Cheree Heppe here: Have you written Apple directly re your suggested improvements? Apple needs to weigh input carefully to incorporate new elements which integrate without compromising a unified whole. At this point, everybody, from the legacy blind services providers whose gadgets the IOS devices replaced to developers with untested ideas want on for the ride. At this point, Apple has my vote because of what has already been accomplished and because of its independend thinking.
Regards, Cheree Heppe Sent from my IPhone 4S On 10/06/2013, at 21:57, Mike Arrigo <n0...@charter.net> wrote: After looking at the new features of IOS 7, a few things are missing that I was hoping Apple might have considered. Perhaps some of these are there and were just not mentioned, or these could be things Apple will never include because of the experience they want to provide. I will list what I think is missing and state why I think they are good features to include. Of course, this is just my opinion, these may not matter to some people and that's fine. No built in file management. Just about every other operating system, whether mobile or desktop provides a way to browse the files and folders on your device and change them. IOS 7 still has no built in file manager, and no support for USB mass storage or media transfer protocol. I think there is an app you can get that helps with some of this, and the air drop may make this a bit easier, but still transferring content from a computer to an IOS device is more difficult than it needs to be. With Android for example, many devices support mass storage, and those that do not have a memory card slot support media transfer protocol, or you can install an app that lets the device show up on your network like any other drive. No option to change default apps. As far as I know, there is no way to change what app will be the default when doing things like clicking links or opening files in other applications. For example, you can install other browsers, but you cannot set them as the default. On operating systems such as android and the mac, this can easily be changed. Apple does not allow you to change the default keyboard used for typing. While you can install other keyboards such as fleksy, you must go in to the application and type what you want, then choose to send a text message, send email, or copy the text to paste in another program. In Android for example, you can install and set other keyboards as the default. I'm currently beta testing fleksy for android, and if I set it as the default, I can use it to type in any application. You can also dictate within fleksy for android if you wish since any keyboard has access to android's voice recognition service. I was also hoping Apple would have opened up the way text to speech is handled, but this does not appear to be the case. It's good that they added a male voice, probably Tom. However, the same restrictions still apply as far as I know. First, developers are not permitted to use the voices that IOS already has. This means that if an application wants to provide text to speech, aside from voiceover, the application must license and include its own TTS engine. So, for example, let's say you have the read to go app, the motion x GPS app and the blindsquare app installed. You would most likely have 3 copies of the same Acapela TTS on your device, taking at least an extra 100 MB on your device. If Apple allowed developers to use the built in voices, this would not be necessary. Similarly, Apple does not allow you to install new system wide voices. Speech is very subjective, but if you wanted to use Acapela for example with voiceover, this is not possible because of Apple's restrictions. With operating systems like the mac and Android, any application is free to use the voices provided, and you can install third party TTS engines such as Acapela and Ivona, and they are available for screen readers, or any other application that wants to use them. To be required to have more than one copy of a voice on a device is a waste of space, especially when it offers no benefit to the user. IOS is certainly very accessible, but I am a bit disappointed that Apple has not opened things up a bit for developers and provided access to file management. I'm not saying Android is perfect, it isn't, but it does include some major things that I think the newest version of IOS is still lacking. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
