apps
RIM Launches BlackBerry Screen Reader for the Visually Impaired
The Canadian company behind BlackBerry has launched what it calls the BlackBerry Screen Reader application. From the explanation provided at the launching, its main purpose is to assist visually impaired individuals. The free application allows BlackBerry customers an audible output based on the information that is displayed on the screen at that particular time. The application has already been released for the BlackBerry Curve 9350, 9360 and the 9370.
Some of the key features about this application that were highlighted are the support for core applications which is where users can easily access the more important BlackBerry applications including email, calendar, phone calls and others, Speech settings which is where users can customize the text-to-speech settings (volume, pitch and speech rate) and preferences for punctuation, verbosity and password security.
Thirdly are the keyboard shortcuts which allows users to set speech and audio preferences quickly and easily through physical keyboard shortcuts and finally, accessible documentation which allows users to access a guide for the application which is in HTML through a desktop web browser. Although the support for visually impaired individuals is something that many manufacturers recently have been focusing on, this comes just in time with BlackBerry’s announcement of its latest platform BlackBerry 10.
Apple is well known to be a company that continues to push the envelope when it comes to technological advancements and firsts. This time around, Cupertino has introduced the first ever automated security update for Mac computers in order to assist them in preventing attacks from recently identified bugs, which are also the very same bugs that that security researchers have pinpointed and warned against, as those could be the gateway for hackers to actually gain remote control of machines.
Over in New Jersey, District Judge William Martini has come up with a ruling that the police are not required to actually pick up a warrant before opening a fake Instagram account. This is because the bogus account could actually be used to receive pictures shared by a suspect, and some folks wonder whether this would require a search warrant to be issued beforehand. Not so, according to Judge Martini in his ruling that stated whenever Instagram users post photos on the site, they happen to be practicing “consensual sharing.”
In other words, users who put up photos on Instagram are more or less in the know that should they “follow” or “friend” others, they will also end up sharing their pictures with them. All in all, one should always be extra careful with whatever one shares with others online, as you can never quite tell how something might end up to bit you in the rear some day down the road.
Both iOS and Android number close to a million apps each on their respective app stores, which is one of the reasons why smartphone users flock to either operating system. Of course there are other factors, such as hardware, pricing, availability and so on, but it is safe to say that app availability plays a big role as well. Well Blackberry seems to think so as well as they have revealed that the Blackberry World app store currently sits at about 120,000 apps, which while still pretty small compared to iOS and Android, is a pretty huge deal considering that the platform and its accompanying devices were only launched earlier this year! Blackberry’s CEO Thorsten Heins praised the thriving ecosystem, which we guess was boosted by Blackberry’s efforts where they held events to encourage developers to submit as many apps as they can, and even offering monetary rewards on top of earnings for every app successfully submitted to Blackberry World. We can see that Blackberry is going for quantity at the moment, and we suppose there are quality apps within those 120,000, but for now it looks like as far as apps are concerned, they may very well be edging Windows Phone out of the picture!