Apps for the biomedical academic

A month (or so) into the new iPad, I have found many sites that detail academics’ favourite apps (Steven Krause, Janet Temos, Colleen Greene and others; MIT Library have a particularly useful collection) but many of these are out of date, refer to apps that have been superseded etc. It might be relevant to know that I am no Apple fanboy – I own an aging iPod and now and iPad. All my computers at work and home are PCs and I have an Android phone. Seamless integration with my Android Phone and Widows PC are key features for the multi-platform apps.

There isn’t much that is discipline specific here and for me it is really just a case of clogging up the Internet with my list in case it is useful to anyone.

So here is my May 2011 version….

If you can’t be bothered to scroll down, just get Dropbox, Flipboard, Tripit and Bamboo Paper.

PowerPoint with embedded movies on the iPad

Having recently bought and iPad but not being a Mac user I found some issues with getting the content I wanted to loaded.

The simple thing was Powerpoint presentations with embedded movies. On my PC these are all WMV files which I generated from original AVI files.

I am sure there are 1001 ways of doing this but I thought I would share mine as clearly there are 1001 websites with conflicting info on there. The easy solution I found was to buy Keynote from the app store. This runs all my PowerPoint presentations easily it seems. The only issue was then getting the embedded movies in.
Solution was to convert them to MP4 for which I use the (free) Leawo MP4 Converter.

This was a very quick easy and free way to convert and enables batch conversion. The whole folder took about 10 mins. A couple did not convert but I think this is down to old codecs used to make them in the first place.

I then uploaded these to my iPad using iTunes (Photos folder, manually selecting which folders to use).

In Keynote on the iPad I then found I simply needed to deletee the embedded movie which wouldn’t run and insert (as a new item) the relevant MP4.
Bingo. Cost £6.99 for Keynote app, time taken ~ 2 hours to work it out and then achieve. Result, nice looking presentation on iPad. The display on the 2012 version is great for this.
The method which didn’t work was to use “replace” not delete and insert from scratch. Having looked at a variety of websites about this issue, this seems to be where some go wrong.

All good now – question remains when will I be brave enough to present using this alone and not take my trusty laptop with me? For the time being I can now load any presentation I have to at least show and discuss whenever I like.