I did a little searching on the app store and found several options.  The one that looked like it would work for me (Window and PowerPoint) was iClicker.

I download the app and download some software on my PC. I started the software on the PC and started the app. It worked.  The app could find my computer via Wi-Fi.  I picked a presentation with the software on the PC and it showed up on the app on my iPhone.  I could see the slides and make it advance all from my iPhone.  It was very cool.

The software on the iPhone can do a a lot with the presentation.

• Advance and next or previous slide
• Display the current or next slide
• Display the notes for the slide
• Add marking dynamically during the show (stars, checks, text)

Ok, so size of the slide display on the iPhone is pretty small, so you need to make sure if you are depending on it for your notes that you can read it ok.

Since the connection is via Wi-Fi there is not distance issues.

I went to my presentation location this am.  Set up my PC and set up the iClicker and it worked. Problem solved.

There is a free version and a paid version ($10) of the app.  I can’t find what is different between the two.  I did see something that say the free version was good for slide shows of 15 slides so I just got the paid version.

Once again the iPhone and the apps amaze me.

I have had an iPhone4 for a while, but no one else in my family did.  I solved that problem with upgrades in all the stockings.  I know they were all glad for the new phones and I was glad to be able to use FaceTime with them all, especially with my grandkids. 

They were not with us on Christmas day, but we got a to visit with them an my grandson showed us all the presents Santa left him under the tree.  He already loves the iPhone at 2 1/2 years.  He loves it more now that Grandma and Grandad are on it. (I think he actually got my daughters old iPhone in his stocking since it had all his games on it.)

FaceTime works pretty well.  It was certainly easy to do.  Where my daughter lives they don’t have good Internet connections so she uses Verizon’s MiFi and FaceTime worked well over that connection.  It would be nice if you could use it over the 3G connection. My grandson does not stand still, so he was a blur some of the time, but that is often how it seems when he is here live.   He also has not learned to be the best camera man, so we got quite a few shots of the ceiling and his fee.  But for us it was great seeing them live and well worth the investment of the upgrades.  Especially since part of the deal was they had to FaceTime with us often.

The iPhone continues to amaze me and I am looking forward to seeing my Grandkids often again.

Here are seven things I learned.

1. The Builder theme is pretty neat. It offers a ton of flexibility.   If you want a theme that provides you lots of control then this is the theme for you.  The theme allows you to control the layout of the page (what types of areas are on the page and where they go)  as well as the ability to have different layouts for different sections of your site.  It also lets you control the style of the pages (colors, fonts, spacing, etc.)  Last but not least,  it lets you control the aspect of the site that help with SEO (page titles, descriptions, metat tags, etc.) Thanks to Chris Jean for a good demo and  detailed development work. (check it out at http://www.ithemes.com)

2. The Backup Buddy plugin is the best backup tool.  Problem : You need to back up your site – all of your site: the database, the themes, the plugins, them images, and  the version of WordPress you are using. Solution: Backup Buddy.  It can restore a backup to the original site or to an empty directory.  It can also restore a backup to a new site with a new domain (changes all the references in the database to the domain name) and to a new set of database tables.  This is great for developing a site on one server and them moving it to the the production site with the production domain.  This is definitely worth paying for.  Thanks to Dustin Bolton for making is easy to do backups we needed. (check it out at http://www.pluginbuddy.com)

3. Firefox with addins like  Firebug  and Colorzilla make a powerful tool set.  If you do web development then you need to use these tools provide a  powerful way to work with web pages (HTML, CSS, etc.).  Yes, I know most of you already know this.  but that Colorzilla addon was pretty cool.  Thanks to Matt Danner for the demo.

4. Twitter has @anywhere.  This is a new development offering from Twitter that makes it possible for visitors to follow and tweet from their Twitter accounts with our leaving your site.  This can really make it much easy for you to get visitors to follow and tweet about your site. Thanks to Benjamin Bradley for showing this. Check it out http://dev.twitter.com/anywhere/

5. Widget Logic plugin is great for controlling when widgets show up.  This plugin will let you have great control of when individual widgets show up on a page.  It uses all the WordPress PHP conditional functions to test to see if a widget is displayed. I really like this plugin and see that it could help you build a site that had lots of flexibility.

6. The Internet is still in it infancy. Things have change a lot in the past 10 years, but it is not over.  The Internet has certainly not reached maturity. There are still changes to come and we have to keep learning, trying new things, and using what works.  Thanks to Cory Miller for reminding us that there it lots to come.

7.The iThemes team is fun and helpful.  They stayed around and talk with anyone that had a question or needed help.  You can tell they like doing what they are doing and value having a great relationship with their customers.  It is easy to see why iThemes is growing and making a big contribution in the WordPress marketplace.

It was an enjoyable and educational two days.  It was fun to hear about what others around the country were doing with WordPress and to meet Lisa Sabin Wilson the author of WordPress for Dummies and BuddyPress for Dummies.  She got us started with a great discussion on how WordPress is for more than just blogging.

If you get a chance to attend any of iThemes Bootcamps, I think you will find them time well spent.  I did.

The goldent egg.

The kids are all looking for eggs as hard as they can.  They look under and around the furniture.  They find  a few eggs. They look in one room and then move to the next.  They find a few more eggs. They look where others have looked.  They find even more eggs,  but they don’t find the prize egg.  They keep looking.  Then they  gets some hints. They look harder.  Finally, someone finds the Golden Egg.

Watching the kids hunt Easter eggs at grandmother’s reminded me of how we look for solutions to problems. We look hard. We look in the palces were we have looked before. We often look here and look there, but we don’t find the prize solution.

One of the reason it takes the kids so long to find the golden egg is becuase they don’t have a systematic plan to look for eggs.  We do the same in problem solving.  We jump from idea to idea but we don’t do a systematic analysis of the problem and the availble solutions.

Another reason the kids have a hard time finding that money egg is that they don’t look well where they do look.  I don’t know how many times I have seen one kid look then a second kid look in the same place and find  an egg.  We often do the same thing.  The solutions are often in the places we look but we don’t  find them.  When we look we need to look well.  We need to look at all facets of a solution and evaluate how minor changes to an idea can make a big difference in how a solution works.

Often the kids don’t see what is right in front of their face.  Today, one of  the kids picked up a item that had an egg taped to the back.  He didn’t even see it.  He was holding it in his hand.  Sometimes the solution is obvious but we just don’t notice it.  We need to pay attention to what is easily available.  Sometimes the solution will be there.

Finally, we often just need to take a step back.  Today the kids were all crowed in close digging through the cabinets.  There was a prize egg close.  One of the kids couldn’t squeeze in.  He just stepped back and used his eyes to look.  Then he ran around, reached over the counter, and picked up the container that had the prize egg in it.  We sometimes need to step back and try a different approach or get a new perspective.  This may give us a chance to find a great solution.

Our kids have looked for eggs their whole life.  They have gotten better at it.  They have actually learned to be more systematic, to look better where they do look to find the obvious eggs and to step back and get new perspective.

If you are looking for solutions practice helps, but so can some of the lesson learned form looking for the golden egg.

Sometimes you read a book that just makes sense and seems incredibly useful.  That is what I found in Dan and Chip Brown’s new book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.  In Switch, the Heath brothers provide great insight into understanding why people do what they do and demonstrate how to use that insight to get people to change.

I know I find solving the problem of how to initiate real change hard.  Whether the change is in my personal habits or my business, it is hard.  I can easily find things I would like to change, but I am often not as successful at making those changes as I would like to be.  So if you want to loose weight, improve personal relationships, change the actions of the team you work with or change a market or a country, I think the ideas in Switch will help.

To help us understand how people change, the authors borrow the analogy of rider, elephant and path to give the reader an understanding of how our rational side, emotional side and environment impact what we do.  The book then explains how to direct the rider, motivate the elephant and shape the path to effect change.

Here is the gist of their explanation:

It is  important to educate ourselves so we understand what we need to do.  This involves pointing the rider in the right direction and making sure he knows what to do.  When we know clearly what to do we can do it.  But even if the rider knows what to do,  he can get tired of exerting control over the elephant and give in to what the elephant wants to do.

Motivating ourselves to do what we know we want to do is also part of the process.  When the elephant is not motivated change is hard. When we feel motivate the elephant does not resist as much and actually wants to go where the rider directs.  But even when the elephant wants to go down the path, it just won’t go if the path is too hard.

Sometime change is hard not because we don’t understand what to do or because we are not motivated to do it, but because the path is just too hard to follow.  In that situation we need to make the path easier.

Makes pretty good sense to me.  It makes even more sense because of the clear examples the book  gives to support and illustrate how to direct the rider, motivate the elephant and shape the path.  The examples are interesting, specific and fun to read, and the research that supports each example makes them very believable.

Another thing I like about the book is that it gives practical advice about how to direct the rider, motivate the elephant and shape the path.  For each concept the Heaths provide three specific “how to” ideas.  Again, these are illustrated in easy to understand ways.  Their specific examples demonstrate how we can cause change using small things and those changes can effect one individual or a whole culture.

For me the points made in Switch bring clarity to understanding how we work and give me hope that people can change.  It is easy to think that people can’t change and we can’t do much to help them.  The ideas in this book help me believe that people really can change and that we can find ways to help them change.  There is more info about Switch at the Heath Brothers website http://heathbrothers.com

I don’t think that I have read a better book on how to get people to change. It is rare to find simple ideas that work in so many places. I know I will be applying the ideas in this book to my personal life, my family, my church ministry and my business.  Making change is hard, but that is what I seem to be working on all the time.

This may be the best book I have read in the last year. I highly recommend this book as a way to learn about people and how to find ways to implement change in the world.

I walked passed a book store last week at the airport.  I didn’t go in.  I was tempted, but I didn’t go in. I didn’t need to buy a book, so no real reason to go in. Why?  I already had two new books loaded on my iPhone.  I have been traveling quite a bit lately and have been reading two or three books a week – all on my iPhone.  I really like reading them on my iPhone.

I can’t by ebooks for my iPhone in a book store.  I do that on Amazon and maybe with iTunes before long.  It is not quite as much fun browsing online as it is in the bookstore, but I am learning to do it.

Now I need a new excuse to browse in the book store.

How are you doing your reading?

Checklist Manifesto

Today we often ask,” is there an app for that?”  Atul Gawande asks, “is there a checklist for that?” in his new book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.  The idea in this book is that using a checklist for things will help you avoid missing many of the simple things.  It is a fun read and makes a great point.

The book is the story of how Gawande (and a team of others) worked to solve a hard problem with a simple low cost solution.  It is really pretty amazing what they did and how they did it.  They solved the problem of  how to to improve the results of surgery world wide, with a checklist.

It is also the story of how checklist are used in many places to help people do a better job when the job is complex.  It shares some good ideas about how to make useful checklists and how to use them.

One of the things I really liked about this book is how it shows how to learn from other disciplines.  Gawande studied professionals from construction to rock and roll to airline pilots to see how they used checklist to help them be successful.   He tells some great stories on how they do it. It is a valuable idea to learn from how others solve the same kids of problems you have.

I like this book so much that I bought several copies and handed them out at work.  I think checklists are a great way to help us execute almost any process with improved results.

Thanks to Mark for mentioning this book in his blog, An It View.  He has some great ideas and this is not the first book I have read at his recommendation.

The ability to get an app instantly for whatever I want to do will be an expectation that IT departments will be challenged to meet. Users always want and need more functions, and IT always has a backlog. How can an IT department get all the iPhone developers in the world to work on their problems?

An app they can use with no training and no training manual will be what users expect and IT departments will need to learn to deliver.  Apps that deliver a great user experience are the order of the day. How can users learn to deal with the complexities of specific business processes as easily as they can use their iPhone to do things they already understand?

A few small pages containing icons give me access to all the things I can think to do on my iPhone, but does that really compare to the the long list of business functions a user in a big company might need to use? IT departments will have to find ways to simplify the number and complexity of functions a user needs at the same time they continue to provide more functionality.

Lots of challenges ahead!  Thanks, Apple, for raising the bar. What is your company’s development team doing to meet those challenges?

MiFi Hot Spot

It seems like much of the new technology I use these days it to make traveling better.  Verizon’s MiFi does that pretty well.

I was getting ready to head out with a car full on a two day drive to a Thanksgiving family reunion.  I though it would be nice to have Internet connectivity in the car.  One of my colleagues  had sent me an article several months ago Verizon’s MiFi device that provides a mobile hot spot.  This seemed like a good time to give it a try.

Went to the Verizon store and after a little wait, I headed home with a small box that was supposed to provide a wireless Internet hot spot for 5 connections in the car while it headed down the road at 70 mph.  I opened it up, connected it to my laptop’s USB port to initialize it. It installed  some software and I clicked on activate and is was ready to go.  Pretty easy.  So I had my wife grab here laptop and we drove to get some ice cream while she connected to the internet to test it out.  She got connection and was on Facebook posting about my new toy.

The device is about the size of a credit card, but a little thicker. You just turn it on and works.  The password for the secure WiFi  network it creates is printed on the back.  They have two data plans, I got the 5G a month plan.  Who knows how muchdata transfer you need when you have a car load of lap tops and several days of driving.

Now for the big test – Three lap tops and a two day road trip – one way.  All I can say is that it worked great.  I am connected now as I write this post.  Everyone could connect.  The connection seem faster than I expected – didn’t seem much slower than being connected via my cable modem at home (I didn’t try in big uploads or downloads).  I did the get car charger for the the MiFi since I knew it would get used just about the whole trip.  I did notice that the battery was supposed to last 4 hours (that is what I remember from the little reading I did) but it seems to only last about two hours.

So now my wife can post on FaceBook and tend to her farm, my sons can play their online games, and my daughter and I can update our blogs.  Now we just need someone to drive!

Do you have moble wireless access for your laptop?  How does it work for you?

iPhone Speedometer

I was heading east on I-40 on a two day drive to meet up with my mother’s  family for a big reunion in North Carolina. Something we do every three years at Thanksgiving.

We had just crossed in to Tennessee and I noticed the speedometer was stuck at 65. It was broken. Just what I needed on a long drive in holiday traffic.  I need to make good time, but I really didn’t want to meet any of the friendly officers from the states I was traveling through. We stopped for dinner and I was complaining about the broken speedometer and my wife said, ” I bet there is an app for that!”

I checked out the app store while I was eating my Arby’s sandwich and sure enough there were several apps for that. I download a free one and headed back out on the road.

Amazing, now I had my iPhone perched up on the dash board as a new dash board speedometer. It seems like it was pretty accurate, based on the traffic around me.   Later in the trip it seemed the speedometer in the car returned to normal and the iPhone app was right on. 

Who would have though that my mobile phone could double as a speedometer.  Who would have though my wife would have thought of checking for apps on our iPhone before I did.  Who would have though that my iPhone could solve about every problem I have (ok not really, but it sure seems like it sometimes.)

What problem has your iPhone solved for you that just amazes you?