Peon's Place

Nearly a year after the release of the 3.0 software update, a goliath amount of improvements, comes the latest update in fashionable mammoth form.

The announcement was made this morning in Cupertino at the Apple Campus (coincidentally, about 10 minutes from where I am right now, in the office), where Steve Jobs fielded Q&A from attendees. Among updates, we have the following, which is sure to make a huge impact:

1. Multitasking. Long past due. However not everything will have multitask ability from the get-go. Mainly things that stream, such as Pandora and Skype, will remain open when you go back to the menu to take a phone call, write an e-mail, etc.
2. Folders. Better categorization for your applications. For myself, I have 12 pages of applications (all free, hah!) on my iPhone, of which include 3 straight pages for various game applications. For future use, I will be able to create folders for these applications to reside in, and therefore require less scrolling from page to page to get to where I need to be.
3. A unified mailbox. Multiple accounts updating a single inbox. While I don’t use my secondary or tertiary accounts much, I do find it troublesome to back out of the inbox, back out of the e-mail account, click on another account, and then click on that inbox to view the single e-mail that popped in. Rinse & repeat to get back to the inbox I mainly use. Now, that too is much more simplified.
4. Bluetooth keyboard support. I cannot tell you how wonderful this will be. I posted (awhile back) a keyboard for the iPhone / iPod Touch that could be used, and this makes it so much nicer for lengthy e-mails and the like.
5. 5x camera digital zoom. No more cropping and resizing photos to cut out the things I didn’t want in the photo. While it would be nice to have actual optical zoom, digital is much more practical in our small telephone devices.
6. Spell check. Hopefully a few of my friends find this ability. ;)

These are among the list which I find to be the most useful.

A Toe Mouse was developed for the disabled, but how useful is it?

A study showed that the amount of people that have disabled arms/hands while having full mobility with their lower limbs is very low, and the number of customized devices for disabled operation already designed makes companies not want to develop products like this much further, yet alone produce and have them available for mass consumer purchase.

Secondly, unlike fingers, the ability to move one toe without moving the other is extremely difficult. As such, likeliness of clicking both toe-buttons at once would occur more often than not. Lastly, mobility with the foot/toe is much less than that of your hand/fingers, so I can only imagine how long it would take to scroll across a screen with this thing.

Overall? Nice idea, but unfortunately the operation of this new device makes the usage near impossible.

There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don’t know.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)