The Year That Was Pt. 2

Okay, these lists generally involve some kind of bias due to experience or familiarity or they held a wonderful birthday party one year at Showbiz Pizza. No wait, that was my voting for who took over as the president of the Sci Fi Club in High School. Never mind that last one.
For real, the general concept of these lists can border on lots of strange and unique factors. This post, however, is just me recognizing some stories that while not the biggest… well I just found them to be cool or interesting. My honorable mentions for the year if you will.
Solara
I do a lot of app reviews for our SPN show for Low Vision users “high Contrast”. That means I get to play with lots of apps and call it working by the way. While working this year, ahem, I tried many an app for nonproductivity. One such entertainment-focused iOS outing ended up becoming more than obbsession, it became more like something you would talk about in group meetings for those battling with OCD.
Solara, by Esper labs, is an innocent little tower building game that lulls you into a false sense of security that you can stop playing at any time. Any time you want to, just put that iOS device down and walk away. For me, and many on the SPN Staff, that wasn’t the case. The thing gets its tallons in you like some kind of Esper Dragon and holds on tight while you count down the minutes, hours and sometimes days before you can act on a particular game related milestone. Oh sure, there are battles with cute little people beating up things. And there are nice Game Center options and social connections to play with friends. But all that pales in comparison to the glory you feel when earning the right amount of gold to level up that character you didn’t know would be the key to victory on that dam story mission you have been staring at for three freaking days despite trying every party configuration mathamaticly possible to only end up losing and reading some generic thing that claims to be some kind of helpful “tip” for obtaining victory that… so yeah the game is fun and you should totally play it and all. Oh, and they are awesome with their commitment to making everything work with VoiceOver. Like describe in text what stores and costumes look like committed. Seriously, sstop reading and go get this thing already!
And to hear my interview with Paul from Esper Labs, go here.
http://serotalk.com/2013/07/24/serotalk-podcast-162-citation-needed/
AI Squared Releases ZoomText for Mac
Many on the internet said “Why?”. And Ai2 said to those critics “Why not?”. Despite those being the final words of Timothy Leary, no kidding: check Wikipedia, I give a standing ovation to a company who dared to do something on a platform that has built in screen enlargement. Of course, he says knowingly, the same thing exists on Windows. But, just because it has that Cat and now California inspired Operating System on it, the story becomes instantly more noteworthy as few are trying to make a dent in that OS beyond the “make your pointer huge” variety. Tenacity, in 2013, thy name is Ai Squared.
To learn more about ZoomText for mac, visit…
http://www.aisquared.com/zoomtextmac/
And to hear the awesome Maurie Hill, from the Zoomed In blog, in audio form… listen to “High Contrast” found on the SeroTalk blog.
http://serotalk.com/?s=high+contrast
APH no longer sells a cassette player,
Nothing seals the deal for me on what was, and what will be now, more than this story. How ubiquitous these things were to anyone over the age of 30 can’t be summed up in prose. It was just something you had. Like a slate and stylus or bold-lined paper or O&M lessons or a bad date. You had one and it might be a good thing because at some point you would need to listen to, or record, something very important and it may take that half speed tape to do that with before you’re next class. But I digress. This thing could have come in the mail with sample boxes of Tide. Or, perhaps it did in some subdivisions depending on the mail schedule. And being dependable was what this thing exceled at for many years. Everyone had one, we all made really dumb experimental radio shows with them and it was always a bit of divine intervention when someone you knew would let you borrow theirs because you left yours at home. Good night sweet prince, let Angels bulk erase you to thy rest… R.I.P.