Tag: Apple

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs Live at D8

6:59 pm: Walt asks if Apple knew it would build a tablet before it built the iPhone.

Jobs: “I’ll tell you a secret. It began with the tablet. Jobs first charged his staff with developing a tablet, but after seeing their first efforts decided the way to go was a phone. “My God, I said, this would make a great phone … so we shelved the tablet and built the iPhone.”

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iGot an iPad

I got a 3g model on Friday and I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to use it for. How/if am I going to incorporate it into teaching.

Today we had a patient with rhabdomyolysis. The UpToDate card, Clinical features and prevention of heme pigment-induced acute tubular necrosis, has this to say about bicarbonate and mannitol:

In a large series of 382 patients with serum CK concentration >5000 U/L, 154 (40 percent) were treated with bicarbonate and mannitol [33]. There was no statistically significant difference in the incidence of renal failure (creatinine >2.0 mg/dL [177 micromol/L]; 22 versus 18 percent), dialysis (7 versus 6 percent), or death (15 versus 18 percent) in patients who were or were not treated with bicarbonate and mannitol. However, there was a trend toward improved outcomes in patients with extremely high CK levels (>30,000 U/L) treated with bicarbonate and mannitol. 

Reference 33 is the primary reference for one of my first blog posts. We started talking about this study on rounds, but the crap machines in the ICU didn’t have Flash or PDF support. I ended up downloading the PDF on my iPhone and four of us passed it around to look at some of the figures. The iPad doesn’t have flash but it does a beautiful job rendering PDFs. I have the article in Papers which does an awesome job at holding and organizing my entire medical library.

Basic review of Papers

Papers is iTunes for scientific Papers. It is the modern equivalent to the file cabinet you always wanted for all the important scientific articles that fall into your grubby little hands. My computer is littered with literally hundreds of scientific articles. What you want to do is throw them all into Papers.

To understand the power of Papers, let’s look at the workflow for getting a PDF into Papers and onto the iPad. After downloading reference 33, drag it into Papers. It initially looks like this:

Then you click on Match and quickly find the article’s reference in PubMed or Google Scholar or another database. To do this I copied the author’s name and entered the year of publication.

After you double click the correct reference all of the meta-data quickly populates the appropriate fields so the you have all the data you need.
Papers even renames the original file, so your reference article folder is organized with logically named files.
To sync your library between your Mac and iPad, just run Papers on both devices simultaneously and it will synchronize your entire Library or specified subset (actually, it is limited to 1,000 articles). Syncing occurs over wifi.

On the iPad, when you launch Papers, you are in the Library.

Search on bicarbonate and you find a couple of articles on the use of bicarbonate to prevent contrast nephropathy, one on its use to treat severe metabolic acidosis, and one on its use to prevent the renal complications rhabdomyolysis…bingo!

Once you have the article you can read it in landscape with some of the meta data revealed or portrait for a more paper-like experience
Papers allows you to annotate, bookmark and share the article
 

Papers also works on the iPhone but after using it I thought it was a bit of a gimmick, I didn’t really want my PDF library on a 3.5 inch screen. The iPad makes a perfect partner for the desktop app. I’m very excited about this.

Papers for MacOS is $42.00, the iPhone/iPad application is $14.99.

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Turning PDFs into ePubs

Here is a site which tells you how to convert HTML files into ePubs so they can be used in Stanza or (presumably) iBooks so they can be used on an iPad.

Here is a site that purports to convert PDFs into ePubs but it didn’t work with the one I tried.

Anyone with any experience doing this?
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iPad: the delivery on a 14 year old pledge

In 1996, a year before returning to Apple, Fortune interviewed Steve Jobs. When asked what he would do to save Apple he explained:

If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth — and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.

At that time, this quote was like a dagger in my heart. At the time Apple was flailing. Windows was rocking and the drumbeat of the end was getting louder. To hear the creator of the Mac declaring the war lost was heart breaking. I chalked it up to an off-the-cuff, spoiled-grape quotation.

Later, after Steve came back to Apple I began to feel vindicated in my opinion. Steve didn’t act like he was “milking the Macintosh.” In no way could I see his actions as just “milking the Mac.” Check out this video of Steve at the 1997 MacWorld. I see no indication of the hopelessness that the PC wars were over (Steve enters at 5:30):

So from the moment Steve re-enters the PC picture, he restokes the PC wars. He introduces the iMac. He successfully recreates the NeXT operating system as OS X. And, though he had phenomenal success growing Apple’s computer business, none of that really fits the bill of The Next Insanely Great Thing.

When the iPod came out in late 2001 I wondered if this was the next great thing, but music, no matter how cool, was just too small a stage for the man who had twice revolutionized computers. Also when you look at the history of the iPod it wasn’t an Apple idea, rather, the concept was brought to Apple by Steve Fadell after Real passed on it. It didn’t feel like what steve meant by “getting busy on the next great thing.”
What the iPod did do, is demonstrate that Apple could win in consumer electronics. This time after Apple innovated the followers at Sony, Microsoft and Dell couldn’t overtake’em. The disaster which nearly destroyed Apple in the PC wars wasn’t re-run during the digital music revolution. Apple invented the digital music business and ten years later the story is still only about Apple.

When the iPhone was introduced this felt like the The Next Big Thing. Phones are ubiquitous and important. The shift to mobile computing has been a long standing theme in the computer industry. Smart Phones aren’t just about smarter phones but putting the power of the computer in your pocket. So it was clear that the iPhone fit the bill of the “the next great thing” but what wasn’t clear was that it would replace the Macintosh. 
With the introduction of the iPad I am now convinced that it will replace the Mac. The two pieces of data that convinced me of this was the demonstration of the iWork for iPad and the support for real keyboards. Both of those mean that the iPad is not just a media consumption device but also a media creation device. Congratulations Steve, I hope the iPad represents the next revolution in computing.
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Why I love the Mac

To bring my readers the Fluids book I had to merge multiple PDFs into a single document. For example, the Hyponatremia chapter exists on my hard drive as 4 separate pagemaker files. These can be converted to four separate PDFs. To put them together is trivial in Mac OS X. No Acrobat Pro or other nonsence needed:

From the Apple website

And from with a little more context from Mac OS X Hints

Use Preview to open up the two PDFs you would like to merge. Choose View » Show Sidebar (or click the Sidebar button). Make sure both PDFs are visible on the screen at the same time. When the Sidebar pops out, you will see a graphical representation of the pages in your PDF document. Simply drag the page, or pages (use Comand to select multiple pages) from the Sidebar of one PDF to the Sidebar of another. You have now merged pages from two separate PDF documents.

So easy. So simple. So elegant.

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The Fluid and Electrolyte Companion has been locked up

The Fluid, Electrolyte and Acid Base Companion was a book I co-wrote during my residency. We started the book in 1995 after graduating and finished it during the summer of 1999. The book came out in January 2000.
The book was a home brew project with no professional assistance. We researched the book, wrote the text in Adobe Pagemaker and did the illustrations in Adobe Illustrator. All the computer work was done on Apple computers. This was a time before OS X and we suffered through the dark days of System 7.5.5, the Vista of Apple operating systems.

When the book went to press the source files were primarily a mixture of Pagemaker 6.5 and Illustrator 8.0. Significantly, we never upgraded to Pagemaker 7.0.

After we finished, Adobe put Pagemaker out to pasture and replaced it with InDesign. Adobe never released a version of Pagemaker that ran natively in OS X and the tools they created for moving from Pagemaker to Indesign required the files to be Pagemaker 7 files. Our 6.5 files were an evolutionary dead-end. No way to get them to Indesign. Then, as my interests turned away from the book and toward the rest of my life I started snipping the threads that allowed me digital access to the Fluids files. In 2001 I transitioned from OS9 to OS X and had to use Classic to open up the book or use Pagemaker. In 2008 all of the Macintosh’s in my house (my laptop, desktop, and wife’s laptop) were finally upgraded to Intel processors which meant that they could no longer run Classic which locked me out of the book. Functionally it was no different than if my hard drive had crashed and I had lost all of my back-ups.
When I started this blog, one of the things I thought I would use it for would be as a tracking tool as I rewrote and modernized the original Fluids book. Well for the last 18 months I have been stuck on the very first step of this process: getting electronic access. I finally solved that problem by getting my hands on a vintage 12 inch PowerBook that was in one my parent’s closets.
Last week-end I found my old Pagemaker and Illustrator disks and installed them under classic. Then I looked deep in some old hard drive back-ups to find all of the fonts needed to render the files. Finally, after some deep Googling, I came across this work-around to create a PDF from Classic. So here is the first chapter of the Fluid, Electrolyte and Acid Base Companion:
I hope to follow this with an edited version of this chapter and then move on to the subsequent chapters and really provide a modern, comprehensive tutorial towards fluids and electrolytes aimed at medical students and residents.
David Pogue did a nice piece on this for Sunday Morning
In the future, I’m going to need to try this and see if it allows me to run my old programs on my current laptop.