Hello and welcome to my NEW new website. If everything goes well, it should look almost exactly the same[1].
Around nine years ago, I set this website up with Jekyll and GitHub Pages. Since then, it’s gone to a new host (I’m currently hosting it using Cloudflare Pages), switched primary domain names (though most old links should still redirect), and now is undergoing a brain transplant. From Jekyll to Eleventy!
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 stellar[1], 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?
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.
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.
