Parents new to, well, parenting, (or to a new sports season or the first year at a new school) might notice the sheer quantity of apps is overwhelming. So what are all these apps for, anyway? Dana Kampman, a Baltimore, MD resident and parent of a teen, has observed her kids’ schools have separate apps for grades, attendance, behavior, announcements, lunch payments and extracurriculars.
“The sheer number of apps schools use is overwhelming,” she says. “It’s not just one app per school. One year, I was toggling between five different apps just to keep up with everything for my two kids. It’s exhausting to keep track of. I’ve had times where I completely missed important announcements because they came through an app I didn’t think to check that day.”
My stepfather died a few months ago, after a long decade dealing with Parkinson's disease. Doug was living in a care facility, and even though my mom visited all the time, for overall contact with the world — and just general fun — he relied on his phone and his iPad. But Parkinson's is a neuromuscular disorder; eventually, Doug's hands and fingers couldn't reliably navigate a touchscreen or a keyboard. As his dementia worsened, he couldn't really figure out how to buy stuff online anymore, much less how to manage a healthcare or banking website.
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Getting older doesn't necessarily come with the kind of extreme disability Doug dealt with. But it inevitably brings to us all a bit of mental inflexibility and physical limitation. The ubiquitous gadgets and apps that are our windows onto the world aren't made for any of that — they're confusing, hard to use, ever-changing, and either too poorly or too well secured. And meanwhile, every sector of society is scrambling to trade storefronts for websites and human staff for AI chatbots.
The new Adaptive Profiles (which work best on raw images in HDR mode) use AI to evaluate the raw file and dynamically enhance tones and colors as a starting point for further editing.
I'm planning for the next hiatus for this little website. Will let you know soon.
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Thanks for reading.