For an organization so deeply ingrained with technology, the American Physical Society has some surprising issues. For example, as I type this, I'm downloading the complete program to the March Meeting at the blazing pace of 5 kB/s, and that's not limited by my connection. For another example, once again the APS has released a mobile app that contains the whole program and is supposed to be searchable. Unfortunately, the user interface on the app (at least the ipad version) is dreadful, unintuitive, and creepingly slow. Geez.
I wish they'd make the full BAPS content available in some easy-for-a-computer-to-parse format. Since physicists have always been pretty clever with computers, I'd imagine that we'd see several very nice apps spring up from random grad students who have better ideas about how to organize the March Meeting schedule.
ReplyDeleteBut on a positive technology note, it looks like this year they've finally given up with overhead projectors for transparencies, after years of warning us how unreliable computers were and how we all needed backup viewgraphs in case the computers didn't work.
Can anyone explain what is the purpose of the bookmarks if one cant see a personalized schedule. Is a personal schedule available. The program doesnt seem to make this clear.
ReplyDeleteI refer you to your previous blog post.
ReplyDeleteIIRC, the APS app last year required a network connection just to check the schedule, so if it's really downloading the whole program, I would call that progress :)
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