Written by: Wes Allen

My son has Ocular Albinism.  It doesn’t slow him down much, but it does make reading a frustrating experience for him.  I’ve found his frustration disheartening because my son is a very good reader.  He has the ability to give characters voices and can work unfamiliar words out pretty well.

At our church children are given a Bible at a certain age, and our son is receiving his this year.  We assumed that we could get a large print Bible that would work for him, but on Monday we checked out the large print Bibles and found that there we wholly unsuitable for someone with my son’s sight issues.  The font was still far too small for him to read without a magnifier of some kind, and even then the paper was so thin the text on the opposite side could easily be seen – for someone who needs strong contrast, it would have made it impossible for him to read.

Three years ago he would have been out of luck, but the advent of digital readers offers my son a chance to learn to enjoy reading like everyone else in the family (which he desperately wants to do).  So my wife and I resolved that we would look for grants to help acquire an iPad for his use in school, home, and church.  Really, that wouldn’t have been a difficult task.

You may be asking, “Why an iPad?”  For a few reasons:

• It’s backlit.  The e-ink displays are nice, but they are terrible in low light and so the lit screen is a must for someone who has vision issues like my son.
• It’s out.  I would have loved to see what Android and WebOS tablets will come out – but they aren’t here yet and we have a small window to get our son reading for enjoyment.  We also will need it for school come September.
• It’s simple, he took to it immediately.
• It’s got multiple book stores.  iBooks is nice, but the book selection is terrible.  Kindle has a nice book selection but for some dumb reason they limit how big you can make the font.  Kobo isn’t a great experience, but has good font sizes and a good number of books.  B&N doesn’t have their iPad reader out yet, I expect it to be well-designed.
• Even though it’s simple, it’s multi-function.  I can set up a drop-box between him and his teachers and he can have access to lesson notes, reducing the strain looking at the board puts on his eyes.

So, those are some of the reasons.  Like I said we had committed to writing grants to acquire the device, but we didn’t have to wait that long.  In a rare AT&T late voicemail delivery #win, my mother called up shortly after we left the Christian book store and went on to other errands.  She works at a local university so I said, “Hey, while you’re on the line, do you think you could give me some leads on where to apply for educational grants?”  When my mother asked why I was looking I told her about what we wanted to do for our son and why we thought the iPad would work well for him.  She said, “You have a grant.”  I said something like, “Whubhuh?” To with my mother replied, “It’s called ‘Aunt Ann’s estate.’”

My great aunt, the last matriarch of the depression generation for our extended family passed away last year, she apparently left money to her nieces and nephews and my mom was looking for a good way to spend it.  She said, “This is what I want to do with it, go get him one.”

Now, my folks are not wealthy.  It also wouldn’t have been difficult to write a grant for the device, so I tried to balk at my mom’s generosity by nervously chuckling.  She got a bit miffed with me when I did that. Mom’s can do that.  Her offer also wasn’t some sort of impulse purchase (that’s my job).  My Aunt Ann spent her entire life in the service of others, particularly in seeing the elderly empowered rather than set aside in their later years.  She even was invited to a White House dinner once because of her work (I remember readin the invitation).  My mom wanted to do something with the money that would be in line with her aunt had lived – she insisted this was it.

One of the things I will always be thankful for in my family, both nuclear and extended, is the value of education.  My mom saw a way to see that her grandson could strive forward, and she jumped on it.  I’m very thankful.

Below is a video of our son seeing the iPad for the first time on Monday.  Before you watch it let me stress a couple of things:

• This is his iPad.  Yes, I’m a geek and it it tempting to take this with me wherever I go and play with it.  That would be a terrible thing to do with my mother’s generosity.  Yet, it’s tempting – but it’s not mine.  I’ll have to save up money for that.
• While he says, “It has my games” in the video – I have very few games on this (and some are for my wife to play after our son crashes for the night).  He likes “little metal ball” – and it’s good practice for his eye-hand coordination. This is for reading, and if he takes it into his room at night that’s all he will be allowed to do with it. He has a DsiXL for games, it was his birthday present.

So, yes, I will do some reviews on my thoughts on the iPad and it’s uses, but I’m more interested in tracking how my son uses it.  He’s very into the Winny The Pooh that comes with iBooks.  Now if iBooks would only get the Narnia books.  I got him a sample chapter of Eregon, but he said, “No, this is a book where people die – I don’t like those.”

This post originally appeared on Painfully Hopeful

Written by: Wes Allen

This week I got to play with an iPad for the first time – let me tell you, it’s a pretty impressive product. I really does look like a big iTouch, but the experience of using it is completely different. In fact, it’s all the computer my wife needs, and I have great hopes for tablets like the iPad to assist those who, while not blind, are severely visually impaired (like my son). Heck, I’d like to have one to use around the house.

There’s something about the iPad’s marketing tactics, however, that’s been nagging at my mind since it was first announced. Yes, the name is…. unfortunate (it might be the rare instance in history where a focus group actually would have improved a product), but I’ve gotten used to the name. What’s been nagging at me about the iPad’s marketing is the proud proclamation that the iPad is “magic.” Geeks like me have jumped all over that word, it seems to be the united opinion that hearing “it’s magic” about the iPad is akin to having someone run their fingers down a chalkboard. I share the sentiment, but because of who I am I started to think, “Why are we reacting to this word so strongly?” I’ve come to the conclusion that we geeks react so strongly to this word because we instinctively understand what this means.

“Magic,” in the Western Context, has come to encapsulate any kind of secret knowledge that’s kept from the uninitiated by a guild or secret society. Those who are not initiated into the guild need this protection because if they used it they’d only end up harming themselves and others. A great example of this view of magic can be found in the Harry Potter series (the ban on under-age wizards) and also in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels (Unseen university exists to keep people from using magic, which can accidentally destroy the world on a routine basis). Geeks understand this, when we drop to the command line and people’s eyes glaze over we get a glimpse of how the uninitiated see our world – “ls -l” might as well be an incantation to a non-geek. We like the fact that we stand between the user and their self-destruction – and it’s one of the reasons why we get so upset when users decide to use the magic, bypass our safe-guards, and then cry out for help when the digital demons come to ruin their day. We refer to this problem PEBKAC. If you don’t know what that means, chances are you’ve been a PEBKAC at some point in your life, you’re not in the guild.

Now, as I said, we’re quite happy being the digital wizards (or, if you want to go religious, “priests”). We stand between the users and chaos and we take pride in that. This is why we hate it when the iPad is referred to as “magic.” First, it offends our sensibilities that the uninitiated would be given the power of our digital realm without having to be taught how to think. All someone who uses an iPad has to know is where to touch and how to type in their password to buy an app – yet, they’ll still get to dance around the tablet like they know what they’re doing. Second, we geeks bristle at the fact that we, who know how to think are are initiated into the grand guild of geeks, are only allowed to use the same limited magic on the iPad that people who are normally PEBKAC get to use. It’s like Apple is saying that there’s another guild that only exists at 1 Infinite Loop, and we aren’t allowed to even consider joining it. So, we get peeved and think, “Who does Steve Jobs think he is, anyway?” What really hacks us off though, is that Steve Jobs isn’t really even considered a geek by the initiated, he’s an artist who employs geeks to merge the worlds of art and digital magic for the PEBKAC peoples of the world. In Steve Job’s world, it’s like we’re unnecessary, his special guild is all the world needs to be protected from digital chaos – and so we get miffed.

The thing is, we know that Steve Jobs still needs us, and he knows it as well. After all, without us where would he get the geeks to create the alloy of his art and our digital magic? So what do we do? We take our guild underground, we “jailbreak” our phones and tablets, and teach others the secrets that are happening under the screen of limited (yet pretty) magic that Steve’s guild offers to the PEBKAC masses. Yes, we know that there are other platforms out there that we don’t need to break into, but the pride of geeks is huge, and so we break into the walls of the iCastle in an act of rebellion. Yet, I think the best of us will eventually find the Artist waiting for us in some hallway of the iCastle with a smile on his face – and before we can attack he’ll say, “Oh good, I’ve been waiting for you. You see, I have this idea….”

It’s like…. magic.

This post originally appeared on Painfully Hopeful

Written by: Wes Allen

Yesterday Google unveiled “Google Buzz.”  A simple way to describe it is that Buzz seems to be the illegitimate child of Facebook and Twitter – squatting in your gmail account.  That’s the the simple way to explain it, but it also gives the wrong impression of what Buzz might just be able to do.  Buzz is attempting to take social networking (Facebook), micro-blogging (Twitter), and location based (four-square or loopt) and wrap it into a simple package.  I’m not sure if they can pull it off, but it’s certainly ambitious.

The HTML 5 mobile Buzz app

I didn’t have access to Buzz in my regular gmail account until late this morning, and if that had been my first encounter with Buzz I’d have to echo my friend Michael’s first buzz update, “i’m sorry, but this won’t replace FB.”  Buzz in gmail is easy to use and update, but it does seem to be nothing more than the aforementioned illicit child of facebook and twitter.  Buzz’s potential simply doesn’t show up there.  On the mobile, however, the potential suddenly appears by the ability to access location-based information.  I find this fascinating.  Google Buzz manages to travel on the path that Twitter paved, but instead of utilizing text messages they’ve created a rich web-app that harnesses HTML 5.  An app that seems to give a better experience than it’s desktop based cousin! Let me show you why I say this.  On the right is the main buzz app window when you access I access it on my iPhone.  It’s very straight forward –  see Buzz updates from people I have asked to follow, along with comments on those updates (which is very “Facebook like”).  Notice, however, the “nearby” button at the top of the screen.  Here’s what it looks like when you select it.

The Nearby window in Google Buzz

Now I have a list of local Buzz updates, which gives me their GPS based location.  I don’t like that aspect of Buzz, I don’t need to know a stranger’s home address, nor do I want strangers to know mine there has to be a way to anonymize this for me to use Buzz with location data.  If I want to display my current location I should be able to do that, as many twitter clients allow you to do, but having that set to default is something I don’t like one bit.  That is a major drawback for me, but at the same time I see some wonderful potential in the “nearby” feature as well.  Next to “Buzz Map” is a listing of businesses and organizations that are near to the current location of the mobile.  When it’s activated this is what comes up in my area.

Nearby locations as discovered by Google Buzz

Buzz pulls information from Google maps and displays it in a list format.  When you click on any of the listings you’re taken to a page where you can “Buzz” about that organization.  That page is shown below.

The first Buzz listing for a local organization

If you activate the “more info” link, you’ll be taken to the listing for that organization as found on Google Maps, like so.

Local listing as shown in Google Buzz

That’s just plain awesome.  The potential for this, if you are part of an organization (say, the pastor of a Church like I am), Google buzz can show people nearby what’s going on in that community and how people are responding to it.  If you set up your organization’s listing in the Google Local Business Center (which I highly recommend) people will see a picture of the organization’s location and any updates that you’ve attached to your entry.  This is the portion of Buzz that most interests me, the merger loopt into their Facebook/Twitter lovechild.  As a way of getting “buzz” going about events and gatherings – this might be a huge win.

This post originally appeared on Painfully Hopeful