When my son Scott first saw an iPhone, he was four years old. He’s a curious little guy, and if he sees something with a screen on it, his curiosity takes over. He took the iPhone in his hand, and started to use it. He did not play with it or examine it. He used it. It had taken him a few seconds to realize that he could drag and touch items on the screen. Within a minute he had found the photo application and was flipping through family pictures like he had been doing it for years. Apple’s intuitive design had almost completely removed the learning curve.

When you first learn to use a computer, you need to learn a new way to interact. Most of us didn’t take too long to learn how to use a mouse to manipulate a cursor on the screen, or learn how to use a keyboard to command a computer to perform an action. What we don’t realize is that our brain really needed to work hard to learn how to do these things – rewiring itself to interact using mouse and a keyboard. We accept this learning curve because in the long run, it gives us an efficient way of integrating technology in our every-day lives. The ubiquitous nature of the keyboard and mouse is great for the majority, but for those who have difficulty seeing, hearing, moving, or with learning itself, it can be a different story.

Touch screen interfaces rely on our inherent instinct to touch the things with which we want to interact. They require less motor control because the movements are not scaled down to match the size of a mouse pad, and they are not unrelated to the task, like those used to type commands on a keyboard. Both of these things reduce the time required to learn a task, and increase the user’s confidence.

Companies have been making computers that are modified or designed specifically for users with disabilities for many years, but given the small production volume, these units have been extremely expensive, rarely near the cutting edge of technology and without a wide range of software choices. All that changed this year when Apple introduced the iPad – a handheld tablet-style computer with a touch-screen interface. The device takes the touch interface familiar to iPhone users and scales it up to a size more useful for standard computing tasks. In making a computer that is amazingly easy to use, Apple has opened the door for people with disabilities to use the same computer as the rest of their peers. This alone is an advantage, especially for kids, who want little more that to fit in with their friends.

I felt a sense of normalcy and acceptance. Using an iPad, which could become as commonplace as the Blackberry and iPhone, is not yet another thing that makes me different. I wasn’t using a strange, unfamiliar device to communicate…

- Glenda Watson Hyatt  (a writer with cerebral palsy)

The iPad costs around $500 for a base model. Compared with a cost of $5,000 – $10,000 typical of a touch screen laptop used by many kids with special communication or mobility requirements, it is easy to see why parents of kids with disabilities and the agencies that assist them are snapping up iPads as fast as they can. In the first few months of production, software developers have come up with hundreds of different applications meant to assist people with special needs, many of them at very low costs. There are signing and captioning applications for the deaf, high contrast and screen reading programs for those with vision loss, communication aides for people with physical disabilities, and organizational programs that are doing wonders for kids with autism. There are even devices on the market designed for attaching iPads to wheelchairs.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Tech companies don’t often design their products specifically to be accessible to people with disabilities. They are trying to bridge the digital divide by making their products attractive to a greater amount of people, many of whom would not normally be interested in high-tech devices. The market for high-tech products has traditionally been young and prosperous individuals, but as that market becomes saturated, companies will begin to target occasional and first time tech users. To do this, companies are making their products easier to use and more accessible. Ironically, it is the power users – the early adopters – who will appreciate these innovations just as much, since making things easier to use makes the whole experience better for everyone, especially those who use the devices the most

When Scott awoke from his second cochlear implant surgery, and had had a bit of time to figure out where he was, we handed him an iPad. He had been a brave little guy, and we had wanted to get him one since the product was announced. He was so happy he could watch a movie in his hospital bed, and his favourite spelling games he knew from the iPhone were so much easier to see on the bigger screen. His iPad is a valuable tool to help him learn at school, and a great comfort at the end of a busy day to curl up in a chair and look at family photos.

I’m a web developer working at a huge company, and as far as I know, I’m the only one using a Mac. We develop web based software for several clients and naturally maintain a myriad of servers with various staging and development environments. This means keeping local versions of Windows based server software, as well as client code and databases—a difficult task for our company issued Dell laptops—trusty and quick little things, but due to our long upgrade cycles, simply not up to par. I switched over to the Mac world about five years ago, and I’ve been using Parallels for testing websites in Windows for almost that long. Then I had an idea. What if I used my MacBook Pro as my main machine and used Parallels to load the development environments as I needed them? I’m really glad I tried it, because it has given me the best of both worlds.

I started by creating a base installation of our company’s standard image of Windows XP. Included in base install is IIS, SQL Server, ColdFusion Server, PHP, VPN clients and a set of our supported browsers. Once I have a working streamlined version of Windows as a virtual machine, I archive a copy of it and set up our development environments for some of our clients. We have different versions of server software for different clients, so I usually have three or four different Parallels VMs with various configurations.

Using Parallels in this way has almost too many benefits to mention. By setting up shared folders between my Mac and my virtual Windows environment, I can use my familiar IDEs to edit my code, and run Photoshop on my Mac—saving files directly to folders in my Windows environment. I can also use the native Mac mail and calendar apps since they integrate with MS Exchange server so nicely, eliminating my need for MS Office.

Another huge benefit is the ability to quickly setup a sandboxed environment for any given client, simply by adding their code and databases to one of my archived VMs.  This entire environment can be set up in minutes and used for myself, or given to another developer to work on, ending dreaded over-the-phone environment configuration. The suspending/resuming speed in Parallels 6 is extremely quick, allowing me to shutdown and resume VMs depending on the client. This quick switch between machines lets me allocate the maximum amount of memory and processing power from my Mac, since I don’t need to run them concurrently.

There’s also the look I get in coffee-shops. I use Spaces in Snow Leopard to switch between my Mac environment and my Windows environment—both of which I keep in full screen mode. On more than a few occasions, people do a double take when they see my Mac laptop instantly swap over to Windows and back. Sometimes I switch back and forth for no reason at all. I’m a show-off.

Finally, and by far my favourite benefit of Parallels, is that I get to use my Mac every day.

Now, full disclosure – I’ve been called an Apple fanboy – but in this case I have objective proof, and his name is Scott. My son Scott is six years old, and his first six years have been difficult. He was born at 24 weeks gestation, just over a pound and barely able to survive.  He followed an all too common path familiar to his preemie peer group, and came through the experience with several conditions that will challenge him in life.  He is completely deaf, and has also lost much of his vision. The combination of hearing and vision loss make it very difficult to learn communication skills, and to use the tools on which our society has become dependant. Using a mouse is hard, since he finds it difficult to relate the movements of the mouse to a screen that he can only partially see.  Now Scott is a smart kid – he can figure out a lot of complex things by employing his curiosity, and he’s not afraid to try again and again.  He loves looking at pictures of people (and trains/trucks/wheels or course) and since we spend a lot of time in doctors’ offices, his Mom showed him the pictures on her iPhone one time, and he soon figured out that moving his fingers on the screen “did stuff”.  The moment he figured that out, he knew how to use an iPhone. It didn’t take him long to figure out how to switch apps, use the home button, “swipe to unlock” and make phone calls to random people. He even came within a button press of replying to an email from the CEO of my company. We now restrict him to an iPod Touch.

Apple’s touch interface removes a lot of the learning that is required to use a new high-tech device.  One almost needs to forget some of the conditioned impulses, and regress a little bit to use it. The iPad takes this a step further, more closely representing the form factor of everyday objects that we may interact with. This removes a barrier for people with disabilities.

I’ve met a lot of people with challenges that have been overcome with the use of technology. A well known example of this is Stephen Hawking, who speaks with the assistance of a computerized voice. He uses a speech synthesis system that runs on a laptop attached to his wheelchair. This is a fairly common set-up for people with disabilities, whether their disability is purely physical or if they need their device to help them form their thoughts as well as communicate. A set-up like this can get really expensive. A touch-screen laptop like the TuffTalker Convertible costs close to $10,000. Simpler devices that only show a group of pictures and say a phrase when a picture is touched can cost well over $1000. An iPhone or an iPad, with some rudimentary software (examples of which are already showing up in the Apple app store) can do all of this, cost far far less.

People with disabilities will never be a market with huge buying power, but the trend towards accessible, simple products is making the world a more welcoming place, and the classroom more inclusive.

This post applies to those people with an ExpressCard slot on a fairly new machine. This will work for all unibody models, as well as some models released prior to that. New MacBook Pro machines, as of summer 2009, have had their ExpressCard slots replaced with SD card readers, with the exception of the 17″ (surfboard) model.

Like 90% of MacBook Pro users, I’ve never used my ExpressCard Slot for anything, and I’ve kept my eye on the market for useful things to put in there. There have always been flash drives made for ExpressCard slots, but the access times have been too slow to make them very useful. Then along came the Wintec Filemate 48GB ExpressCard drive (currently $140 from Tiger Direct).  It has access speeds of 65MB/s for write, and 115MB/s read – fast enough to use as a boot disk, and to handle file operations faster than the fastest hard disks available for the MacBook Pro.

I’ve read lots of reviews of this device, and people seem to have different opinions about the best way to use this fast drive.  Some people suggest that it should be used as a scratch disk for Photoshop, or other programs that do a lot of reading/writing to the HD. A few others have used it as a boot drive for Leopard. That’s what I wanted to try.

I have to say that the first drive I ordered was a dud. It worked as a USB drive (the drive actually can be plugged in via USB, which is immensely helpful) and I even installed Leopard on it via USB, and booted from it. It was very fast, even on a USB interface, but when in the ExpressCard slot, the machine froze when transferring any files larger than a few megs. Had to exchange it. When the new one came, I was all ready.

Here are the steps I took:

1. Partitioned my 250GB drive into 50GB and 200GB partitions, with my old version of Snow Leopard on the 200GB Partition, and an Empty 50GB partition to be used later.
2. Backed up everything via Time Machine, and double backed up my important files to a firewire drive.
3. Installed Snow Leopard to the ExpressCard Drive, making sure to exclude extra language files and printer drivers.
4. Booted into the new instance and ran software update a couple of times. At this point you can migrate your settings from your old system via Time Machine or your hard drive, but I decided to start fresh with a smaller set of applications, and moved my settings over manually and selectively.
5. Install all your applications. I was able to fit all my applications on the new drive for optimum performance, but if you use some huge apps, you may need to install some on your old hard drive.  As you add new applications, you can put them in the default “Applications” directory, or in an applications directory on your old hard drive.
6. Move your user directory. You don’t need to store all your music and videos on your solid state drive. Instructions here.
7. Trim the fat. I used Monolingual and xSlimmer to remove extra language files from installed applications and to remove PowerPC binaries (do this at your own risk!). Surprisingly, this reduces the size of native Apple applications significantly – sometimes 70%. Saved over 3GB doing this.
8. Start dumping redundant files on the 200GB drive, removing system files and everything you don’t need. Do this carefully!  Organize your drive well. Leave your user directory intact, as it is still your main user directory.  I moved my web root over as well (copy your web root, and update Apache to point to it – if you’re into that sort of thing).

At this point, I had used 20GB on my solid state drive, leaving me almost 30GB for new apps. I flirted with the idea of putting a Parallels virtual machine file on the SSD, but I’m not sure I want to fill another 15-20 GB there, and I’m not sure the speed improvements would be worth it. I’m going to try it briefly, and I’ll update this post if it’s worth doing.

The next steps are optional, but since this is a new way of doing things, I wasn’t sure I was ready to trust the drive completely.  I created the 50GB partition so I could have a clone of the drive on my old HD. This way, if the card fails one day, I won’t be screwed. I cloned the drive using Carbon Copy Cloner and I now have an exact copy of my initial installation. You may want to do this every so often, so your clone is up to date. Point your user directory to your other partition for consistency, and you should be able to boot into either one seamlessly.  If you want to free up that 50GB eventually, you can put a boot drive on a firewire or USB drive for safety.

If you want to get all hard core about it, you could even buy multiple ExpressCard drives, and swap between them, loading Windows or Linux on the others.

And now for the results

This thing screams. Seriously. You would not believe how fast this machine is, and it was already a very fast machine.  Safari opens instantly. It was quick before, but now it opens in about 100ms. Most native apps are the same – opening in less than a second. Photoshop opens in four seconds – practically blew my mind.  I’m not going to bother running benchmarks, since those depend so much on other factors, and I’m satisfied that the machine is faster, and significantly so.

I’m not counting on much as far as battery life improvements, since the hard drive will still be doing a lot of the work, but I do notice that the drive does not spin up much at all, and I like the silence.

Macminicolo.net does just that.  You send them a Mac Mini (or buy one from them at the going rate) and they will hook it up to a smoking fast connection in a managed facility.  You get full access to your machine, and can even (optionally) manage the power supply remotely.

Worried a Mac Mini would not be able to keep up with your needs?  You’d be surprised.  They perform very well under load, especially maxed out with RAM.  In addition to being able to host unlimited domains yourself, it’s a great way to keep remote secure backups, manage an SVN repository, or just to use as a personal file server.

I’ve been using their service for about a year, and I’m extremely satisfied.

Download it here

Coda is marketed as “one window web development” and it really is. I’ve been going back and forth between Dreamweaver and Eclipse for coding over the past few years, and both are great tools. I still use Eclipse for large sites at work, but I needed something for building small sites, and for quickly editing sites I’ve built in the past.

Coda lets you set up as many sites as you want, and for each site, remembers which files you have open. To make a change, you edit the file, or files and hit publish. It FTPs the files in the background, and keeps everything synchronized. You can even edit files directly on the remote site, which is great if you have specific server config files that you don’t want to be synchronized.

Also, code recognition is available for HTML, CSS, Javascript, Actionscript, Coldfusion, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Python, and several more. Coda is one of those programs that I’m happy to pay for. It’s $79, but will save you time every single day. There is a free trial that I think is fully functional.

Give it a try.

You install the software on both machines, and once set up, it acts as though each machine has multiple monitors. your mouse pointer goes off the edge of your screen, and appears on the monitor of the other machine (it will even wake the other machine up it it is asleep). When your mouse pointer is on the other screen, your keyboard switches control also, and you have full control or both machines.

Can it get any better? Yes it can. You can drag and drop files. Teleport seamlessly transfers files in the background, and the drag and drop action of your mouse between two machines acts as a file copy. I use this all the time, and it saves so much time. I can come home from work, open my laptop on my desk, and with the mouse from my desktop machine, drag any files I need from my laptop to my desktop in about 5 seconds. Teleport also synchronizes your clipboard, so copy and paste works between machines as well.

Download Teleport at http://www.abyssoft.com/software/teleport/

If you don’t have multiple Macs, and still want to try something like Teleport, there is an application that has most of these functions, and will work with Windows, Linux, and Macs. It’s not an easy to set up, but there are good instructions on the site. It’s called Synergy.

Download Synergy at http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/