Wednesday, April 18, 2012

iLovePiano for iPad


i Love Piano

WHAT'S THE PROBLEM DOC?
I love it's sound, how deep and clear the notes sound. Being a technical guy, I haven't had any time to study music in school or with a personal teacher.
We all know that music theory is complicated and we all want to learn stuff as quickly as humanly possible. But who cares what an octave is, or what is a chord? Who really wants to learn to read staff music, clefs and all the other weird stuff?  Well... you can learn to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or Ode To Joy on YouTube or even by ear, if you're lucky enough. That's cool for playing little bits of music for showing your family and friends  that you can play piano, but if you want to play something more complicated like Hungarian Rhapsody no 2, you will need to learn some notes. Of course the girl playing the piece above has studied music all her life. If we can gain about 2-3% of her piano experience and knowledge then we can play some cool bits.

WHAT DO WE DO?
We try to find some shortcuts, to learn stuff faster without spending 50 hours/week in a piano learning classroom. We try to find apps, documents and tutorials to learn how to play the piano faster. We want to make playing the piano a hobby, not a daily job.

WHAT DID I DO?
I created an app that would help my brain make a connection  between a few elements that can help me play music. We want to know how a note sounds, what's its name, where it's located on the piano and how we should write it on paper. iLovePiano tries to do just that in a quiz-manner. There is no previous learning required, you learn stuff on the go. You can cheat when you don't know an answer. It's all in the benefit of learning.




WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?
It's a little bit hard to explain the concept, that is why I strongly advice you to get the free version of  iLove Piano. Take it for a spin and see what you learn in a few days. Don't just install it and expect miracles. You're supposed to practice a little bit, we're not doing black magic over here.You will have to use it at least 30 minutes/lesson to see some progress.

LINKS & RESOURCES

iLovePiano - iPad Version - Free






iPhone 4s keyboard

I don't usually write a lot of emails on my iPhone and also rarely use French to do that. 
The other day I had to write a email on the iPhone, in French. 
Here's how easy it's to do that, just a few steps: 

1. Enable the French keyboard:
      Settings > Keyboard > International Keyboards > Turn On the Switch next to the desired language (French)

2. Create a new email, hold the Globe key (the one in the left of the Space key) and select the new language.

It's that easy and the cool part is that it comes with spell check for that specific language.