It’s been a quiet week:

• my review for an iPad case went up online
• I started publicising The Metaning via twitter. The results were pretty good insofar as the Australia Council retweeted the announcement, and then it was retweeted again by another couple of organisations, with 20,000 odd followers in total. On the downside, there’s only been a couple of sales total, which has been a tad demoralising.

The plan for next week is to gear up for all the major events for 2014:

• Contact my e-waste provider, to source materials for the UWS exhibition.
• Contact steel and perspex providers to source materials for Sculpture By The Sea.
• Contact National Library and NSW State Library about exhibiting The Metaning.
• Obtain printing quotes for doing a short run of The Metaning as a large format premium print book.

Opening disclaimer: I was supplied with the test unit by MobileZap Australia, and allowed to keep it.

The Kit: Bluetooth Keyboard Case is a leather folio style tablet case designed to fit full sized tablets in the 9-10 inch range. It does so by having plastic clips which grip around the corners of the tablet, are connected to the case with elastic, and can therefore stretch outwards, accommodating larger form factors. In this case, I’m testing with an iPad Air, which unfortunately is too thin on its own for the clips to grip securely. You might want to look for a specific iPad Air case if you want to use that particular tablet. Alternatively, if you have one of Apple’s smart cases around your Air, I’m using the black leather one myself, it will bulk it out sufficiently for the clips to maintain a firm grip on the device, and the cover flap can close over your screen before you fold the keyboard against it.

The construction seems very sturdy, being stitched leather, with a soft suede-feel inside. The back of the case has a magnetically secured kickstand to prop the screen up while open, and the whole thing is kept closed by a leather flap and loop arrangement, which seems secure enough.

The keyboard itself is removable from the case, and held in with magnets, which makes it convenient to keep the single sheet instructions underneath. It can be removed and used without the folio, as the battery is within keyboard itself. It’s a reasonable keyboard, featuring about 5mm of travel and a full row of function keys. My only real criticism of it, coming from a Mac background, is that the right shift key is too small for the way I type (right pinkie finger used to activate shift). Given a perfect world, I would have preferred a smaller single line enter key, and a relocation & resizing of the End & right Control keys, respectively. That said, the keyboard is very usable, and I was able to comfortably code up a website while on the road. This is probably the biggest blessing of an external keyboard for someone like me, who actually really likes typing on the screen – the on-screen keyboard eats half the display, which is problematic when doing extended writing / coding sessions. I’m writing this review on the keyboard, and having the full screen to read back and ahead is so much better for keeping the context of the bit you’re writing at that moment in your head.

In terms of battery life, I haven’t been able to determine how long it lasts – though my habit with electronic devices is to charge them every night, I’ve been using this keyboard sporadically since December 18, and it’s still working on its initial charge. The manual lists 80 days standby, and 90 hours use. Charging is an area where I have a criticism of this product, however. Although the single sheet user manual states the product comes with a charger cable, my particular example didn’t include one. Thankfully I was able to find a charger for a bluetooth headset that happened to have the required micro-usb connector. Pairing and activating the keyboard is easy, with a built in key combo to wake the connection up after it’s been switched off.

All in all this is an effective and reasonably priced solution, which has a distinct advantage of not being tied to any particular model of tablet. If you’re in a situation where you want to provide standardised keyboard covers for multiple types of tablet, or have multiple tablets, but only want a single keyboard cover, this may be something to have a look at.

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The week was mostly spent on the road trip from Brisbane to Sydney, however before leaving I put the iPad through its paces in building a small single page website for The Metaning. The app I used was Textastic, which has both HTML editing and FTP uploading built in. It’s a pretty nice piece of work. Having bought quite a few productivity apps for iPad of late, I have to say that the pricing structure of under $10 makes the “full fledged” mac apps seem vastly overpriced.

An Xmas visit from a backyard lizard.

It’s the Xmas / new year break, and I’ve done a road trip from Sydney to Noosa. Key to this was adopting a new bit of software for password management – 1password from Agilebits. This package plugs a major hole in the MacOS X / iOS ecosystem, namely the lack of a mobile version of the Mac’s Keychain Access app. While iCloud passwords seems to be the solution Apple is offering, it doesn’t address all the multitude of secure things you need to have with you, that aren’t used via a web browser.

The big news from this week, is that The Metaning is now available on the iTunes / iBooks stores. This was one of my major goals for the ArtStart year, and so it’s nice to be able to check that off the list in the final days of the first half of the grant.

This week has seen yet another momentous achievement – The Metaning has been submitted to the iBookstore. Hopefully it’ll be approved before the end of the year.

The iPad keyboard cover I was sent to review arrived, but not before a warehouse mess up sent me someone else’s order, a whole bunch of samsung accessories. Then, a day or so later, another package arrived with the actual review unit.

The week ended with a road trip from Sydney to Brisbane for the Xmas break. Next week will be dedicated to reviews of that keyboard.

A momentous week this one. My first book has gone live on the iTunes Store. This was a major achievement in terms of my ArtStart year, and means I’ve got the entire process bedded down. The Metaning ebook version continues to develop, with just a little fine tuning required to get it finished.

Another interesting occurrence this week – I was contacted out of the blue by an Australian online tablet & phone accessory company enquiring if I was interested in doing reviews of their products. There’s a bit of a bonus in that I get to keep whatever I’m reviewing, but seemingly only need to link to them, rather than putting it on their website. I’ve got drafts for pretty scathing reviews of a number of products I use, being a fairly critical person, but never quite finished them. This might give me a more solid goal to work towards, and make the other reviews more relevant and publishable.

This week saw processing of all The Metaning pages – adding scanned text boxes, tweaking rotation of the images, and setting up the exporting process to build the final retina quality images.

The originals of these are around 50mb out of the camera, and then converted to photoshop files at full size, with text boxes added, they come in at a round 450mb, per page. It’s a lot of process to set up, but once done the actual construction of the ePub is more or less automated.

I’m still playing the waiting game on the Nervous Spaces ePub, but hopefully that will be sorted soon. Once this is out of the way, I can get the final part of Surfing The Deathline done, and then the bulk of the final half of my grant year will be dedicated to sculpture.

This week saw the arrival of yet another piece of kit – yeah it does seem to be a repeating theme – an Adonit Jot Touch 4. This thing’s a neat aluminium bodied stylus for the iPad, which communicates pressure sensitivity over Bluetooth. With 2048 levels of pressure, it more or less turns the iPad into a Wacom cintique. So as a result, I’ve basically reduced my “carry everywhere” kit from an A4 sketchbook, 2 pencils, an eraser and a paperback book, to an iPad Air and a pen.

The other major milestone is that I finished the Nervous Spaces ebook, and uploaded it to Apple’s iBooks store. So now we play the waiting game as Apple review it for “quality assurance”.

The week wrapped up with a final photo shoot of The Metaning, using the double-polarised technique. After painstaking effort to square up the camera to the wall so all four corners of the image would be in equal focus, it finally came together. The shoot was done in a couple of hours, and next week should see the entire ePub 3 version completed, now that I’ve got the process down from the Nervous Spaces book.