Dear List,
Having read the flood of emails about the Hims announcement let me add my
voice to those who have spoken with caution: it is easy - very easy - to get
seduced away by deluxe feature sets and what have you, and I speak as
someone who has fallen victim to that in the past. My own view of the
BrailleSense, however, is that it still has serious problems and has
concentrated too much on bells and whistles to the detriment of resolving
these particular serious problems. The braille translation is still way
below par. There is nothing beyond a fairly clumsy implementation of US
braille (they say it does UK Braille but it really doesn't, particularly in
maths); you cannot suppress capital letter signs which might not be a
problem in North america but in the UK we grew up reading without them and I
rather like my Braille to appear as it would in books; you can't read
seamlessly or continuously; you can't customise paragraph boundaries.
Humanware is miles ahead of the competition in terms of Braille translation,
especially if you live outside North america or want to use it to read or
write foreign languages.
Turning to the wordprocessor, the Hims wordprocessor is manifestly deficient
if you want to produce professional quality documents. You have very little
control, relatively speaking, over formatting. as a barrister here in the
UK I very quickly abandoned any idea of producing draft orders, opinions,
pleadings etc. using it because they looked scruffy and unprofessional. Not
very good if you want to do these things on the go. I also found the
scenario where you are reading one document and writing another where you
had to keep activating read only mode in the wordprocessor very ungainly as
compared with switching between the wordprocessor and the book reader as we
do with humanware devices.
Hims' processor speed on the brailleSense Plus is very, very slow. It is
noticeable when one takes notes quickly that it is very swift to fall
behind. I remember taking a note of judgment with it once and I had to wait
for nearly five minutes after I had finished for it to catch up with me. I
have to say that I am therefore sceptical about how it will manage with PDF
files. It already takes a great deal of time to open long documents, and I
mean documents of 500 or more pages, and PDF files will probably be of a
bigger file size than those more often than not.
The qwerty interface on the BrailleSense is very clumsily implimented. The
mannual is even more clumsily written. The qwerty interface treats one line
of text and one length of the Braille display as synonymous, making for a
rather cumbersome experience when reading using the arrow keys. It's very
difficult, in other words, to flick through.
These are just some of the problems I experienced. I know there are people
who will be very excited by these new features Hims have added, but all this
BrailleNote is doomed stuff assumes that we all want the bells and whistles.
Personally, I want a machine I can use efficiently in court. The slim,
light Apex fits the bill perfectly and its Braille translation is second to
none. The web browser is working well, I like text adventures and the
planner and database applications also come in useful. I don't really care
about an awful lot else. If I want to do something awfully complicated I'll
wait until I'm in front of my PC; if I want to tweet, read an unprotected
PDF or mess around on Facebook on the go I'll use my iPhone. PDF support
might be useful I suppose but the reality is that most useful PDFs from my
point of view consist entirely of images and in that connection, Hims don't
take you any further forward. If I had one wish, I would wish that
Humanware would make the Apex truly compatible with portable printers such
as the Pentax Pocketjet.
I do support Techies' requests to have the SDK. some really useful talent
could be unlocked there. At the same time, however, I hope techies'
appreciate that some of us when it comes to notetakers are of but simple
tastes and that thing ssuch as paragraph boundaries matter so much more to
us than an application to polish your shoes.
Best,
Mark Higgins
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