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Your weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
Show Notes:
Trick My iPhone with Wade Wingler
* Special episode: Replacing the built-in apps on iOS with alternatives
* Some assistive and some usability – definitely geeky
* Haven’t tried all of these with voice over yet – many I have though and they work. (If you’re interested in one, contact me and I’ll give it a quick once over with voice over – or check applevis)
* Built in apps:
* Calendar
* Fantiscal 2 $4.99
* Clock
* Sleep Cycle $2.99 & HD (Free)
* Boxer $.99
* Voice Memos
* Sound ever $1.99
* Reminders
* Evernote (free)
* Notes
* Evernote (free)
* Drafts $2.99
* Byword $4.99*
* Camera
* Scanner Pro $2.99 and Jot Not (free) for scanning (Evernote)
* Calculator
* 10bii for financial calculator $5.99
* iCloud
* Google Drive and Dropbox (free)
* Podcasts
* Pocket Casts (less than before) $3.99
* Weather
* Favorite – Yahoo but flaky (free)
* Perfect weather is new favorite $2.99
* Weather bug (free)
* WTHR for local (free)
* Safari
* Chrome (free)
* Facetime
* Skype (free)
* iBooks
* Audible (free)
* Kindle (free)
* Voice Dream $9.99
* One I can’t get into:
* Launch Center Pro $4.99 (wanted to like it but don’t so far)
-——-transcript follows ——-
WADE WINGLER: Hi, this is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana, with your Assistive Technology Update, and today, I’m going to show you how to trick your iPhone.
[Music]WADE WINGLER: Hi, this is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana, and this is your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of technology, designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs. Welcome to episode number 152 of assistive technology update.
Today we’re doing a special episode. I am on vacation this week and set in the studio a few weeks ago and recorded this episode that I’m calling “Trick my iPhone.” Normally on assistive technology update, we spent our time doing interviews and talking about the news in the field of assistive technology, but it occurred to me recently that I use my iPhone a lot. It’s probably one of my number one tools, but I don’t always use the built-in apps that came with iOS. Although I think those are very good apps, I’m going to spend today’s show talking about apps that I use instead of the apps that are built into the iPhone.
I’m kind of calling back to an old show called trick my truck with they would take a big semi and fix it up with all kinds of extra things. That’s sort of the idea behind my show today. It’s going to be a little bit of a different episode. It’s going to be a lot of apps that we talk about. I think it’s important to talk about the fact that not everything that I’m going to say today has to do with assistive technology. But everything kind of might have to do with assistive technology, definitely usability. So as I go down through these apps, when I think there are particularly assistive applications in these apps that we’re talking about, appoint those out. Sometimes what we’re talking about is just about general usability in the ability to use the iPhone faster and more effectively as a tool.
The other thing I’ll mention is that I’m not focusing on vision impairment and blindness as my primary method or reason for using these apps this time. If I know that an app works with voiceover, I’ll mention it. A lot of these do. Some of them I haven’t checked yet, either. So if you hear me talking about an app and you wonder how well that one works with voiceover before you go ahead and make the investment in the app, because some of these two have costs, let me know. Shoot me a note on email, tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or call our listener line 317-721-7124, or shoot me a note on Twitter @INDATAProject. Let me know which app you would like to know about voiceover compatibility. If you let me know, I’ll give it the once over with voiceover, or better yet, check out the website of our partners over at applevis.com because they have tons of apps over there and can talk about the accessibility with voiceover in those.
Without further delay, I’m going to start talking about the apps that come on the iPhone and what I use instead.
The first one I want to talk about is calendar and what I use instead of the built-in calendar. As you guys probably have guessed, I’m a fairly busy guy. I have lots of responsibility is here at the INDATA Project at Easter Seals. So my calendar is something very important. I need to look at it several times a day. Instead of, or in addition to, the built-in calendar on my iPhone – and by the way I’m running iOS 7 with an iPhone 5.
Instead of the built-in calendar, I use a program called Fantiscal 2. Fantiscal is something that can read your regular calendar file. I host my on Outlook. It presents it in a way that’s very different. It gives you at the top in its default view five days of the week. So I’m recording this on a Tuesday. At the top, it gives me a visual representation of Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. And that visual representation, each one of those boxes, it gives me colors to me know how full my days are. Immediately below that, I have kind of a long, growing list of different appointment. If I take my thumb and scroll up through this list of appointments on the bottom part of the screen, it advances the top part of the screen so that I can see what day of the week on.
The thing that really helps me with this is a gives me a great conceptual view of all the stuff that I have to do. If I want to see the full month view, I simply grab the wiki at the top and pull it down a little bit with my thumb to the middle of the screen. It slips right away to a full month view. It also tells me where the holes in my schedule in the month view so that I can look and see what’s going on. If I want to go back to the week view, I pull my thumb down again to the middle and it goes to the week view. Then if I want to go to a more involved or more detailed week view, I rotate my phone sideways. I put it into landscape you and a gives me the next five days anyway that I can really redound to the minutes the opponents that I have.
The other thing that I really like about Fantiscal is that it does a great job of overlaying my Outlook schedule, which is my work appointments, with my Google calendar, which includes my family stuff, so I can look and see that my daughter’s birthday is coming up here in a few days, that she has dance class tonight, that I need to make sure I leave work on time today so that I can get her to dance class. It also shows me that in two weekends, my wife and I are going to have a little getaway weekend. Last thing is, as I’m going throughout my day, having the ability to have those calendars overlaid on each other is very helpful so that I don’t book a late afternoon appointment MS of something going on with my family. I know you can do those things with the built-in calendar, but I really like the way that Fantiscal lays those things out.
Now Fantiscal is not a free apps. In fact several of the apps I’m going to talk about today do have a cost. For me, and I’ll tell you differently if I get to one they don’t agree with, and every case I think the cost has been worth it. Fantiscal costs $4.99, so you’re looking at a five dollar app, but the freedom that it gives me in the way that I can view the calendar and have quick access to it has certainly been worth it.
The next thing I want to talk about is the clock. The iPhone comes with a pretty cool clock and has a stopwatch and a countdown timer and all those kinds of things. For a long time, I relied on the built-in clock and the iPhone to make me up in the morning. I set an alarm and you can set it to wake up weekdays, weekends, single lines of those kinds of things. But I don’t know about you, I hesitate to be jolted awake by a very loud alarm.
Although you can change different alarms, I recently was told by a friend about an app called Sleep Cycle. This is a $2.99 app, but it does something kind of interesting. It works only on the newer iPhones, so works on my iPhone five. You plug your iPhone income and you actually set it on the bed next to you need your head. What it does is it uses the microphone and the accelerometer in the iPhone to measure the noise that you make when you sleep – and my wife will tell you that I’m a pretty noisy, snoring sleeper. It also measures the movement and the bed to try to figure out how deeply for sleeping at any given moment.
The idea is it can kind of keep track of how you’re moving and what that means in terms of the depth of the sleep of that particular moment, and then it wakes you up over the period of time. I’m an early riser, so I tell it I want to be out of bed by 4 o’clock in the morning so I can start my day. What it does is it sets a half an hour window. Between 3:30 and 4 o’clock, it starts monitoring, or in fact it’s been monitoring all night, and tries to find a time when I’m sort of waking up anyway when my sleep is not terribly deep. It wakes me up gradually over that period of time with softer sound. It also does a pretty good job of giving you information about how well you sleep or how well it’s thinking you sleep. It lets you compare that to how much exercise and other things that might affect her seat. Sleep Cycle is $2.99, a pretty cool way to wake up.
The other one that I have used is called HD Clock, and it’s in that same category. It will allow you to have just a bigger display with some other options for alarms. It also includes your Twitter feed and whether and information built right into that. Check out sleep cycle or HD alarm clock which is free.
Although I find myself using the built-in mail client a lot, I’ve recently fallen in love with an app called Boxer. I keep track of about four different email accounts on my iPhone. I have my regular work account, I have some accounts related to some schools were I teach as an adjunct faculty member come and then I had my personal account. I found that I have emails rolling in all day. I need to have a way to dispatch some kind of quickly.
I’ve got Boxer set up so that all of my emails come in to unified inbox come and then I can very quickly look at a message and decide if it’s something I need to do with or if it’s just junk. If it’s something that’s just junk, with one swipe, I can’t get rid of that message and archive it. I can determine based on how I swipe whether it’s a complete swipe or just halfway across the screen swipe, whether or not it goes to the trash or goes into an archive where I can get it later.
I’ll come back to Evernote in a minute. I’m a big fan of Evernote. I use Evernote to organize my life. I’ve got Boxer set up so that when I’m in my inbox, I can cite the other direction come in my case from left to right, and it will automatically take that email and drop it right into my Evernote so that I can set it up according to priorities of things I want to do with or put it into a notebook where I can remember that information for later.
Boxer isn’t terribly expensive. It’s only $.99. It does work with IMAP accounts, it does work with Outlook, exchange accounts, and all the, kind of in the accounts that you’ll find out there. It has a very nice visual representation, but the big deal is it lets me really blessed in my inbox very quickly. I get to inbox zero every single day, in fact with this app, when you do, if you get to inbox zero, get everything out of your inbox from it will give you a nice inspirational quote and tell you how many days in a row you’ve done that. Check out Boxer, pretty cool.
Before I jump into some more of these apps that I want to talk about, I should probably talk about my passion for Evernote. Evernote is a free app and a free web-based service that will allow you to keep track of all kinds of things.
I use Evernote in a few different ways. One is I use it to our Information. I have all kinds of documents that you need to reference. If I travel, I have itineraries and things in there. I’ve got recipes, I got people’s contact information. Just all kinds of good stuff in there. I also use Evernote as my to-do list. I use a pretty sophisticated system of tags that help me keep track of what I need to do next and what’s high-priority and what needs to be done on certain days. Evernote not only lets you tag items that it’s very quickly to pull together everything marked urgent and be able to do with it, but also lets you set reminders on your notes so that if you have something that needs to be done – in fact, while I’m sitting here holding my phone, it is reminding me that I need to make sure my daughter has a right to dance practice tonight.
You can set reminders to do that. That’s one of the things that I want to talk about. I use Evernote instead of reminders on my iPhone. I cannot only have a reminder that tells me what time reminds me at what time I need to do something, but it also what’s me attach lots of information to that. I can have a recipe of something I want to cook for supper tonight, set a reminder to remind me to start the oven in advance to warm it up or whatever, and it gives me lots of options. I don’t use the reminder app on my iPhone, what I do set reminders and notes within Evernote to do that. Evernote is free. It works on your iPhone, your computer, your web browser as well as android phones. It’s pretty cool.
Another app that I use along with Evernote is an app called Sound ever. It’s $1.99. What it does is it attaches to my Evernote account, and it put an icon on the desktop of my iPhone on the main screen. When I want to record a reminder to do something, or record sound for the podcast and interview or anything like that, I simply hit the icon on the main screen. It looks like an elephant so it’s kind of easy to remember. It automatically starts recording. I can pause and I can restart the recording. When I stop, it just automatically throws that recording into Evernote so that it’s there sweating have to remember to back it up. I don’t have to remember to save it. Any time I recorded think in Sound ever, it automatically shows up in my Evernote. Because I spent so much time and Evernote, it’s right there and easy for me to either save or assign a to do item with that. Even set a reminder to do with that recording later. Sound ever is $1.99 and it dumb stuff straight into Evernote.
A couple of other categories of apps that also tie into my Evernote obsession are Drafts and Byword. These tend to replace Notes. So on your iOS device, you’re going to have a regular app to take notes with. But I use Drafts primarily. It’s $2.99. What it allows you to do is very quickly jot down notes on your iPhone.
I don’t know about you, but there are lots of times when someone says here’s a phone number or shoot the email address or here’s something you want to remember. Some of those things lend themselves to recording with a voice recorder like sound ever that I mentioned before, but other times you need to write down something on your iPhone.
When I need to do that, I simply have Drafts on my home screen. When you fire it up, it gives you a small blank sheet of paper or a blank screen where you can type in a note. You can type in whatever information you would like whether it’s a phone number or reminder or some critical piece of information. Then it’s got a send button. But it’s a very smart send button. You can configure it.
What it allows you to do is set up a bunch of shortcuts so that whatever note you just typed can immediately be moved to yourself if you like to do that. Or you can have one set up to send to Evernote which is the one that I do the most. You could have it immediately post it to Facebook, immediately send it out as a Tweet under any of your twitter accounts that you’re interested in. You can have it post that note that you just wrote two cool plus to set it up as an event within Google. You can simply copy it to the board so that you can pop open another app that you’re interested in using and pasted from there. It also is markdown compatible. I find myself using markdown syntax more and more to write documents so it’s nice to know that you can jot a note and markdown and have it right there in drafts. You can send it through buffer app, you can send them as text messages.
Really, it kind of flips the idea that you need to know where the note is going to go before you write it on its head. It allows you to just take a note with whatever information you are interested in and then quickly hit the barn that you preprogrammed and send it to whatever service you want. It is compatible with Siri by the way so I find myself very frequently in the car, I think of something you need to do, I hit the key for drafts and then hit the Siri button, dictate a note to myself and then hit safe to Evernote. It jumps right into my Evernote. Siri is not always 100 percent accurate in that situation, but mostly I’m writing notes to myself, so whatever Siri comes up with its voice recognition is usually good enough and I’ll remember what I was trying to move her at that point.
The other one I wanted to mention in this category is Byword. I started using Byword recently, mostly because I’m interested in writing and markdown, but it’s little more sophisticated word processor that you can use on your iPhone as well as your iPad. Drafts cost $2.99, byword is $4.99. It gives you a little more sophisticated way to do some text composition on your iPhone.
Another app that most folks use on their phone’s camera. I do use camera a lot for taking snapshots. It while ago, a year ago or so, I would use the camera to take pictures of receipts or try to use it as a scanner. I didn’t go very well because the camera just not set up on its own to do that. So the first app that I used for scanning documents or receipts or those kinds of things is called Jot Not. It’s available in the App Store for free. It does a pretty good job of allowing you to take pictures of receipts or if you see a pamphlet hanging on the wall that you just want to get a copy of for future reference. It does a pretty good job at that.
More recently, I have switch to Scanner Pro which cost $2.99. But it is a really smart scanner application. The thing that I like about it is I can take a receipt that a little bit crumpled up or maybe folded or not in great shape and hold the iPhone over it, turn on Scanner Pro, and it’s pretty smart. It throws this great up on the screen and automatically finds the edges of the document, automatically de-skews it and tries to sing it out to the any words or text that might be crumpled it straightened out into a real clear picture. Then I like it because it also will send directly to Evernote. I can take the thing I want to get a picture of, take a picture of it, and hit a button and it will stick it up into Evernote so that I can have access to it later. Jot Not is free and does a pretty good job. Scanner Pro for $2.99 I’ve really started to like recently because it does a great job with some of those less than pristine documents that are out there.
By default, your iPhone comes with an iCloud account and an Apple account that allows you to put some information in the cloud. I find myself however very fervently using Google Drive which is free and allows me to access information on my Google Drive for my iPhone. But even more so, I find myself using Dropbox. I find myself pulling documents out of Dropbox just for quick reference, but more and more I find that a lot of the apps that I use sync over Dropbox. Have a big user of text expander on the Mac which also has an iOS application. A lot of my documents that I use from different apps sync across Dropbox. Both Google Drive and Dropbox are free apps that you can get for your iPhone and allow you to really do a lot of across the cloud sort of syncing with your data. Pretty cool stuff, you should probably have a Dropbox account. You can get that for free or if use it a lot like I do you can end up with a paid account we can have lots of space in the cloud.
I’m not an amateur urologist. I’m not one of those people who is obsessed with leather, but I find that everybody who uses a smartphone is interested in a good weather app. That tells me that there probably aren’t a lot of great weather apps out there because I find myself constantly looking for them. The built-in weather app on the iPhone is something that I very rarely if ever even open up and take a look at. I find that it’s not future rich enough for me. It misses a radar which is one of the most important things for me.
I have found another weather app that I like from Yahoo. It’s just Yahoo’s Weather, and I really like it. It’s elegant and beautiful, but frankly I find that it’s a little bit flaky. A lot of times when I try to open it up and get access to the information and Yahoo weather, it just simply doesn’t work. So I want to use a beautiful interface and have information about the weather, but if it’s not working, that doesn’t do me any good. I still have the Yahoo weather app on my phone, but I find myself not using it a whole lot.
Another one that I found recently that I like because it has a lot of good information right on the front screen that is easy to get to is called Perfect Weather. The thing that I like about Perfect Weather is when you fire it up, it immediately shows you a map, and then at the top of the screen, it has a pull down tab kind of like the home screen pull down that you can pull down a get access to the current, high and low for the day, the current temperature, you can get your six-day forecast and what the likelihood is for precipitation. Then if you don’t want all that information, you can fold that Backup and it will give you a bigger access or more of your screen with the weather radar. It’s a built in radar that gets its information from NOAH. I just like the fact that this app gives me the stuff that I need. I want to know what the weather is like right now, what’s it going to be today, what it’s going to be over the next few days, and it particularly if the weather is bad, I want to get all that stuff out of the way and look at the radar so I can see if there’s a storm moving in. Perfect Weather is $2.99. It’s kind of my new favorite weather app. So far I like it.
In addition, there are two other weather apps that have on my phone. I have four in addition to the one that’s built in. I have Yahoo, I have Perfect Weather. I’ve always kept Weather Bug on there because I find that it gives me more detailed information then a lot of the other apps. So I don’t use it a ton, but I do grab that one. The other one I use is a local one to the Indianapolis area. It’s the NBC affiliate, WTHR, it’s our local television station here for NBC content. They have a pretty good weather app. I go to that one because it’s very local and also includes the meteorologist blog and I can hear from them in written text what they are saying that the weather is going to look like over the next few days. So five weather apps on my phone. The built-in one, the Yahoo one, Perfect Weather, Weather Bug, and then our local weather, which for me is WTHR.
A couple of quick once here that are different. Your iPhone comes with a Safari browser. I very rarely use it. I use Chrome. I use Chrome on my desktop computers as well, and I just like that environment. So I find myself using chrome and Safari.
Your iPhone also comes with FaceTime built-in for those audio/video calls, but I find that a lot of my friends and folks that I’m fully with you Skype. So I have Skype on the inside of FaceTime. I do use FaceTime, and I do use Safari, but instead of Safari, I find myself using Chrome a lot, and instead of FaceTime, I find myself using Skype a lot.
I don’t want to read a long book on my iPhone, but there are times when I really do enjoy book and novel kind of content on my iPhone. In addition to the stuff that you can get through iBooks, I spent a lot of time on Audible this link to audiobooks. I drive; my commute is an hour each way, so I find myself listening to audiobooks. So the Audible app is free. Then you have to buy the books. I also find myself using the Kindle app a lot. I have a Paperwhite that I use at home for reading books, but there are times when I’m very into a book and I’m standing in the line at the grocery store and I want to read a few pages. So I fire up the Kindle app on my iPhone. Both Audible and Kindle are free, you have to pay for the content, but they are free apps that are pretty cool for your phone to make it a little bit fancier.
Recently I started using Voice Dream a lot. Voice Dream is kind of a generic e-book reader, and it costs $9.99. So we’re talking about a $10 app, but the things that I really like about it is if I have a textbook or articles or a magazine, I can scan those into a PDF, drop it into Dropbox, tell Voice Dream to go get it and read it out loud in a very clear voice with some visual highlighting. There are a lot of times when I’m driving back and forth to work, and I want to listen to longform content. I’ll simply scan it into work into a PDF, stick it into Dropbox and ask Voice Dream to read it for me. It’s a pretty good way to get access to those kinds of documents. It reads EPUB and rich text and a lot of other kinds of formats as well. I’m really happy with Voice Dream as a reader for somebody like me who sighted but wants to have audiobooks.
The last thing I want to talk about today is actually something that’s not working for me, but I want it to. I’m very interested in Launch Center Pro which is a $4.99 nine cents app that allows you to kind of create some very quick hotspots on your screen to launch turn apps. The idea behind Launch Center Pro is you can have one set up the phone, he touched the phone icon on the bottom part of your screen and you slide your finger around to up to about 12 different speed dial numbers that you have set up. You can also do that with email. You can touch a button and it will give you 12 different rapidfire email addresses. You can also do that with photographs. They take a picture and you can tell it to take your most recent picture and send it to Facebook or as a text message or into Twitter. The challenge that I have – I love the concept behind Launch Center Pro, I don’t find that is compatible with enough of the applications that I used to make it really helpful. Go to still mess around with Launch Center Pro and maybe I’ll have an update to the show at some point and let you know if I figured it out. I love the concept because you can put your thumb on the screen and drag it around to different categories were different areas of the screen and have different access to shortcuts, but I’m just finding that is not working well for me.
An episode about tricking your iPhone wouldn’t be complete if I can also mention our partners. Head on over to BridgingApps.org to learn more about all kinds of assistive technology, special ed come and apps for folks with disabilities. And check out AppleVis.com where you can learn everything you need to know about apps designed for folks were blind or visually impaired, and especially those who use voiceover.
So that’s a quick rundown of some of the things that I do on my iPhone to trick my iPhone and make it a fancier iPhone instead of using some of the built-in apps. Again not everything here is going to be compatible with voiceover, but if you want me to check one of those apps, let me know and I’ll be happy to do that. You can give us a call on our listener line at 317-721-7124. You can shoot us an email, tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Or you can shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject. Tell me how you trick your iPhone. I would love to know what apps you using to really maximize your productivity and make your iPhone work the best for you. That’s it for this special episode of assistive technology update. Next week will be back with our regular format. Until then, I hope you’re doing well.
Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? Call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Looking for show notes from today’s show? Head on over to EasterSealstech.com. Shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject, or check us out on Facebook. That was your Assistance Technology Update. I’m Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana.