Anyway, back to the iPhone… In this day and age, we need to be thinking about Universal Design. Universal Design is a practice of designing such that the final product is usable to everybody, in the greatest extent, without the need for adaption or specialized design. Well, most reviews say you just need to use the iPhone for a while, and you start get used to it. That is the entire point of Universal Design, you personally do not have to change something about yourself to use a product. The biggest thing people will have to adapt to is the touch screen keyboard. Okay what if you have big fingers or a little shaky? You are out of luck, and cannot use the “hottest new thing.”

Now I know there is other phones with bad design features, but that is due to demand. Frankly, I will say when I went phone shopping last week, each phone I looked at, I didn’t like. Everything from it being so slim I had to use two fingers at best to hold the damn thing, to buttons so small, I hit 2 or three at once. I know I will never own an iPhone, but it will be interesting to try it.

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, cell, cell phone, UD, universal design

One of the pages I waited to update was our page that shows people how to make a Macintosh accessible. We provide cheat sheets for the various accessible programs that we support. But Macs only have the programs that are built in. So I had to hop on a Mac to do a write up for the system that is currently running in the main lab. At first I was like ok, I am going to loose my mind. But after having to use it for a few days, I began to like Macintoshes again. Back in November, the bookstore had a raffle for a brand new 15″ Macbook. That was quite an interesting raffle, and since then I thought it would be fun to have a Mac to dink around with.

Technorati Tags: macintosh, webdesign

1. I have worked with computers since late 1991.
2. The newest Macintosh operating system I have worked with, other than 15-20 minute periods, is MacOS 4.5.
3. I have flipped or tipped my electric wheelchair 4 times.
4. I think math is fun.
5. I have proved a part of a team (4 or 5 members out of about 15, who work at a major company) wrong over a product they support during a talk they were giving.

Back when I was solely a mac user (1991-1997/8), the Microsoft Works Suite was the only word processing program offered by Microsoft that worked on a Macintosh, I believe. I forget when exactly Word was made for Macintosh computers, but I believe it was in 1997 or so. My first PC laptop in 1998 had both Microsoft Works Suite and Microsoft Office 98. But dropped Works a little after.

Nowadays, people and manuals sometimes say “open up word, and do x”, instead of saying open up your word processor. I know that there is a number of word processors other than Word and Works. Hell, Microsoft Windows even comes with two free. Yeah Notepad and Wordpad aren’t that fancy, but they still work, and are still considered word processors. But this isn’t what I am trying to get at in this post. What my question is, is why Works is still being actively updated?

I think Microsoft should just stop making the Suite all together. I just tried to make a database using the built in database application in the Suite. Let me just say that it felt like using Excel with it being a tad more user friendly, and calling it a database. Sorry I don’t think so, I could not even make multiple tables! If you have made a database, unless it is really basic you need multiple tables to do almost anything with it. The filter was somewhat nice since it had a number of drop downs on it, but no built in functions, and the advanced mode looked like poorly written SQL. A few years ago Microsoft finally stopped putting out updates for Windows 98, shouldn’t they do the same for Works Suite?…Unless of course there is some significant amount of people that I am not thinking about.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, office, word, works suite