with the advantage over print of being able to dive right in to those absurdly dense plots of graphs (O HAI every community detection paper!). GoodReader makes it trivial to scribble inscrutable lines and circles around things, as well as all the usual highlighting/typing notes you’d expect, and thankfully actually respects the PDF annotation spec, rather than baking it into the PDF like some apps. I have had a couple of bugs with GoodReader where it randomly decides to not let me annotate any PDFs for a while, but this has been rare enough to not drive me mental yet. Typing was awkward on the bus, where I’m holding it portrait to read, and want to be able to type a note without resting the iPad on something. After a couple of days, it was beginning to look like the dream workflow was doomed until, by accident, I discovered the split keyboard, which instantly propelled this whole exercise back into life. At risk of starting to sound like an Apple fanboy after mere hours of ownership, it was one of those moments where I realised Apple do just ‘get’ certain things after all. Just imagine how I felt where, after a while, it seemed like the keyboard was split one key off my natural split point, only to discover there’s a phantom key for that.

This workflow still needs some improvement. I’m still manually copying PDFs around my Dropbox, and although that gives me a repository of annotated papers, I’m still manually tagging up the papers I’ve read in CiteULike, and writing notes in CUL to summarise my annotations. I mentioned earlier that I’m using a “*reading” tag in CUL. Currently, this doesn’t do anything other than give me a nice overview of what I need to read. Ideally, setting that tag should be all I need to do to get a paper on my iPad, and finishing up with it in GoodReader would attach the annotated copy back to CUL, and generate a note summarising all my annotations. Summer project ahoy!

Writing

The other chunk of productivity meant to come out of this is the ability to write on the move – documents or code. So far, this isn’t something I’ve spent as much time sorting out, but I thought I’d share the workflow so far. I’m using the ssh client Prompt. Coupled with a Bluetooth keyboard, this works great for vim, but would be completely untenable using the soft keyboard – but this was always the plan. I have a few horrifying-sounding shims to make actual work iPad friendly – such as symlinking the PDF output of my LaTeX files to Dropbox so I can quickly pop over to GoodReader and see how something looks.

There are bigger mobility problems though that I haven’t yet seen a particularly elegant solution to. Over semi-decent wifi, actually typing at length on vim over ssh is completely doable, but trying to replicate that on a train over 3G, where connectivity could be charitably described as “intermittent”, not so much.

I haven’t yet seen an elegant way of actually working with svn natively. There are apps that let you browse repos, but as far as I can see, no way of actually maintaining a working copy, edit locally (ideally vim, but for bashing out words on a train, I’m not particularly fussy) and commit back at a somewhat more reliable juncture. I’m cringing in horror a little at even thinking this, but given the number of apps which natively interface with Dropbox, the ‘easiest’ solution might actually be to maintain a working copy in Dropbox, and edit to there (this is, of course, assuming any of these apps are are then able to sync THAT locally into a slightly absurd third-hand copy and cache changes locally without persistently moaning that there’s no connectivity). If there’s nothing out there to let me do this, then, wahey, I think I’ve found another summer project!

It may sound slightly masochistic to try come up with such Rube Goldberg solutions to what would be trivial on any laptop, but one week in, I still think the beautiful reading experience, and the – erm – unproductivity side that I haven’t delved into here (in bed, cup of tea, jumping from a PDF to Angry Birds – awesome) – makes up for the contrivances elsewhere, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t quite like the prospect of having to come up with a dodgy hack for something quite basic

Incidentally, if you’re striving for iProductivity and you’ve come up against similar problems and have some interesting insight, I’d appreciate some guidance!

In an ideal world, we choose the tools that enable our perfect workflow. More often though, we desperately try to cajole our existing stuff into doing something vaguely resembling what we want.

I’ve recently been reflecting on my own workflow, which despite having completely changed over the last six months or so, is largely using the same tools from more than two years ago.

I bought my trusty laptop, Cid, just as I was heading towards the final year of my undergrad. I would be working from home, usually on six bits of coursework and pet projects at the same time. Then I’d head into uni, where I needed to work on the same things and daren’t go near a lab machine, while also holding a part-time job for which I also used my own box. If I had any downtime, I’d be using this same laptop to pop into Warcraft, or dabble in Photoshop and After Effects. Cid needed to do a little bit of everything, and he generally coped, although as a 17″ brute, actual mobile computing was not his strong suit.

Today, I have a capable box at uni, which generally doesn’t need to do much more than let me browse the web, skim over PDFs, bash out code and words in vim, while playing around in R (or other toy of the day!). At home, I’m working on pretty much the same stuff, and unlike my undergrad work, the box I’m actually sitting in front of has become near-irrelevant, so long as I can ssh and svn in the general direction of my work. Out of habit more than anything, I drag Cid to the lab with me every day, even if his job is little more than to run Spotify and a Twitter client. Other cracks are emerging. I’m constantly reading papers, usually printed out, stuffed in my bag, and pulled out while sitting cramped on a bus (I have an hour’s commute each day), where I’ve given up even attempting to annotate on the move, while my bus careens madly around some interestingly maintained roads. I have stacks of scribbled papers lying on various desks across my flat and the lab, and trying to do anything meaningful with them is a great pain. When I actually use my laptop for work now, it’s sitting on my desk at home, and when I’m on the go, and actually want to get some work done on the train or whatever, it’s usually too much of a brute to be practical.

In other words, my workflow has gradually drifted away from the point where my laptop was the solution to all problems, to now being a compromise in all situations, with, ironically, a serious mobility gap it cannot fill. Although performance-wise it’s still fine, it will probably be on its way to retirement in about a year, so I’m taking this opportunity to start rethinking what tools can best fit my actual workflow.

This led to, yesterday, my purchase of an iPad – my first Apple product. It’s a strange choice for me, particularly as up until a couple of weeks ago, I was still bemoaning its (perceived) lack of utility. Originally, I started considering it as an answer to “what device will let me read and annotate PDFs on the go without feeling like a compromise?” I could’ve entertained one of the many Android tablets, but the only reason this generation of iPads were pushed into the ‘worth considering’ space is for the display and form factor, which make PDFs completely legible without zooming. Of course, spending several hundred pounds just to avoid having to print papers would be absurd, so at the same time I’ve been making sure the iPad will be able to pick up my entire workflow on the go. With ssh and svn clients and vim, alongside a web browser, I really have most of the tools I use all day on a beefy desktop or laptop. Coupled with a lightweight Bluetooth keyboard, I have an effective laptop, and if needs dictate, I can still get by without that!

This has also been an interesting experiment in completely changing my workflow when I’m less mobile. In the lab, my desk had peaked at four screens, which rather than maximising my productivity, created a layer of constant distraction. Twitter and Facebook streams rolling around in the corner of my vision, blogs and RSS readers pinging me to every article written by anyone anywhere, and buried in all of this, a couple of terminal windows and Firefox where the real work was meant to be happening. I’ve stopped bringing Cid to the lab, and now my iPad, by virtue of its limited multitasking, has become a funnel for all those distractions. Mostly an idle black mirror, it awakens only for push notifications for email and social networks, abstracting me completely from the real-time feeds I used to rely on. If I do want to take a break and see what else is happening in the world, it takes a conscious context switch to pick up the iPad, collapse on a sofa, and kill some time. Amazingly for me, a serial  procrastinator (just – one – more – tab!), focusing my energy like that on a separate device has made it incredibly easy to work without distraction.

This is only day one of the great iPad productivity experiment. I know there are a million and one blog posts about using iPads as a laptop-replacement (I’ve probably read most of them) – but I expect I will follow this up soon with a better longitudinal perspective (plus, hopefully, some useful app recommendations for the travelling academic!)

UPDATE: I’ve realised I may sound a bit mental referring to my laptop by his name. Incidentally, my iPad is called Nobuo. We don’t question this.

We’re running a user study this month in St Andrews, exploring attitudes to online privacy. If you’re in or around St Andrews in February, we’re looking for participants to carry a mobile phone around with them for a week (which we’ll provide). The phone will periodically ask participants about the extent to which they would disclose their location and current activity, to evaluate the effectiveness of a system we have developed called ‘Virtual Walls’.

As a reward, each participant will receive a £10, £20, or £50 Amazon voucher, drawn at random. The study is open to anyone in the St Andrews area – whether university staff, students, or not!

If you’ll be around from February 17th until March 2nd and are interested in participating, or would like more information, please email me at lh49 [at] st-andrews.ac.uk. We also have a Facebook page with more info about the study, which you can ‘Like’ to get updates!

Whether you’re interested in participating or not, I’d also appreciate if you can help get word out to anyone you know in St Andrews! Thanks!

Following on from that last post – if you’re interested in playing around with Spotify mixtapes but don’t want to play around with scripts, a more friendly version is sitting at spotipath.com. Like the script it’s built on, this could be charitably described as a beta – so expect downtime, errors, slow responses and more! Give it an artist and a song, and a few seconds (or minutes) later a playlist will come back to you. Some lines down the side show you how the playlist was actually built (with each song having a thread back, relating it to so many songs through the playlist), and to save the playlist (or just add it to your queue), drag and drop it to the Spotify window. The draggable is a bit temperamental so I’m working on a fix for that at the moment. Any suggestions or feedback, throw it at me here!

A while ago I published a little C# app called Spautofy – it awkwardly interfaces with Spotify to try create an ‘infinite mixtape’ – start playing a song and it will queue songs which are similar to those which came before it. The idea was to mimic algorithmically the way people jump from song to song, constructing a sort of accidental narrative as they go. Unfortunately, the way it tried to control Spotify was so hacky it was really unreliable, so not as useful as I’d like.

But, it’s a theme which still really interests me. I’ve just published a variation on it – Spotipath. This (at the moment) is a little Python script which plays on the mixtape idea – taking a source song and crunching through it to incrementally produce a playlist with that same meandering quality. The version on GitHub at the moment is really incomplete and inefficient – it was an evening’s attempt to port the gubbins of Spautofy to Python. The idea is to expand on this and make a user-friendly web frontend to it – but the code is sitting there now. Feel free to try running it yourself – it has a couple of dependencies on wrappers for the Last.fm and Spotify metadata APIs – and you’ll need a Last.fm API key to get it running.