Posts

I have low vision. A kind you can’t really correct for with glasses or contacts. I also bought Apple Vision Pro at launch. Why would I do this? Well because I’m a nerd who wants to see the future, but also because I was fascinated to see how Apple would handle accessibility for this new product. Apple’s track record on accessibility in the past decade has been stellar¹, in my opinion, with their teams adding powerful options every year and ensuring every new platform has accessibility support built in from the start.

After watching Apple’s WWDC23 session on visionOS accessibility, I knew accessibility on visionOS was an important point for them. But even after consuming as much information on the platform as I could, I knew I had to try it for myself to know the answer to the important question: how well does it work for me?

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It’s time for a new year and so, inspired by an initiative spawned by the Hemipsheric Views podcast and further expanded by Robb Knight for folks to share their default apps, I thought I’d share a default app list of my own! This is primarily focused on stuff I use outside of my actual job, which also means my list is extremely iPhone and iPad focused. I have a personal Mac, but I use it shockingly little as of late.

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Every year, coinciding with Childhood Cancer Awareness month, the Relay FM podcast network does a “Podcastathon” to raise funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. (You can donate now at stjude.org/relay!)

With many donation milestones and incentives along the way to their goal, many community members are stepping up to make donation trackers. My friend Matt VanOrmer made a special command for his FeedbackBot in the Relay FM Members Discord and an iOS widget in Python using Pyto. I decided to take on the challenge of making my own version of Matt’s widget using JavaScript with Scriptable. Scriptable allows us to build real iOS user interfaces, including widgets, by writing JavaScript directly on device, and seems like the perfect tool for this job.

Let’s get started.

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I recently upgraded my iPad from the 2018 11” iPad Pro to the new 2021 iPad Pro 12.9”¹. I was interested in the speeds of the M1 chip, but what really got me to upgrade (and to go up in display size) was the new Liquid Retina XDR display. This 12.9” display, with a resolution of 2732x2048@2x, has over 10,000 mini-LEDs to serve as a backlight laid out into 2,596 local dimming zones. That sounds fantastic! But what does it look like in practice?

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