Beautiful story about the iPhone from a blind user's perspective

Last Wednesday, my life changed forever. I got an iPhone. I consider it the greatest thing to happen to the blind for a very long time, possibly ever. It offers unparalleled access to properly made applications, and changed my life in twenty-four hours. The iPhone only has one thing holding it back: iTunes. Nevertheless, I have fallen in love.

via behindthecurtain.us

Blind users are often forgotten, usability for them is an even harder challenge for device manufacturers.

Follow up story:
http://behindthecurtain.us/2010/09/11/rejoining-the-apple-family/

(found via http://daringfireball.net)

Why iBooks and Kindle app should look at Stanza.

The iPad has a big black border around the screen to hold it. A book has the same border on the pages.
However, dear people of Apple and Amazon, trying to duplicate the book pages exactly is a total waste of screen estate. We do not need a border within a border for our eBooks!

Have a look at Stanza who understands this. Maybe it is the way ePub books are generated, I don't know, but there is absolutely no use in having so much dead space around the text.

Thank you Apple (finally)

Thank you Apple! I received my MobileMe Calendar Beta invite yesterday (after all other accounts in my mobileme family pack got it :-S).
I love the MobileMe service, but was always annoyed to see that you could not share a calendar for read/write access and sync it at the same time through MobileMe. So I was forced to use Google Calendar for this. Annoying, since I don't use google for anything else.

So in the past few years, I've mailed with some very friendly Apple support people, filing my complaints, I even sent a mail to Jobs (never got an answer though) about this. Lo and behold, a week after I sent my complaint email to Jobs, the Calendar Beta was introduced, with exactly the featureset I proposed in my many emails. I guess I wasn't the only one complaining then :-)

Yesterday, after upgrading my wife's iPhone to iOS4.0.1 I moved everything from google calendar to MobileMe. I hope to never have to look back again.

iPhone 4 troubles - or are they?

Oh my, the iPhone 4 hasn't been out for a day and first reports of troubles are showing up already. Biggest complaint is loss of signal when holding it the "wrong way". 
okay, I'm not saying this is not an issue, but it seems to be a trend that whenever there is a new iPhone or Apple device, immediately reports of problems show up:

  • 2008 - launch of iPhone 3G - problems with reception and white iPhone case
  • 2009 - launch of iPhone 3Gs - problems with overheating
  • 2010 - launch of iPhone 4 - problems with antenna (especially for lefties) and discoloration of screen
These may or may not be real issues, what strikes me is that these occur in the first weeks after a launch and then quickly fade away. 
In my opinion this is mostly due to the fact that really everyone is looking at these devices with a magnifying glass. Any small issue will be blown up to gigantic proportions. And the Apple attitude of not really being open to communicate with doesn't help with that.

To put things in proportion: millions of iPhones have been sold, and usually a very small, but very vocal group will get all the attention, while most people are perfectly happy with theirs.
Or maybe Apple is using this as a very weird but clever marketing ploy, just hype it up even more and say "we told you there's nothing wrong" in the end....