Tag: Apple

Siri and My Learning Disabled Daughter

I ran across this article from a few months ago by Matt Honan criticizing Apple’s Siri “Siri, When Will Personal Digital Assistants Finally Work?” (maybe he should have called it “when will Siri make people take computer security seriously, but that’s another article). The articles goes on and on about how awful Siri is compared to Android voice search.

Being a Certified Apple Hater (seriously — I had to take a test for that), I’m up for any article that bashes Apple and trumpets Android, except in this case my real world experience contradicts Honan.

First, as far as I’m concerned, voice systems are awful especially when they actually work. I’ve blogged before about my freaking Kinect screwing up my Netflix viewing experience when someone in the room utters the wrong goddamn set of phonemes. Moreover, there is nothing more annoying than sitting in a room with someone else who is talking to their phone or tablet.

But for Christmas, my kids each got an iPad. My son’s usage of the iPad was pretty much what I expected — games and web browsing. I was curious, though, how my daughter would use the iPad because of her unique learning disabilities. She is one of about 20-30 people identified so far who have a duplication of genes on a specific chromosome that causes an odd conjunction of cognitive limitations. In general she has a lot of trouble moving from specifics to generalizations which, among other things, means that even though she’s only 16, she reads at maybe a 3rd grade level.

Somehow she discovered Siri on her iPad, though, and it is now a frequent companion. If my 10-year-old son wants to know a geeky fact like how much the moon weighs, he goes to Google and finds the answer. Something like that would be extremely difficult for my daughter, but she quickly learned that “Siri, how much does the moon weigh?” will get her a usable answer almost all of the time.

She will sit and ask Siri questions for 20-30 minutes at a time. She is very impressed that Siri “knows” her name and will greet her with a “Good Morning, Emma.” When I asked her what she thinks of Siri, she told me “Siri is like having a sister.”

Pocket Legends – An MMO for the iPod/iPhone/iPad

Space Time Studios’ Pocket Legends is a scaled-down free to play MMO for the iPod/iPhone/iPad.

It offers three basic classes, along with typical MMO feature such as leveling, upgradeable stats and skills, etc.

It has been getting very good initial reviews. Space Time’s free to play model seems to be selling additional content/areas beyond the initial area for a fee, though at the moment there isn’t much available at all for purchase for the game.

Nice, and clearly just the beginning of the transition of MMOs to mobile devices (along with the increasingly prevalent mobile enhancement of traditional PC-based MMOs).


Apple Will Control the Horizontal. Apple Will Control the Vertical.

Apple iPhoneMashable has an interesting post about Apple rejecting a game for its iPhone App Store because the game involves throwing shoes at a caricatured image of former President George W. Bush. Mashable quotes the developer as describing the game this way,

1. You hold the IPhone like a shoe,
2. Press on Start button
3. System, starts saying 3, 2, 1 and Go
4. You, swing your arm ( as you are throwing ) without throwing.
5. Application will figure out how hard did you throw the shoe at him and it may or may miss the cartoon.
6. It shoes the total number of shoes that have been hit at the cartoon.
7. We started with Bush, but next in line were Bin-Laden and other figures as well ( apparent from the splash screen).

But, of course, Apple controls what applications users can run on the iPod Touch/iPhones they own, so it refuses to allow users to purchase this application. The AppStore’s TOS includes ridiculous language that,

Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.

Well, of course — why would you ever let users decide what kind of applications they want to buy and run, when Uncle Steve and his cronies are more than capable of making that decision for you.

Apple C&D’s Wired — But People Who Talk About Radical Transparency . . .

John Brownlee over at Gadgets.BoingBoing.net (about the only BB property worth reading these days) has a basic overview of Apple sending a cease-and-desist to Wired Gadget Lab over a piece there showing how to install OS X on an MSI Wind. Yeah, newsflash — Apple sucks. They’re just Microsoft with a much smaller market share.

However, this part of Brownlee’s post had me snorting diet Coke through my nose,

Ars Technica’s Clint Ecker then asks if Chen (and other Conde Nast writers) are allowed to discuss it publicly, or cover it as news.

Chen’s Twitter response (since deleted):

Probably. We’re supposed to favor radical transparency here, right?

It certainly doesn’t look like it. The video to the guide in question has already been pulled and replaced with a random stream of CES 2009 videos. The YouTube mirror has been pulled as well.

Okay, if I were writing about Boing! Boing! the last thing I’d want to bring up is other sites’ lack of transparency given the whole Violet Blue episode and the more recent efforts by the ongoing efforts of Boing! Boing! comment moderators like Teresa Nielsen Hayden to insult and disemvowel anyone who dares show up with a different point of view.