What should have been an easy assignment this week involving screen-capturing the process of an advanced google search turned out to be a hard one and major lesson learned about technology.
I went out of town over the weekend and knew I would have some downtime while there, so I planned on doing the advanced Google search assignment while there. My Googling skiils are the envy of a lot of my friends, but I will admit that I learned some new tricks from watching the Google tutorial videos.
Because I was flying, I didn't want to lug my laptop through the airport, so I thought, given my desire to find new ways to utilize my ipad, that I would take it instead and do my assignment on it. I'd practiced the search that I wanted to do on my laptop and the Screen-Cast-O-Matic program was a piece of cake. I figured the actual capturing of the search would take 30 minutes tops and then I could enjoy my weekend. Boy, was I wrong. The trouble started when I went to the screencast program using safari on my ipad. I could access the program, but the actual screencast wouldn't work because ipads aren't Java-enabled. After spending about an hour trying to get things to work, I researched the issue and found that I could use a Firefox app for the ipad that should allow me to screen capture the search. So I spent the $20 dollars for the app and, surprise, surprise, surprise, it STILL didn't work. I tinkered with it for about another hour before ultimately giving up and borrowing someone else's laptop to do the assignment. Guess what? It took about a half hour to do the screen capture.
So what is the lesson here? Just because a piece of technology works on one device isn't a guarantee that it's going to work on all devices. Had I tried to do this at home, I would have given up after fifteen minutes and opted to take the laptop with me. Always know what your device's capabilities are, especially when you are working back and forth between a windows-based laptop and an Apple product or vice-versa. Failure to figure these issues out in advance may result in a scream that can be heard all the way in Philadelphia.
