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 thomasobrey

iTunes to be more accessible

Posted by Thomas Obrey on September 29th, 2008

I found the tidbit below while perusing news.com. This is especially interesting given the recent post I made regarding Target and the National Federation of the Blind, in which Target settled out for a cool $6M.

Apple will be making iTunes more accessible to blind consumers, under an agreement reached with the Massachusetts attorney general’s office and the National Federation of the Blind.

The agreement states that the application will be fully accessible by year’s end, and, drum roll please — Apple will contribute $250K to the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind so they can buy assistive technologies.
Read the news.com snippet, which is brief.  Or the AppleInsider scoop, which is quite lengthy and mentions some Nano changes as well.  -t
 thomasobrey

Landmark Accessibility Ruling

Posted by Thomas Obrey on September 11th, 2008

This is an email that a co-worker sent me the other day. It struck a chord with me, and I thought the topic was important enough to share with everyone; so thanks Norm.

You may have heard that Target.com and the National Federation of the Blind agreed to a $6,000,000.00 settlement and rigid, scheduled audits for having an inaccessible site.  As a result, many organizations may want to begin investigating their options for an audit to evaluate the accessibility of their own product(s) or web properties… 

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 thomasobrey

The lure of the Rubik’s Cube

Posted by Thomas Obrey on September 4th, 2008

As a teen in the 80’s the Rubiks Cube was more than a puzzle, it was a personal challenge. I had friends that had managed to master it, without help, whereas I never got past the first few stages. The motto at the time was “you can’t do the cube”. Even it’s inventor, Erno Rubik, who first showed this puzzle at a toy fair, had not figured it out yet. 

Fast forward to today and the Rubik’s Cube is back, and with a new tagline - “You CAN Do the Rubik’s Cube“. This change in approach is a friendlier challenge - one of encouragement. And it’s supported  by a robust campaign to introduce the Rubik’s Cube into schools, summer programs, youth organizations and after-school programs, to start. (more…)

 thomasobrey

Trends that come and go, and stay around too

Posted by Thomas Obrey on July 24th, 2008

Ah, the dreaded trend word. In the B2B space it’s a scary issue. They come and go before most even get a chance to embrace them. With Gartner and other “influencers” at the helm, tossing new fangled ‘everything’ around, it’s a genuine OMG issue.

I read earlier this year that 2007 was the year of Social, and 2008 is the year of Mobile. Holy crap. Are you serious? What happened to Web 2.0? Or is that now Enterprise 2.0, because anything that finally makes it into the enterprise took so long we needed a new name? I think we can thank Gartner for that - the new names for the stuff that needs some new focus. (more…)

 thomasobrey

What does going green mean, to us?

Posted by Thomas Obrey on July 15th, 2008

There’s been a lot of chatter around the office, mostly email and hallway talk, about what this really means. I love that we’re talking about it. But what does it all mean? To go green, or be green? To us?

The movement is really quite quiet, with little steps here and there - on the people side it’s items like fewer lights (bulbs in and on), mugs not paper cups, car-pooling, 2-up double sided printing (I love that), less printing, making notebooks from scrap paper (of which there is lots), shutting monitors and desk lighting off, and a company plan for dry cleaning with a “green products” company. Small steps. But steps. Nothing drastic, but sustainable. Not a diet, but a lifestyle change. Very cool.

On the IT side there are some great strides being made as well. What I like to call big impact items. (more…)

 thomasobrey

The new PixelMEDIA site’s up. Nice.

Posted by Thomas Obrey on July 4th, 2008

We published this at about 5 last night. It was a 13 day sprint, and we jammed. We were super focused. It’s late on July Fourth and I just took my first look at the site, the whole thing. Remotely. I like it. I have a page of updates, of course, the d’oh! list. It’s amazing what a day and a new environment can do. I felt like “a user”, just cruising around. Exploring everything.

However… it was not a flawless launch. There was a last minute freak out moment. You know what I mean — you’re ready. You’ve looked at everything ten times, some twenty.

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 thomasobrey

Macromedia Director is back.

Posted by Thomas Obrey on May 5th, 2008

Well, for us old-schoolers, long before Flash was anything but an idea, there was Director. Back in the day it was Macromedia Director. And way way back - it was Mac only and you had to use “the Gaffer” to convert Mac files to play on a Windows machine. Way way back… like early 90’s. I think Teece was 10.

I’ve got many thousands of hours into this program; and this company, PixelMEDIA, was largely built on the back of Director.

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 thomasobrey

the Natural User Interface

Posted by Thomas Obrey on January 7th, 2008

Well, Bill Gates said it during his CES keynote, which sucked by the way. Surprise. The Wiki has a page on it, however anemic, and there’s a group called NUI (e.g. – Natural User Interface) that has assembled to explore this emerging area of interaction design.

So I of course explored last night; thinking what is it? A new word for the same old shat, or something truly different? And if it is different, how different, and how does it compare with what we’re familiar with today, or is that not fair to ask? NUI is actually pronounced ‘new’ - so maybe someone’s thought real hard about this, being new that is.

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