Mark, as others, you have painted a realistic picture of the current lacks
in HIMS products and, in fact, it bears out the legacy we're still enjoying
of the good Braille, paragraph boundaries, etc, left by people like Dean and
Jonathan ... I do wonder now though if we still have that kind of expertise
available to us.
What seems to be important now is to ensure that Humanware really steps up
to the mark and quite quickly to bug fix some of those annoying quirks and
add those functions we all have been waiting for since the introduction of
the Apex over a year ago. I am also disappointed that it has taken so long
for them to produce an upgrade which, quite honestly, didn't contain all
that much for me and I had sincerely hoped this would have been available by
about September/October last year.
In view of this, I wonder if we could ask questions of HW about their
programmer capacity and whether they have folk onboard now whose knowledge
is totally up to date when it comes to providing the kind of package we now
wish to see. (If they are relying on some of their older programmers who
worked on Keysoft some years ago and haven't done much in the way of
updating their skills since that time then we are going nowhere fast!
I wonder if anyone has any knowledge of their programmer setup at present or
is sufficiently qualified and able to ask the pertinent questions of HW
staff. We have been badly let down in the past and I'm really hoping we're
not just going to have paid good money for a new Apex, only to see it going
as far as it has reached at this stage. I for one would not be happy if
this were the case. However, my needs are such that I have no intention of
moving for the moment, even if I'd like to enjoy some of the benefits the
HIMS package appears to be offering.
Honestly, though, we shouldn't be waiting too much longer before we see
something good for our outlay.
--
Carol P, United Kingdom
---- Original Message ----
From: "Mark Higgins" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2011 10:12 AM
Subject: [Braillenote] The Grass is Always Greener
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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