Timeline is currently being rolled out to all accounts (watch out for the change if you haven’t been switched over yet). To coincide with that Facebook have announced Timeline Movie maker for making movies from the timeline feature.This adds an interesting narrative element to Facebook, and adds functionality you may have looked to image apps like iPhoto, Live Photo Gallery or Picasa for, or the venerable Photostory.
Timeline has been an opt in feature up to now, but is about to be made the way Facebook works for everyone, replacing and combining your profile and wall. If you support people who use Facebook be prepared for some confusion and a bit of a learning curve. When you get switched over you have 7 days to set up the what appears in your timeline (content that was much less visible may now appear in your main public view) before it is made your public face – but this will be made public in 7 days whether you make changes or not.
London has a new app to add to the list of apps for locating accessible facilities. Its called Ldn Access.
Other apps that cover this kind of information include the wider Action for Access campaign and app from Leonard Chesire, more specialist apps like the London Toilet Map, and Parking mobility an interesting combination of disabled parking info, and a mechanism for violation reporting (if your area adopts it – there is no information on the website that I could see listing areas that have).
The cbeebies site has had a makeover, and includes a section for adults with useful information, background to why activities are important, and practical ideas about what to do. Information about children with disabilities is right there in the middle of all the other stuff, not in a special section by itself.
Interesting announcement at Google IO last month about support for usb devices connecting to Android phones and tablets (so you could plug a game device in to control it), and an open way of developing custom devices to plug in called the Android Open Accessory Development Kit based on the open source Arduino platform.
Rather than making people sign non-disclosure agreements to find out the hardware details (like another well known manufacture of tablet and phone devices), and making them pay large licensing fees, and submit devices for approval they are basing the initial development kit on a popular, well used open source project that anyone is free to make. A number of low volume manufacturers are making boards to use already.
There were already a ways to connect devices to Android devices, but none were officially sanctioned, so could be blocked or changed at any time. Having an open route that is officially supported is great. On the day of the announcement they made all the details available, including the design files you need to make your own (one of the requirements that makes hardware open source)
While there are some quirks in the way that they are doing this is an exciting development and could lead to a lot of interesting devices and prototypes.
I have got as far as getting the software example that talks to the board onto an Android tablet – as my tablet didn’t have the latest version of Android on it I needed to update it. As it is open source there were versions online i could try (legally).
Its been on the cards for a long time, but this is the first one that I have seen that is available for use. The video is rather cheesy – but the main evolutionary change here is the ability to use where you are to target the phrases you may want to say, and the online editing of the vocabulary and content. More details here.
Its that time of year again – Google have a page about this that has fooled a few people, the additional page makes it more obvious that it is a joke.
I think its interesting how hard it is to tell the difference between this and the inflated claims about how useful and intuitive a new technology might be.
There have been high tech start-ups that have done this kind of thing to get a public site up while they developed their code – but never got the code working well enough for it to take over from the human operators. It fell apart for them when their investors realised that they were still using humans to do translation.
Very technical post – no video to watch, sorry. The BBC has published a white paper about universal remote controls. Its explained in more detail here, with a good high level discussion of why they are doing it. Briefly they are looking at it in much broader terms than the current range of replace your infra – red tv remote with a smart phone apps that are already out there. They have designed something that they hope can be adopted by many groups and used as a platform agnostic standard to drive forward development of this area (kind of like WWW for tv set top boxes and remotes). It has great potential for trying out different accessibility options with people, and developing bespoke solutions for people to control their media viewing. A free open source example implementation is promised for the near future for people to start to play with – can’t wait.
