OpenMusings

Another piece of software that’s been added to my “useful apps” list: Sketchbook Express for iPad. I’ve had to do a few “rich pictures” on T214 to illustrate TMA answers – in days gone by I used to do these on paper, then use a digital camera to snap the picture and insert the photo. Not particularly elegant.

Sketchbook Express provides an easy answer – fingertip drawing, exportable as a JPEG image which you can email yourself, and it’s capable of doing some rather impressive effects & text manipulations. The end results look far more impressive in the TMA doc, I can tell you.

Express is a free app – there’s a £4.99 Pro version as well, but it seems to be overkill for simple doodle purposes (some of the sample art I’ve seen produced with Pro is very professional-looking). Worth checking out if you have an iPad.

Needed to draw a spray diagram for TMA01 on T214 – there may well be a tool for this on the Course Software CD, but a) I haven’t looked at that yet, b) at home I’m a Mac user and they usually don’t support us too well, and c) while I do some work on the office Windows PC when things are quiet, I can’t install things on it without invoking the wrath of the IT Gods. So I needed a web app that could do the trick.

Enter Gliffy. It’s a “freemium” diagramming web app – and, for what I’ve been using it for the past few days, it’s pretty darned good. “Freemium” refers to the business method of letting users have free access to certain levels of a tool & charging them for more advanced ones – in Gliffy’s case, it’s the groupwork and collaboration tools that come with a price tag. For basic use drawing spray diagrams and the like for TMAs, the free option is perfectly good enough. Could have used this when I was doing M359 (SQL), I can tell you…

Something for the T214 crowd – there’s a general forum on the ‘net with a section devoted to the course, and that seems to have reasonable input from at least some of the OU’s course team – worth a look as an additional source of support for the course. Here’s the link.