Newton’s Lore

Some friends of mine have written an article for Media Culture called iTunes Is Pretty (Useless) When You’re Blind: Digital Design Is Triggering Disability When It Could Be a Solution.
Check it out!

Although I’m somewhat suspicious that the claim that pod in iPod stands for “Portable on Demand”, seems more like a backronym coined by those wanting to use it to attempt to avoid being sued by Apple’s Lawyers.

Meanwhile some folks find podcasting less than inclusionary (sadly for a lecture series on Disability Inclusion!)

Personally I think the iPhone will suck from the ‘You have to look at it to use it’ point of view. Buttons at least make phones easier to use without looking at them. Perhaps some accelerometer based gesture user interface (although difficult to use in your pocket without looking somewhat suspicious Roll on the haptic iPhone.

After announcing that iTunes has sold 4 billion songs (20 million on Christmas Day), 125 million TV shows, and 7 million movies, Steve Jobs today announced the availability of iTunes Movie Rentals (for US users only!) with content from Sony, Universal, Touchstone, Miramax, MGM, Lionsgate, Newline, Fox, Warner Bros, Disney and Paramount.This will include over 1000 movies available 30 days after DVD release. Watch on Mac, PC, iPod or iPhone within 30s start time (assuming you’ve got decent broadband), and movies available for watching within 30 days but must be watched within 24 hours of starting to watch. US$2.99 for library titles and US$3.99 for new releases 

Steve Jobs has announced during the WWDC 2007 keynote that Safari 3 will run on Leopard, and Windows XP/Vista. Faster than IE or Firefox (with iBench HTML test).Includes Google and Yahoo! search. Draggable tabs (including off into their own windows).500,000 downloads of Firefox a day. 1,000,000 downloads of iTunes a day. Over 500 million downloads of iTunes to Windows machines.Beta available from http://www.apple.com/safari