New IT Interest Group Meeting Notes – February 23 and March 23, 2012

For this blog entry, we are combining February and March. For both months, we had shortened meetings/discussions, and the notes combine well into one post...

The group started by welcoming Ashley, Memorial’s ISIP student worker during the Spring Semester.

The group then discussed various cloud storage applications. In all, we discussed SkyDrive, iCloud, GoogleDocs, MyWebSpace, and DropBox: Sue has used iCloud (5Gig free) for her personal contact book, calendar, and AppleNotes and said that it works ok for her personal purposes. We have all used Google Docs (1GB free), and though it has quirks it works OK. Ashley has used SkyDrive (was 100MB, now appears to be expanded to 25GB free), and she thinks it worked OK for storage. Ian has used DropBox for file transfer (2 Gigs free) and has also found it to work OK. This comparison page may also help. It is from June 2011. We have all also used MyWebSpace. An interesting interface...

Ian reminded the group about the Campus Mobile App bundle (v1.2 out soon, or now) that consists of a suite of apps related to UW and useful for faculty, students, and staff.

Sue noted that she has used (in her iPad) the Papers app as a PDF reader and the Scribble app to annotate on the PDFs. Cool.

Nancy demonstrated the Dragon Dictation app on her iPhone. She uses it to recognize names in her contact list, and then also dictate texts/email/twitter posts. Amazingly, when dictating text, it accurately recognizes when to capitalize proper nouns. Cool! Nancy also mentioned the Dragon Go app which you can use to speak your queries and look up information in Wikipedia, Google, NetFlix, IMDB, Amazon, YouTube, etc... Also cool!