Hi Thomas, wow, I wasn't aware Win 8 was as crazy as that. I thought they were supposed to be doing a big push for accessibility and are supposedly developing their own screen reader a'la Voiceover?… Yes?…
Anyway, on the subject of Mac / iOS, remember that all the dev tools are free so yes, it will cost a bit up front but after that, with the exception of your developer membership ($99 per year) everything you need to write apps is free. Plus, the Mac OS updates are like $29 so even that is ridiculously inexpensive! :) If you wanted, you could also look for a refurbished Mac Mini which would be more than capable of running XCode. So you could use that for your development machine. -Just some thoughts… Smiles, Cara :) --- View my Online Portfolio at: http://www.onemodelplace.com/CaraQuinn Follow me on Twitter! https://twitter.com/ModelCara On Apr 2, 2012, at 3:18 PM, Thomas Ward wrote: Hi Cara, Wow! I had no idea that there were that many blind iPhone users. I knew they were becoming popular, people have mentioned them a lot on lists, but definitely I underestimated the actual size of those who own and use them. Which goes to show that there is a substantial market that is being overlooked because of the prevailing opinion that Windows is the only show in town. That 1,238 members of the VI Phone list is larger than Audyssey and I believe the audio games forum combined. That's a huge market we could in theory target if we wanted to break into it. As for getting a Mac and developing games for Mac's and iPhones I've definitely thought about it. I don't have the cash right now, but I've been thinking about switching to Mac for quite a while now do to purely practical reasons. One, I'm beta testing Windows 8 and to be perfectly honest about it I'm not impressed. There are things here and there I like about Windows 8, but over all I don't really care for it. Many of the UI changes such as the ribbons, the new start screen setup, and the general look and feel of the OS isn't appealing to me. Its designed for a touch screen and if you are blind and have to use a keyboard to get around its not really that user friendly or intuitive. The desktop has pretty much been phased out of use so I can't just copy my icons to the desktop like on prior versions of Windows which means I either have to dock them to the taskbar, fight with the confusing startscreen arrangement, or use run to launch the program. That part of it royally sucks. So I'm not really looking forward to using Win 8 in any copacity for my personal use. Second, while I am a faithful Linux user I'm smart enough to see that accessibility isn't as good as it could be. Apple is still far ahead because they have a dedicated team of developers who work on VoiceOver and do access testing with Cocoa to make sure the standard graphics toolkit etc is reasonably accessible with VoiceOver out of the box. As a result when I looked at 10.7 I couldn't believe how user friendly and accessible the design was, and it just keeps getting better. With Ubuntu 12.04 in some regards access took a massive step backwards. Unity 3D the default graphical environment is an accessibility nightmare. The Unity 2D environment is much better, but I still find installing gnome-classic as the most accessible graphical environment to date for Linux. Its a workable solution, but not without doing some extra configuration and having some experience configuring the system to have maximum accessibility. That's fine for an experienced Linux user like myself, as I know how to configure it to get it to do what I want, but experience or not its still frustrating to have to reconfigure everything to get access working as good as it can be. So I've been thinking that Mac OS right now might cost more up front to invest in, but its probably the best solution for a blind user. It seems Apple's accessibility has been growing by leaps and bounds and its worth the investment. Cheers! On 4/2/2012 1:08 AM, Cara Quinn wrote: > Hi Thomas, yes, as of right now, not including some members I've not approved > yet, we have 1238 people on VIPhone which is the iOS users' list. > > So yes, there is most definitely a thriving community here and mine is just > one list! :) > > So I'd honestly encourage anyone who has thought of developing for iOS to get > a Mac of some kind, an iOS device and start coding with Objective C! :) > There's totally a market for it! > > People really want more games that are not only accessible, but that are > creative in their accessibility. I.E. There are already many games which are > accessible on iOS, but really taking the idea of audio games and running with > it to bring a richer audio experience as many audio game developers for > Windows are used to doing would be fabulous for the iDevices. Furthermore, > there is actually also even a sighted market for audio games on the iDevices > which you really don't see on the PC / Mac. > > Anyway, very interesting topic indeed. I do hope people here will start > realizing this market is not only improving but is actually exploding over > night. -Seriously… > > anyway, have a terrific night!… > > Smiles, > > Cara :) > --- --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. 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