Hello! Any chance of an iPad app for ELAN? I could imagine how creating annotations would become so much easier on the iPad. Just a pinching and opening gesture to create a field! It needn't be a full version - perhaps just a simplified one to create and maybe edit annotations on the go.

a hopeful iPad owner,
Julie

Hi! After a quick web search, I get the impression that Java and Flash are intentionally not available for iPhone or iPad. You might be able to install some version of Java after 'breaking your jail', but then the next problem will be that ELAN needs a decent media player, preferably with hardware acceleration for graphics and/or sound. Both Java and good media player support are needed to run ELAN. ##

Also, your main reason for being interested in ELAN for iPad seems to be using the touch screen with multiple fingers. However, nothing in ELAN uses multi touch gestures yet and I do not know whether and how certain versions of Java would support them at all. You are of course not limited to iPad hardware for using multi touch: ##

Any tablet PC or computer with touch screen or computer with a touch pad, graphics tablet or similar device could be used in theory, as long as it supports multi-touch (which I think is very uncommon for graphics tablets, by the way). ##

Finally, you might be disappointed by the lack of precision of multi touch input. Using a mouse or pen input device are better methods to 'hit' exact coordinates. ##

Luckily there are other ways to annotate quickly in ELAN: You can use avatech signal analysis modules (recognizers) to automatically segment your audio or video files. Then you only have to fill in the text for the already marked time spans. In addition, newer versions of ELAN feature faster work flows for annotating: ##

For example a table view which minimizes the number of key presses needed to type text for many annotations. An older example is the rough segmentation mode where you just tap a key while playing your media to start/end annotation segments, quickly generating many annotation segments in one go.

Luckily there are other ways to annotate quickly in ELAN: You can use avatech signal analysis modules (recognizers) to automatically segment your audio or video files. Then you only have to fill in the text for the already marked time spans.

Hi Cdcox,

you can find information about avatech on http://www.mpi.nl/avatech but you are right that there is no place where you can download recognizers yet. In general, recognizer modules are often not installed on the local computer but on an institute server. Your ELAN directory then only needs an XML file with CMDI metadata to point ELAN to that server. The metadata file also describes which user interface elements have to be displayed by ELAN when you select that recognizer and run it etc.

Some modules can also be installed on the computer where you run ELAN, but that can depend on your operating system. Tagvowels which you mention can work on Linux and Windows with some configuration adjustments, while some other recognizers are only for Linux or only for Windows. With WINE, some Windows recognizers can work on Linux. It is also possible that some Linux recognizers can be made to work on Mac OS but I know no specific example for this.

When you run recognizers on a server in your intranet (you need a network drive where ELAN can share media files and exchange data files with the recognizers) then only the server needs to have the right operating system for the recognizer, while ELAN can run on another operating system as long as you can define a rule for how the path names are mapped between client and server.

I suggest that you give some more details about what sorts of recognizers you would want to use, so we can check the possibilities. You are of course also welcome to use email for that instead of this forum.

Regards, Eric Auer (construct email as firstname.lastname@mpi.nl)