After attending the keynote and speaking with numerous people at Apple during the week, one feeling that has resonated with me is that accessibility, conceptually, has become a mandatory part of not only how Apple designs its products, but of the Apple ecosystem at large. To be mindful of accessibility is now, more than ever, an expectation.
Several student scholarship winners I spoke to eagerly expressed their desire to learn more about what accessibility is, how it works and how to best incorporate it into their apps. They truly want to build tools for everyone.
A lot of this will depend on what Apple makes available to developers — right now, there’s no word on when these tools will start rolling out to third parties to start tinkering with beyond “next year,” much less a consumer release. And there’s still plenty of questions, like whether UIKit ported apps will be offered as universal software like how iOS, iPad, watchOS, and tvOS apps are currently bundled, or whether or not developers will be able to offer both UIKit and AppKit versions of their apps on the Mac App Store.
But if developers are able to take advantage of the potential that Apple seems to be offering here — and again, that’s a big, theoretical “IF” — it could mean a fresh wave of new, native apps for the Mac that will hugely change how we interact with our computers, much in the same way that apps have forever changed the mobile landscape.
But the problem right now is, Apple's iPad and Mac lineup is feeling like it's frozen in time. iPads have hit a wall as far as how much further they can go with being flexible browser-based productivity tools. MacBooks have split into a family of options that have drawbacks, including limited ports, occasionally-jamming keyboards, touchbars that try to help with touch control but don't quite do the same thing.
Moving the Mac needle forward with new software is appreciated. But it's not the whole story. Someday, Macs and iPads are going to evolve, and in the meantime, it's becoming increasingly difficult to figure out when is a good time to buy one. Or maybe it's time to consider a Windows PC that already does both.
Daniel Leighton has Crohn's disease and sometimes the pain that flares up in his body is so debilitating that he can't get out of bed. But even on those days, Leighton dutifully works on his art.
Since the iPad came out in 2010, Leighton has used the device as his blank canvas to create digital art on.
An empty table, a patch of artificial turf, and a room full of tiny, 3D printed beds: not exactly the kinds of displays you’d expect to see in an exhibition about the future of technology and art. But seeing the future sometimes requires a little extra vision – in this case – augmented reality. Adobe is betting big on AR with The Festival of the Impossible, a three-day immersive art exhibition that firmly restates the company’s collaboration with Apple on creative tools and the democratization of technology.
Using the Eisenhower Box method, Focus Matrix breaks tasks into one of four groups: "Important & Urgent," "Important & Not Urgent," "Not Important & Urgent," and "Not Important & Not Urgent." The color-coded four-square matrix layout of the app offers users a quick snapshot showing which tasks need to be completed immediately, and which can be pushed back until later, or safely delegated to someone else.
Traditional word processors, like Word, feel too much like drudgy busywork. Ulysses’ beauty and minimalism makes writing feels more akin to creation. Compare it to Pages or Notes, and it even out-Apples Apple.
When you start driving, the app automatically turns on after hitting a speed of about 20 miles per hour. The user does not need to do anything.
After your trip is over and you get out of your car, the app will alert you to check for children in the back seat. If you do not open the able and disable it, it will start a rapid-fire notification to your phone.
In 1993, John Gilmore famously said that “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” That was technically true when he said it but only because the routing structure of the Internet was so distributed. As centralization increases, the Internet loses that robustness, and censorship by governments and companies becomes easier.
If you need to talk to someone: here's Wikipedia's list of suicide crisis lines.
In the United States, you can call 1-800-273-8255 to the Suicide Prevention Lifeline for free and confidential support for people in distress.
In Singapore, you can call 1-800-221-4444 to reach the Samaritans of Singapore for support and a safe space.
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