Grandma's iPad - A user guide and review

I gave my 80 yo half-blind wheelchair bound arthritic mother her iPad.

She loves it. She's fascinated by it, her main complaint is that she loses track of time playing with it. She's using the Facebook.app (iPhone, double sized -- which is a feature, see below) to follow me and she composed her first email since her macular degeneration progressed.

She manages to drop it into conversations. The amazement and envy of a young supermarket employee is priceless.

As with her 2007 Mac Mini, which is increasingly hard for her to operate, I've written up a user guide for Grandma's Accessible iPad.

Very quickly (for time is short!) here are some related observations in bullet form:

• Games are a a good way to learn basic motions. She likes Solitaire, I paid a few dollars for an ad-free product.
• Ad-supported products are NOT elder-friendly. They're too unpredictable and confusing.
• Her devices are enrolled in MobileMe, one of our family accounts. I have a "GrandMa" user account on my laptop that syncs with that MobileMe account. That lets me remotely manager her contacts and calendar from my laptop. I'd use "Back to my Mac" from that laptop but I didn't have time to make it work with her ISP (currently blocks needed ports).
• Old-fashioned desktop-oriented web apps are the most accessible apps because they zoom very nicely. Mobile web apps are the least accessible low vision apps because they don't scale at all (pinch expand doesn't work) and they don't even have configurable fonts.
• Web apps that require authentication are a REAL problem. She absolutely cannot manage passwords. (Almost nobody can, really.)
• iPhone apps with retina-displays support set to double size are PERFECT for her. Very large UI, very simple UI.
• The more "features" in the OS the more troublesome. There's nothing in iOS 4 that is good for her -- it's just more complex (multitasking, "folders", etc). More features means more "traps" -- unexpected behaviors. (Like the "wiggles" if you rest a digit on an icon, but at least I could explain that.)
• It's really annoying that Apple made "zoom" (a very weak feature) incompatible with VoiceOver. They should at least use a rotor gesture for the VoiceOver screen blank feature so the triple finger tap could zoom.
• Apple's Mail.app is very hard to use with low vision. She has to pull out a magnifying glass (which is a feature of the iPad, they don't work well with desktop screens). Apple's font scaling only shows up in the message, nowhere else. It's really not a very user-friendly app.

See also these related posts (first 4 are iPad, 5th is OS X desktop):

• Accessible iPad - the best apps are web apps
• iPad user guide: accessibility and more
• iPad for low vision elderly
• Amazon Kindle for iPad - Accessibility fail
• OS X accessibility - radio shortcuts, shortcut cleanup, voice over and magnify
• OS X and Mac Mini tutorial and configuration guide - low vision elderly

What's wrong with Google Maps?

There's something weird going on with Google Maps. Twice on our family trip, once in Canada and once in the US, Google gave us very scenic but impractical directions. They were quite different from prior directions for identical routes. There were no road closures to explain the choices.

No, we weren't choosing the bicycle route.

It's as though Google's routing algorithms are mixing up bicycle and auto travel.

Weird. I assume it's transient, but it's very annoying.

PS. In a separate bug, Google has Sault Ste Marie Michigan and Sault Ste Marie Ontario merged as one location in their database. Any searches on Michigan locations get Ontario results.

Sync Hell: MobileMe contact sync bug - does Apple care?

Every few weeks, I run across an Apple bug so egregious that I can only conclude nobody there cares.

The MobileMe contact sync bug is one of those. As best I can tell only the first, last and perhaps company strings are used to match contacts when synchronizing. So if a contact has only an email address, then the match is on an empty string (null key). This produces many-to-many combinatorials, email addresses that grow with each sync until every empty name contact has every other empty name email.

This is an incompetent design. The responsible engineer and product managers should hand their head in shame.

iTunes 9.2 app update bug: The information on this page is outdated

There are a lot of suggested fixes on this page, but only one of them is good ...

Apple - Support - Discussions - Application update all Information ...

Does anyone know of a solution for the 'The information on this page is outdated. Click OK to refresh the page. If you have available updates after refreshing, click Download All Free Updates' message?

I open iTunes the go to the app store and click Download All Free Updates. It always gives me the message that the page is outdated, I have to click OK then it refreshes the page with the exact same app updates and I have to click Download All Free Updates again for it to continue.

This happens every time I have new app updates whether I launch iTunes or every time the iMac goes to sleep and I open iTunes when it was already running.

"Rangeshooter" had the simplest, safest tip. It worked for me. Quit iTunes, restart, try again to install. He suggests its related to iTunes running when a machine goes to sleep.

Other tips involved reinstalling iTunes, deleting apps, etc. They were much more invasive.

I've seen this error message in the past related to an old app, and deleting and reinstalling that app did the trick. This time it looks like a different problem.

Now we see how long it takes Apple to fix this. I've seen some of their bugs last for years.

Update 7/14/10: From Josh Bancroft via Comments, another fix:

After you get the "this page is outdated" error, click on your email address in the upper right corner, to access your iTunes account. It will prompt you for your password. Once you're on your account page, click Done, and you should be back at the "My App Updates" page. Now, updating all of your apps should work.

Thanks! This makes the bug sound like a DRM issue.

Update 7/25/10: Fixed in an iTunes update.

Retrospect Professional 8 backup of VMware VM corrupt on restore

I've been using Retrospect Professional 8 to backup a Windows 7 machine. That machine has VMware VM running.

There have been no backup errors.

Recently I had to do a restore of the VM. All seemed fine. The size was right. When I ran it, however, the VM was corrupt.

The VM is made up of many large files. I think Retrospect backed some up at different times, depending on metadata changes, file locked, etc. Normally that would be fine, but they all had to be the same version for the VM to work.

Fortunately I had a completely separate manual all-at-once backup done when VMWare was turned off. It was a few days old, but we didn't lose anything significant. Sometimes paranoia is a good strategy.

A cautionary tale! Virtual machine backup is tricky.

Curious OS X bug with audio CDs - missing track names on most machines

I have a CD-R containing music that, when inserted in a 10.5.8 machine shows track names. When I insert the same CD in a 10.6 and a different 10.5.8 machine I don't see the track names.

The machine that shows the track names is running iTunes 9.1 and is very old. The machines that don't show them are running 9.2.

It's 100% repeatable. I think it's either a bug with the new iTunes or something to do with old hardware.

Very strange.

Grandma's iPad stand

I wanted a stand so Grandma's iPad could show family photos while it charges.

I picked up the plastic frame shown here for $6 from a local hardware store. The iPad is in the $25 Griffin case (yes, it blocks the rotation lock, the power switch is beneath a tab so I just push on the tab) folded back on itself. The power cord plugs into the right side.



It works well. It's easy to add and remove the iPad without removing the case.