Google must have been reading our back to school series, because the Google Docs interns have added a bunch of new features designed specifically for students. There's something for everyone, whether you're writing papers or doing problem sets. Although Google is highlighting thiese improvements as useful to students, some of them could definiteltly come in handy in a nonacademic situation.

For those of you taking math classes, there's an equation editor, so you can actually take math notes on your laptop without a special app. Chemistry students will be happy to note the addition of superscripts and subscripts, making it easier to put the 2 in H2O.

Google Translate is now available from within Docs, which is of general interest, but should appeal specifically to language students. For students conducting surveys, there's now an option to proceed to a different question depending on a participant's answer. If you're just writing a paper, you can take advantage of additional bullet styles and the ability to export footnotes as endnotes if necessary.

It's no secret that I reserve special levels of scorn for the Record Industry Association of America - the music industry body whose moments of fame include suing the dead for copyright theft and in the process destroying any consumer goodwill towards the music labels. It's not that I loathe paying for my music - nothing could be farther from the truth - it's just that as a legitimate customer, I can't help but feel that I get the rough end of the stick for being honest.

Whilst most adults know that it's illegal to share music online, there's clearly a question of how to teach school-kids the law - and their fair-use rights. Enter the RIAA's recently updated "Music-Rules!" curriculum, which encourages youngsters to create class projects to educate their peers in how to legitimately obtain music:

Imagine that you are in the music industry... With your team of fellow music industry employees, plan an information campaign that lets others know why it's important to get their music the right way... You'll want to convince your classmates that your teams' plan is the one that will become the class project!

Challenge: Take your campaign a step further by contacting the editor of your community newspaper or the director of your community cable television station to see if you can submit an article or video about your campaign.

Whilst it's understandable that the RIAA would seek to 'educate' children in the legality of sharing music online, the convenient ommision of fair-use (complex though it may be to explain to younger children) means that the RIAA's campaign fails to convince us it's anything more than a glorified PR campaign. After years of intimidating adults, and now attempting to use children as unpaid PR hacks, it's hard to do anything but criticise the RIAA's ongoing tactics.

[Via Boing Boing]

There are plenty of apps you can use to build your own comic strip, with little artistic talent required. Various members of the Download Squad team love Bitstrips and Comic Life Magiq, but we grownups aren't really the target audience for ToonDoo, a comic strip maker from Zoho. ToonDoo is for educational use, allowing kids to make comic strips in the classroom (even if they can't draw), and letting teachers use them as instructional tools.

If kids today are anything like I was at their age, letting them loose with a comic strip maker is a recipe for fun and mischief. ToonDoo is helping teachers out a bit by introducing ToonDooSpaces, which gives each classroom its own sandbox - with comments and other social features - that the teacher can moderate. The pitch is that Spaces makes it easier to keep track of student progress, while also helping to make the learning environment a little less Wild West.

ToonDoo could be a big distraction for kids, the same way Bitstrips is for Download Squad, so it's good to give the teacher some bonus mod powers to keep the learning focused.

I have to admit, I'm pretty envious of kids today, because they get to play with fun stuff like Storybird. Storybird is a place for kids and parents to read and create storybooks. It's completely kid-friendly and features a gallery of great artwork that you can use to get started. Just because Storybird is targeted at children doesn't mean it's dumbed-down, though. A lot of adults I know couldn't lay out a storybook in Pagemaker, but they'd have no problem creating something nice with this.

Of course, kids can make their own Storybirds, but they can also read selections from the site's public collection. They're not all great, but the characters in the art gallery are cool enough to hold some interest (I know I would have loved the monsters, in particular, as a kid). Storybird is also looking at offering a print publishing platform, so you can use it to make real books, too. What kid wouldn't want a professionally printed version of his own book?

Some of you are headed back to school this week, and I want to let you know that we at Download Squad feel your pain. We've all been there at one time or another, and it's not always easy. While I'm not volunteering to do your homework (don't want to get you in trouble, you know), the least I can do is offer some helpful applications for everyone's favorite (formerly) collegiate website, Facebook. I hope these five apps make your school year a little bit easier. Good luck in the new school year, DLS readers!

Notely

Notely is a comprehensive system for to-do list, homework planning and events. The Facebook app is just one way to keep track of that: there's also a web version of Notely, and an iPhone app. It's all available with a free account at Notely.net.

Courses

Courses is a beefed-up version of a feature you might remember if you're a long-time Facebook user. It lets you list your current course list on your profile and find other people in your classes. What's more, it works as a class discussion board, video chat, place to put your weekly assignment schedule, and place to store files.

According to the New York Times, Wikipedia is making a move away from a democratic free-for-all system where anyone and everyone can edit any article. Instead, the site will require that changes to articles about living people be approved by trusted users.

As fans of Spider-Man are aware, with great power comes great responsibility. Wikipedia's massive growth over the past few years, and its emergence as a trusted source of information, has led the board of the Wikimedia Foundation (which oversees Wikipedia) to make changes that would put more power in the hands of the site's trusted contributors.

Apparently, the German-language Wikipedia has been doing this for about a year, and not just on pages dealing with living people. The English version seems to be moving in the same direction. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales sees this as a test, to make sure the new approval process will go smoothly before rolling it out to all articles. This could be a practical step toward improving the quality of Wikipedia, but it seems to signal a retreat from the philosophy on which the site was founded. It might be worth retreating, however, to deal with the frequent, sometimes high-profile, incidents of vandalism on Wikipedia.

The good news is that Wikipedia finally has an official iPhone app. The bad news is that Wikipedia already had an iPhone-optimized website, and the app doesn't offer any compelling reason why you shouldn't just keep using that. Unlike some of the downloadable, offline-readable versions of Wikipedia we've covered before, the iPhone app isn't any more useful than a bookmark of the mobile site.

When I rounded up a bunch of ways to enhance your Wikipedia experience, I mentioned two good iPhone apps: Wikiamo and Wikipanion. I'd recommend either of those over the official app, as they offer options for searching, formatting, and offline reading that the official app simply doesn't. I hope to see the Wikipedia app improve over time, but for right now, it's just taking up space on your home screen.


[via AppScout]

The saga of Apple's inexplicable App Store approval policies just got even weirder. This time, a dictionary iPhone app was rejected for containing profanity, and only accepted once a 17+ rating was attached, and the allegedly obscene words were removed from the app. Even more frustrating is that Ninjawords, the censored dictionary, distinguishes itself by using different sources for its definitions than any other app on the store right now. It could have been a great app.

It's true that it's Apple's store, and Apple is allowed to make the rules, but it's hard to see how such a crucial part of the iPhone business can continue to expand with rules so sporadically applied. Developers won't want to develop, for fear of having their apps rejected, or being asked to remove content or functionality before they're allowed into the store. These same arguments come up every time a legitimate-seeming app gets rejected, but Apple really doesn't seem to have learned its lesson: rejecting legitimate apps is bad for everyone involved. Censoring a dictionary to protect readers certainly isn't going to sell any phones.

[via Daring Fireball]

Google's automated translation service, Google Translate, is one of the most popular language tools on the web, but Google has other ambitions in the translation field. The recently-launched Translator Toolkit is aimed at helping people create better translations of web pages, Wikipedia articles and Google Knol articles. These improved translations feed back into Google Translate, making it more accurate for everyday users.

If you're a translator, you can upload a file or enter a URL, and use the Translation Toolkit to improve on Google's automated translation results. Available tools include dictionaries and previously-saved user translations. Once you're done working on your translation, you can download it, or - for Wikipedia and Knol articles - publish it back to the source page.

Wordnik is a bit like a dictionary, in the sense that it collects words and their definitions, but it aspires to be more than that. Users contribute example sentences, audio pronunciations, images from Flickr and more, so you can really get a good idea of how and when a word is used. There's also a thesaurus-plus "related words" feature, which shows not only synonyms and antonyms, but other words that are used in a similar context.

Wordnik isn't exactly Wiktionary, but it does accept user contributions of just about anything you can think of about a word. The combination of images, audio and contextual clues would also seem to make it a better dictionary than most for non-english speakers, and its library contains a weighty 1.7 million words. Since it's laid out better than most dictionary sites, and also incorporates definitions from some of the better ones, it wouldn't be a bad move to replace your current favorite online dictionary with Wordnik.

We're hitting the home stretch in the MindBites Screencast 4 Cash contest! As I discussed last month, MindBites is holding a contest in conjunction with Techsmith's Jing Pro and Download Squad (that's us!). Entrants can submit an original screencast to be eligible to win a Grand Prize of $1000, plus a copy of Snagit/Camtasia Studio. There will also be a People's Choice Prize, determined by popular vote, and the winner will get $500 and a copy of Snagit.

The deadline for entries was extended until June 1, so you still have time to enter in your own screencast. Have some awesome coding or web design skills you want to share? Share them with the world!

Right now, individuals can vote once per week, but starting June 2, you can also vote daily! Even better, for every vote cast, $0.10 will be donated to the Youth for Technology Foundation, which helps underprivileged kids get access and instruction to technology.

If you want to create a screencast but you're unsure of what software to use, peruse our past reviews and tests of web and client-based screencasting apps! Check out the contest page for all the rules and requirements, plus check out the entries that have been submitted thus far.

If you've got a great idea for a screencast, you have until June 1 to enter. Grant and I are two of the judges and we can't wait to see what else gets submitted!

Tired of using other people's lame tablature to learn how to play your favorite songs, if you can even find a tab at all? Would you rather just figure out the music yourself? Well then, Capo is the Mac app for you. Drop an audio file from hard drive into it, and it will slow down the music so you can figure out how to play it. Everything takes place with one simple, beautiful window.

Capo has a lot of other neat tricks that make learning a song easier. One of the best features is looping a selected part of the song, so you can focus in on the bits you're having trouble with. Playback speed and pitch are adjustable, and you can drop handy markers for verses, choruses and the bridge, so you don't have to scroll through the song to find the part you're looking for. Sure, it's a tool that's designed to do one thing, but it does that one thing extremely well.

At SXSWi 2008, Grant and I met Jason Reneau, the founder and CEO of MindBites, a platform and marketplace for video lessons. We were really impressed with the MindBites vision last year. When we met up with them this year, it was awesome to see how far the community, the site and the market for quality video tutorials has come.

Today, MindBites is launching the Screencast 4 Cash contest in conjunction with Techsmith's Jing Pro and Download Squad (that's us!). Entrants can submit an original screencast to be eligible to win a Grand Prize of $1000, plus a copy of Snagit/Camtasia Studio. There will also be a People's Choice Prize, determined by popular vote, and the winner will get $500 and a copy of Snagit.

Every vote cast in the contest will yield a $0.10 US donation to the Youth for Technology Foundation, which exposes children in underdeveloped parts of the world to technology through instruction and staffed technology centers. So just by voting, you can help underprivileged kids get access and instruction to technology.

Screencasts are a great way to learn, or teach a specialty. We covered some iPhone-specific screencasts last month and found the medium really, really ripe for learning or supplementing other forms of instruction.

If you've got a great idea for a screencast, enter the contest! Grant and I are two of the judges and we can't wait to see what stuff gets submitted! You can read more details on deadlines and voting dates over at MindBites.

Want to know more about MindBites? Check out this video from SXSWi 2009!

Microsoft Encarta is a digital encyclopedia that used to come on a CD-ROM, and eventually graduated to a web-based service. But in the age of Wikipedia, where even the Encyclopedia Brittanica allows users to suggest edits, it looks like Microsoft either can't or choose not to compete. The company is pulling the plug on Encarta later this year.

On October 31st, the company will turn off all of its Encarta web sites except for Encarta Japan for some reason, which will shut down a few months later. Microsoft will stop selling Encarta software by June. Microsoft will continue releasing updates for the software versions of Encarta until it shuts down the internet service.

Users who have paid for Encarta subscriptions will be refunded for the unused portion of their subscription.

[via Ars Technica]

Last month Grant, Christina and I checked out a couple of screencasts from Pragmatic Programmers' Bill Dudney. Specifically, we watched "Coding in Objective-C 2.0." We took a look at part one mostly, which is an introduction to the Objective-C syntax and structure, culminating in a basic application. Part two covers memory management in depth. Since then they've added a part 3 on debugging, and the plan is to continue adding more. Part one covers classes, objects and messages and, like the other portions in the series, costs $5. One thing I love about Pragmatic Programmers is that they offer a wide choice of formats, including versions tuned for iPhone viewing and Theora Ogg format.

It's important to note that while Objective-C is the language you'll use for iPhone development, these screencasts alone won't make you an iPhone developer. For one, there are differences in memory management on the iPhone versus desktop apps (iPhone apps don't do garbage collection). Also, iPhone interactions require the use of Cocoa Touch, and that isn't covered in these. If you are looking to move from another OOP language to Objective-C, however, this is a great way to get started. Plus, you really need to understand Obj-C to make solid iPhone apps. The side bonus is that you will also be able to write Mac desktop apps.

These screencasts are particularly useful if you are an audio-visual learner and have some background in programming. Don't expect to come up to speed if you have a slight understanding of a basic scripting language. That said, these are very clearly explained and the structure is great. If you watch the videos and do the exercises, I have little doubt you'll be learning the basics of Objective-C in no time. Listen to the audio as we discuss who these are for and what could be done better.