"David H. Bailey" <dhbailey52@comcast.net> on Sun, 20 Nov 2011
07:04:44 -0500:
>I use ForScore as my music-reading app -- I have scanned all the pages
>from the teacher's book for Accent on Achievement (both books 1 and 2)
>and created a separate PDF file for each page in the students' books --
>for example my file Accent1-10.pdf has the pages from the teacher's book
>that have all the songs and other information the students have on their
>page 10. When we start working on separate pieces, then I scan the
>score of the piece into a PDF file. I have all these files (and
>thousands more for my own personal practice and performance) loaded into
>ForScore, and so I no longer bring 2 very large teacher's books to my
>band classes, I simply bring my iPad.
The arrival of the iPad seems to have contributed to the rise of MIDI
over Wifi and the porting of CoreMIDI to Windows. (It also is on
MacOS, I think.)
"Everybody" seems to have programmed something musical for iOS.
(Apparently starting with iOS 4 on the iPhone.)
>Additionally, I've created a spreadsheet in Numbers to keep track of
>attendance and payment issues (the students pay me directly for
>participating in the band classes -- I don't get paid by the school).
>This has allowed me to stop carrying a notebook for tracking such things.
At least here in the Netherlands transferring money through Internet
banking is common (even with PayPal and the likes left out), so one
might also use one's iPad for checking transactions and shifting
amounts between day-to-day account and savings or investments.
>Thus all I bring with me each morning to band class is my iPad and my
>baton -- the school I teach band at doesn't have a music room so we
>rehearse in the library, all before school starts each morning. There
>used to be a band room but they needed an additional classroom due to
>increasing enrollment, so the regular school music teacher has her desk
>and supplies in a corner of the hallway, tucked under a stairway, and I
>have no place to store anything.
>
>The iPad has made things very much easier each morning!
Here in the Netherlands several bodies of government (city and
provincial councils) have provided their members with iPads and
stopped physical distribution (in print) of all documents to be
discussed.
It is reckoned to be cheaper.
Sidebar 1: I can't judge the environmental side of it. Yes, one saves
paper, ink, and the emissions relating to transport and storage. On
the other hand, the (wired or wireless) transmission of data and the
servers needed for hosting also consume energy. In the outskirts of
Amsterdam there are a lot of buildings with ventilation outputs
instead of windows. And Google has built a server parc in the North of
the country, next to a power plant.
I think that the iPad will prove to have changed the world by the way
we organize our lives. But it's neither the first nor the last
milestone in a fast evolution.
Sidebar 2: I still have a dusty Philips Velo 500. Have a smile at
<http://pdadb.net/index.php?m=specs&id=1400&view=1&c=philips_velo_1>,
its predecessor. It was mobile, but it lacked a telephone. (And the
wireless Internet, but I had a dock accomodating an Ethernet card.)
Nowadays, providers of mobile telecommunications are adjusting their
subscription rates to the rise of Internet traffic and the diminishing
of calls.
--
Chris Laarman
