Just as a side note, i use cap signs all the time and am from the uk,
its only an rnib standard to not use them. also documents look bad in
print with no caps.
Louise.
On 16/03/2011 10:12, Mark Higgins wrote:
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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