Gary Bishop » Links

Why I don’t develop for the iPhone/iPod Touch

gb — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:36:10 +0000

The iPhone and iPod Touch are very interesting platforms for enabling technology. Touch, accelerometers, portability, radio, coolness; they’ve got it all.

But the rules of program distribution are so ridiculous that I can’t imagine playing by them. I want to give my apps away. And I want to do it without some faceless technician’s approval.

After you’ve done the work to develop your App they can reject it without giving any reason.

This recent post from Riverturn illustrates the problem though I’ve heard of many more cases like this.

There is another music game in here somewhere

gb — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:29:27 +0000

After finding iDaft and then the YouTube video on Tar Heel Reader, I’m thinking about music games in a new way. In a trip down memory lane we came across Mahna Mahna. I love this video!

I have this feeling that there is a fun game idea in here for Maze Day (and beyond). I’m not sure what it is. Perhaps you press a square on the DDR Pad to hear one phrase “mahna mahna, dee dee da dee dee”. Then you have to press another one to go to the next phrase? Or perhaps it is a joint effort between two kids? One doing “mahna mahna” and the other doing the dee’s? Maybe the background is playing in a loop and you have to queue the “mahna mahna” at the right time like Guitar Hero?

Give it a listen and then give me some ideas in the comments.

Reading with Franz

gb — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:23:02 +0000

Paul posted a really nice video about using Tar Heel Reader over at YouTube. The puppet and the stop motion self assembly of the switch interface are great! Check out Reading with Franz.

Flash 10 ignores files served with Content-Disposition attachment

gb — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:01:13 +0000

I got a report that Tar Heel Reader wasn’t speaking on some newer computers. Thankfully it also didn’t work on my Vista VM. I painfully tracked down the problem to the Content-Disposition: attachment header I had added to make debugging easier. After figuring out the problem I found this Adobe info describing the change.

Court again rules against US paper money

gb — Wed, 21 May 2008 13:06:26 +0000

A US federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that the country’s one-sized paper money discriminates against the blind and told the government to change the currency’s size and texture. It’s taken six years to get this far, and the government may well appeal again. I say give it up and switch to an accessible design.

Releasing the music in your head

gb — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 01:01:45 +0000

Thanks to Martha for pointing out this video: TED | Talks | Tod Machover, Dan Ellsey: Releasing the music in your head (video). Very interesting. I’d love to do something like this for kids. Machover talks about Hyperscore.

Tools for classification

gb — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 01:06:10 +0000

Links I found related to classification.

Marking Up a Tag Cloud

gb — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 23:29:13 +0000

24 ways: Marking Up a Tag Cloud is an excellent discussion of how to implement a cloud using CSS. I hadn’t realized that most ways of doing it are inaccessible. I used his approach to construct my query cloud page.

Ian Bicking on HTML Accessibility

gb — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 01:12:17 +0000

Ian Bicking’s interesting and provocative blog post on HTML Accessibility is a good read. Empirical accessibility is a good idea. I think by this he means making it work for real users. Fred Brooks’ ideas about the computer scientist as toolsmith seem very relevant.

I’ve been thinking about grass-roots accessibility for a while, though I can’t say I’ve made much progress. It seems to me we have to somehow empower people to enhance accessibility in a bottom up way without much help from developers.

Daylight Savings Wastes Energy

gb — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:29:11 +0000

An article in the WSJ reports on a study of energy consumption in Indiana before and after their recent switch to DST. The switch cost them $8.6 million extra for electricity.