Software

I saw the above icon when browsing through iPad apps and of course it stuck out at me and made me wonder what app this was.  Certainly it must be some Catholic app I thought. Turned out it was for an app version of the Father Brown books by G.K. Chesterton.  It certainly does not invoke Father Brown to me, but an icon of a short rather frumpy looking priest I guess would not be the best icon.  The icon reminds me more of what would happen if X-Men character Scott Summers (Cyclops) became a priest.

The fact that they are selling two Father Brown novels as an app annoys me to no ends.  For $2.99 you get:

This special enhanced iPad version contains the following features:
• Choice of text size
• Chapter selection
• Remembers last viewed chapter
• Optimised for iPad

What annoys me is that they are ripping people off. For example via the iBooks store you can download both The Wisdom of Father Brown and The Innocence of Father Brown via Project Gutenberg for free. Or you could download them from Project Gutenberg directly and then import them into many of the freely available eBook readers on the iPad. The features they advertise are of course features available in every eBook reader. No doubt they and others are taking public domain books and inserting them into an app wrapper to take advantage of people who don’t realize how they could get the same content for free. If they offered some unique feature or benefit not otherwise available I would applaud their entrepreneurial spirit – instead I call rip off.

Instead go to Project Gutenberg and download and read the multiple works they have available for G.K. Chesterton and others. Project Gutenberg has their titles in text, html, and more recently in ePub and other formats. I like ePub because it is a free and open e-book standard that continues to grab support and is the default format for iBooks and is usable by Stanza.

Sometime my geek side and my Catholic side get to met.  I just noticed a new app for the iPad called Hello Baby – Pregnancy Calendar done by P&G Productions for Pampers.

The app is rather cool in that as you click along the timeline you see the progress of the baby and you can enter your baby’s name and due date.  You can also just swipe across the screen to move along the timeline.  Clicking on the image brings up a zoomed in image.  Clicking on the book icon brings up textual information on child development.

It is rather odd that the first time you run it there are two check boxes for agreements about the pictures used. Plus the app starts at 4 weeks not at conception.  No doubt there is some political correctness involved in these decisions.  Plus there is of course links to the Pampers web site, but regardless of the commercialization this is a fairly nice app that is being provided free and a useful tool for pregnant women.  The app also hooks up with Facebook to share information on child development.

Regardless this application might just be a great tool to use in the pro-life cause.  The iPad itself provides a good size screen  and in combination with this app might be perfect for sidewalk counseling.  This provides a good educational approach.

The thing is Planned Parenthood and NARAL can’t release a similar app.  Trying to display a baby as just a “product of conception” or other euphemisms just don’t work together with actual medical images.  The science of  human development has always been a powerful part of the pro-life cause which is why the culture of death so hates women actually seeing their child on an ultrasound machine.  Besides Planned Parenthood couldn’t have a Hello Baby app, more like Goodbye Baby for them.

Fr. Paolo Padrini twittered me some iBrievary news.  I have been using  the multi-language Liturgy of the  Hours application iBrievary daily for over a year and it has replaced my 4 volume set of the Liturgy of the Hours.  Besides being available for the iPhone/iPod Touch it is now also free and available on the Android and Symbian platforms.

Even cooler for us Apple geeks he has also decided to further develop iBrievary specifically for the iPad which will be the ideal form factor for the Liturgy of the Hours. I had planned to get an iPad anyway as a reading device since it can be used to not only read non-DRM ePub format eBooks, but can read formats from the Kindle also.  Since Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and many others are offering content on the iPhone/iPod Touch software this means is can just use the iPad and not need a Kindle, Nook, etc.  Having an iPad version of iBrievary makes the decision even easier for me.

www.ibreviary.com

As someone who loves to read I have long
been looking for a decent book
catalog program that can keep track of the information I want to keep
track of.  I have downloaded dozens of programs and they have
all fallen short in my criteria.  There are also several web
sites that do are good for cataloging of books, but they two are not as
flexible as I want.

• For one I wanted a program where could easily catalog
  hardcover/softcover books, books from Project Gutenberg that
  I have listened to by converting them to speech, Audio books from
  Librivox, and novels that are podcasted.
• A wish list function where I could track books I would like
  to read and be able to able to export a list of them.
• Flexible enough that I could track information such
  as what books I have reviewed.
• Record the date I finished a book.
• Keep series information such as for example the order of a
  book in a trilogy.

I had even at one point wrote a program in
C#  that handled
most of the functions I wanted and maintained them in a database.
But to really develop it to the point I wanted would take
a considerable amount of time.

Today though I found the program that
performs all the criteria I
wished for.  
target=”_blank”>Bookpedia by Bruji is a Mac OSX
program that is
quite beautiful in its functionality.

The interface is very similar to iTunes
and is fairly intuitive. It is quite easy to add books and you can do
it is several ways.  You can type in a title and then have it
search locations such as Amazon to get all of the metadata and cover
art for the book.  You of course can enter a book in manually
if it is nowhere to be found  A real cool feature is that I
could use the built in iSight camera in my iMac to read the barcode
from a book.  Once it successfully reads the bar code it looks
up the book and enters all of the information.  Since I
already had a database of books I have read over the last couple of
years it was important that I could import that data.
Bookpedia will read the export format of several popular
programs and has a variety of import templates.  I was able to
convert my database to CSV and then have it import all of my old
records.

The Collections pane contains your main
library, but you can also add special collections, smart lists, and a
borrowed and wish list collection.  The smart list lets you
define data critera from any field with a number of options and is very
flexible  I was able to quickly put together a collection of
all the books I read last year and this year and was able to find out
that I read 160 books last year.  When you import a collection
it creates a new collection so you can massage your data if necessary
before adding it to your main library.  You can also export
your data in a number of ways to text, html, ftp, and to an iPod.
The iPod export functionality works quite well. In the
program I wrote I would export a report of wish list items and then
manually copy it to my iPod.  This way when I was at a
bookstore or used bookstore it was quite convenient to refer to the
iPod notes to lookup books I wanted.

The metadata for each book entry is
extensive and also allows for you to define custom fields for other
information you might want to track.  There is also a tab for
selling information  and another that allows you to store
links for the specific book or to contain other images.  The
searching feature works well and includes spotlight information. This
works quite well so I can type a name in Spotlight and then select it
and have it open the program and display the entry for that book.
There is also a full screen mode where you can navigate the
covers and select them for more information along with another screen
that shows a bunch of statistics along with charts.

This is just a very impressive program and
at a price of only $18 is
quite a deal.  As someone who writes software for a living I
was quite happy with the flexibility of this program and how you are
able to setup the views just as you want.  With most programs
there is pretty much always a feature missing that the only thing in
Bookpedia that I would want is the ability to import a Amazon wish
list.  This is just a great Mac program.

I have only been using a Mac since October, but when my Windows machine
died last week it didn’t upset me too much even thought the machine was
only about 15 months old.  I now do everything on my iMac
including ironically Windows software development with Visual Studio
2008 via VMWare Fusion which offers great virtualization and I can run
XP and Vista at pretty much native speeds on my iMac.