BabyTalk is a free program offered by the Stanford Ear Institute and Weingarten Children's Center that uses Apple's iPad and FaceTime to bring speech therapy to deaf and hard-of-hearing children in the rural areas of California.
Most sketching apps on the market focus on single projects and their underlying layers, rather than a canvas of ideas and suggestions. Forge is different. I've long thought the iPad was perfect for rough storyboarding: It's not an artist's preferred medium for detail work, but it's portable, and easy to sketch on, and has plenty of storage space. Forge, built by the folks behind the...
Sometimes you just need more work space on your Mac. You could appease this by buying a second monitor, but it may well be that you need this space while on traveling — a place where a second full-sized screen becomes much more cumbersome than helpful. The solution? Use your iPad. Duet Display is a tethered second-screen option that lets you borrow your iPad's Retina display for your...
Vint Cerf is sometimes called one of the "fathers of the Internet" for his role in developing the TCP/IP protocol suite that's in use on every Internet-connected device. So when he warns of a forgotten century of data, it's worth paying attention to. What's more, we've seen some of these dangers already, as Mac users — dangers we must stay vigilant for. Bit rot During a recent...
One of these days I need to learn to keep my thoughts to myself. I'd get into less trouble and would have way more money in the bank. Kevin Michaluk is Chief Media Officer of Mobile Nations and an expert in buying expensive consumer electronics. He's been known to spend over $1000 on Porsche Design BlackBerry handsets and upwards of $500 on clock apps. A watch enthusiast for most of...
Samsung has been most successful when it's made products specifically to fill gaps in Apple's lineup. When you couldn't get an iPhone or Verizon, Samsung made sure you could get a not-an-iPhone on Verizon. When you couldn't get an iPad that was smaller than 9.7-inches or an iPhone that was bigger than 4-inches, Samsung made sure you could get not-an-iPad at 7-inches and not-an-iPhone at...
Last Thursday Apple released the first developer beta for their all-new Photos for Mac app. A public beta will follow at some point, and the a public release this spring. In the meantime we've published a Photos for Mac FAQ and a Photos for Mac preview. It's still in beta, so everyone needs to adjust expectations accordingly, but it's also the future, and potentially one full of promise...
The point of my work as a freelancer writing about accessibility is to advocate for (and raise awareness of) iOS users with special needs. This is meaningful work to me, as I'm a disabled user myself, and I've worked with children with special needs who have leveraged iOS to help them learn. Yet, for as often as I champion Apple's work in making iOS usable by the disabled, so too have I...
Earlier this week I wondered what might be possible if Apple made an iPadOS. Based on the feedback I got, many people seemed to assume I was petitioning for "yet another operating system", different in kind from iOS. In other words, one more thing for Apple to have to manage or maintain. To be clear — I wasn't. What I was petitioning for was something akin to WatchOS — a variant of iOS...
April will mark the one year anniversary of Apple's SVP of Retail and Online, Angela Ahrendts, joining the company, and it sounds like the training wheels are off and the retail veteran is ready to start making her mark on the company. Amidst new stores launched and announced, and ongoing rumors of new outfits, new designs, and new areas for the Apple Watch, we decided to put together...