Apple Dabble ... getting to know you
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With the rising popularity of the iPod, my office is witnessing an increase in the number of students coming to campus with Apple computers. A few weeks ago I had a conversation with IT about Mac access and this led to a meet and greet with the campus Apple Rep. That conversation is detailed in a previous blog post. He promised to get me a loaner laptop and it arrived a couple of days ago. I should disclose that the first personal computerI ever owned was a Mac Performa 636 running OS 7.x and I was a Mac owner up until OS 8.5. Until landing at Boston University I had been a dual user in previous jobs and had a preference for the Mac. Two things have changed my point on view on this matter - the first being my ever evolving access technology interests, experiences and responsibilities and the second being the upgrade to Windows XP. For the time being anyway I am a PC user with a preference for XP. This could change, however, as the OS wars continue to rage.
The laptop on loan is a 2005 15" PowerBook G4 with 1GB of RAM running OS X 10.4 Tiger. Clearing the cobwebs from my memory I spent the first day reacquainting myself with this lovely metallic beauty. Two things struck me immediately - (1) is the wide screen monitor and (2) is the almost overwhelming amount of visual feedback presented by the system.
Wide Screen monitors are becoming more common and may eventually supplant standard sized monitors on laptops [Business Week has a good podcast on this topic]. A problem for low vision users is that some magnification programs for the PC may balk at magnifying the entire screen. I'll likely discuss this in more detail later - for now I am focusing my comments on E-Text.
I equate Macs with Eye-Candy. This is not necessarily a bad thing and I understand why students enjoy the bouncing icons, genie-in-a-bottle effects, detailed icons, display options, etc. to the comparitively undynamic Windows desktop. Apples may be not so good for the visually impaired and perhaps a bit distracting for the ADD crowd, but were I a fair number of years younger I would probably want one for myself.
Other differences, with which I will become more comfortable as I use the laptop, include the manner of installing software, how files are managed, task bar, wireless access, etc. Within minutes of starting it up for the first time I was able to locate or install many of the standard programs I prefer [Word, FireFox, Windows Media Player] and install BU VPN. In playing around with the programs [hey - it's my job] I quickly realized that non-native programs do not behave the same or work as well as native ones. For example, Windows Media Player has the ability to adjust the speed on MP3 tracks - but not on the Mac version. I do not find iTunes to be nearly as user friendly or flexible as WMP for a variety of reasons I will discuss in greater detail on a later post.
Overall, most of the differences between Mac and Win are negligible and a matter of taste. They can be overcome easily enough using Virtual PC - but I do not know how this will impact access technology. That's something else to investigate. One item I will mention - and which took me by surprise - is the inability of the Mac to run portable applications off a flash drive. I tried out both my RSS reader and OpenOffice and the Mac would not recognize or allow either to run. I have gotten both of these programs to work on a variety of Windows machines (2000, ME, XP) and on a workstation running BU Linux - but not the Mac. I will try again after [if] I get Virtual PC up and running. I was able to download OpenOffice and get it to run but it is apparent that the Mac simply does not like it - kind of like the geeky kid trying to hang with the cool crowd.
VoiceOver has initially turned out to be a bit of a disappointment - I do need to work with it some more. But what I thought was going to be a text to speech offering is actually a self-voicing navigation device for the system and not TTS. AccessWorld has a good review of VoiceOver as does Ermin Nacor, a colleague at the SFSU Adaptive Technology Program as part of a review of OS X. I did try out the 'start speaking' option in TextEdit and found that nothing has chaged since the last time I used a Mac. At least the 'speech' in Word for Mac works to a minimal degree.
This weekend I will tackle my main goal - getting KatiePlayer installed and running along with the RFB&D upgrade. Following this will be some trials with Mac Access freeware/shareware.
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