Mobile Apps News from Nicole Hennig

Jul 25, 2019

Mobile Apps News

July 25, 2019

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the 70th issue of Mobile Apps News! I hope you'll enjoy this newsletter and spread the word to your friends and colleagues. Please get in touch if you have any suggestions for topics you'd like to hear about.
This issue includes news of:

Hushed - an app that makes it easy to call and text from a private second number.
Memos - an app that finds text in your photos and indexes it for you.
A special link to get my course, Online Privacy & Security for $19.99 (instead of $89).
Several tips, including tips for drawing with an Apple Pencil.
Accessibility, voice-computing, thought-provoking articles, interesting stats, and articles about the future.

Enjoy!

App News

Featured apps

Didn’t Even Know I Needed Spotify’s New App, but Damn (Android & iOS)
It's like Pandora (create your own “stations” based on music you like), but with a few more features and a clean, simple interface. Spotify Stations.

Memos: A private search engine for all your photos (iOS)
This app finds all the text in photos on your camera roll and indexes it, so you can search your screenshots (or photos of signs, menus, etc.) Very handy!

By the People (beta): Library of Congress (web app)
Transcribe, review, and tag digitized images of manuscripts and typed materials from the Library’s collections. Choose a particular campaign and become a virtual volunteer.

The Best Evernote Replacement App (For Research) (Mac OS and iOS)
A favorable review of the app KeepIt. You can store and search videos, audio, PDFs, web page. Everything imports quickly and becomes instantly searchable. It does fast OCR on PDFs. Organize with tags, folder, and bundles. Do advanced searching of all your content. $12.49 per year or $1.99 per month.

Protect your privacy with a burner phone number: Hushed (Android & iOS)
“Hushed Private Phone Line is a simple and secure app that makes it easy to call and text from a second number. There’s no phone contract involved, because you can call via Wi-Fi or using your existing data plan. Otherwise, you can use the included 6,000 SMS or 1,000 phone minutes per year. Meanwhile, you can set up a custom voicemail greeting, call forwarding, even choose your area code.”

App updates

Create Better Text Shots for Twitter Using Linky (iOS)
If you like to tweet screenshots of text, this app makes it easy. It now adds highlighting and new style options.

Google Maps Will Now Warn You About Natural Disasters in Your Area
It includes a hurricane forecast (if you are near one), and earthquake shakemap if a quake has hit your area recently, and flood forecasts in India. Read more details from Google.

iPadOS: The MacStories Overview
When iOS 13 comes out in the fall, the iPad will have its own special version of the operating system with more capabilities than the iPhone. Read this to learn about the details.

Google Adds Two New Syntax for Date Search
How to use the “before” and “after” date operators to narrow down your search.

YouTube is back on the Fire TV, and Prime Video launches on Chromecast starting today
“Amazon and Google have mostly made up.” I’m happy that we can now Chromecast directly from the Amazon Prime video app on my iPad and iPhone.

Just for Fun

An AI neural network is giving cats the terrifying names they deserve: Bones of the Master, Romeo of Darkness, Mr Sinister.
I like “Mr Sinister” or “Sparky Buttons” or “Whiskeridoo.” See more names.

The best books to read at every age, from 1 to 100
An interesting list.

My Offerings

Get my book:
Keeping Up with Emerging Technologies

Learn the best methods for keeping up — no matter what new technology is trending.

There are several books written for librarians about specific new technologies, but it’s hard to find a comprehensive resource for the best methods for keeping up, along with integrating new technologies into library services. That’s why I wrote this book.

“The book serves as an invaluable guide not only to resources and methods for staying current and performing the duties, but also as a tool to place the role of Emerging Technologies Librarian into the broader context of librarianship.—Michael C. McGuire, Colby College“ Read the full review.

Online Privacy & Security - self-study course
On sale for $19.99 with this link: https://www.udemy.com/privacy-security-action-plan/?couponCode=SUMMER-SPECIAL
(Usually $89.99)
Discount expires August 15.

A previous student said:
“This is the best e-course I have ever taken. The content was current, the assignments were relevant, the instructor was accessible.”
Linda Azen Martin
Instruction Librarian, Santiago Canyon College, Seal Beach, CA

After you participate in this course, you will…
* know how to use technologies that protect your privacy and security.
* have a security action plan for your own data.
* be inspired to offer a workshop on this topic for your library users.
* easily continue your learning with the course resource guide.

Best Podcasts for Diverse Audiences (ebook)

If you like podcasts, get this ebook for recommendations of shows to listen to in these categories:

* Children and Teens
* Feminism and LGBTQ
* Racial Diversity
* People with Disabilities
* The Digital Divide
* Technology and Society
* Discovery Tools

$9.99 on Amazon (ebook for Kindle) or $14.99 on Smashwords (EPUB that you can read in any ebook reader except Kindle).

Or buy just the individual title you want for $2.99 each, for example:
Best Podcasts: People with Disabilities

Tips

Accessibility

3D Printed Tactile Maps Increase Accessibility on University Campus
Watch the video to see how this works.

You Can Now Turn on Scrolling Live Captions When You Make a Skype Call
Good news for those who are deaf or hard of hearing. Get real-time transcripts of what is being said on a Skype call.

Apple teases nearly 60 new emoji coming to iOS and Mac this fall
“Following Apple’s proposal to the Unicode Consortium last year to introduce more disability-themed emoji, a new guide dog, an ear with a hearing aid, wheelchairs, a prosthetic arm, and a prosthetic leg will be available in the emoji keyboard.”

Voice Computing

How Much Personality Should a Smart Speaker Have?
A U.N. report and a recent episode of Black Mirror (“Rachel, Jack & Ashley Too”) question how much personality (and what kinds) should be programmed into voice assistants.

Consumer Intelligence Series: Prepare for the voice revolution (PDF)
Interesting report on how people are using voice assistants. Based on a 2018 survey by global research firm PwC. One finding: most people aren’t using the advanced features of voice assistants. Basic tasks remain the norm.

Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri will get smarter this year. Here’s how.
A report on new and upcoming features of voice assistants by Amazon, Apple, and Google.

Thought-Provoking

PRIVACY
Apple is now the privacy-as-a-service company
Apple is implementing single-sign on in iOS13. “It means a developer or service provider can still easily talk to you directly, but also means that they can’t then trade that on for profit by selling or sharing your information with other developers and providers.” Good news for your privacy. Read about a few more upcoming privacy features in this article.

Google Chrome has become surveillance software. It’s time to switch.
Learn about the details in this article. I switched to Firebox as my primary browser about a month ago and I’m happy with it.

Google Promises ‘reCAPTCHA’ Isn’t Exploiting Users. Should You Trust It?
“An innovative security feature to separate humans from bots online comes with some major concerns.”

The Clever Cryptography Behind Apple’s ‘Find My’ Feature
An upcoming feature is good for finding your stolen Apple device, even when it’s offline, and also keeps Apple itself from learning your location. “”Now what’s amazing is that this whole interaction is end-to-end encrypted and anonymous,” Federighi said at the WWDC keynote. “It uses just tiny bits of data that piggyback on existing network traffic so there’s no need to worry about your battery life, your data usage, or your privacy.””

REGULATION OF BIG TECH
Opinion | The People Screaming for Blood Have No Idea How Tech Actually Works
By Kara Swisher in the New York Times. Regulators “are coming in with guns blazing in a way that looks thoughtless and is likely to prove pointless.”

Regulating Big Tech makes them stronger, so they need competition instead
Excellent points by Cory Doctorow in The Economist.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

FACEBOOK'S CRYPTOCURRENCY

TEENS & TECHNOLOGY

CONNECTIVITY

Interesting Statistics

Mary Meeker’s most important trends on the internet
All the slides (333 of them!) are embedded at the bottom of this story. A few interesting stats summarized here are: “E-commerce is now 15 percent of retail sales, Americans are spending more time with digital media than ever: 6.3 hours a day in 2018, and Images are increasingly the means by which people communicate, as technology developments like faster wifi and better phone cameras have encouraged a surge in image taking.”

For more and more Americans, a smartphone is the only internet connection they need
Summary of a Pew Research study that reports that 17% of Americans use smartphones and the /only/ device they use to get online. And 37% say they /mostly/ use smartphones to get online. For people between 18 and 29 it’s 58%.

About three-quarters of Americans favor steps to restrict altered videos and images.
“Nearly two-thirds of Americans (63%) say made-up or altered videos and images create a great deal of confusion about the facts of current issues and events, with another 27% saying they create some confusion.”

The Future

Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2019: World Economic Forum (PDF)
Bioplastics for a circular economy, social robots, metalenses, DNA data storage, collaborative telepresence, (and five more).

Startup packs all 16GB of Wikipedia onto DNA strands to demonstrate new storage tech
“DNA is compact, chemically stable — and given that it’s the foundation of the Earth’s biology, it’s arguably not as likely to become as obsolete as the spinning magnetized platters of hard drives or CDs that are disappearing today the way floppy drives already vanished.” Who’s using it? Those who want to archive human knowledge off-planet, see: The first library in space.

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