Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard, the development nickname for Macintosh OSX version 10.6, is available for sale today.
It has new accessibility features.

PCWorld article on these.

I’m particularly interested in the mirroring the screen with the trackpad feature. The trackpads on the new unibody laptops are huge. And I recall that Apple has patents on some haptic feedback touchscreen ideas. Could a built-in braille reader in the Macbook be possible?

Must remember to do a blog post about Windows 7 when it comes out.

Text-to-speech under attack

In case you were not aware, Amazon’s Kindle 2 electronic book contains a text-to-speech feature that reads e-books out loud using synthesized speech.

Amazon's Kindle 2 e-book

People with vision impairments or who are otherwise unable to read can download the newspaper or a novel from anywhere (it uses 3G over the cell-phone network) and it will read it aloud.

Cool feature, right?

Roy Blount Jr, president of the Author’s Guild doesn’t think so.

Apropos to nothing

It would appear that the jet pack situation of the 21st century (i.e. the lack of jet packs) is on its way to resolution.

It’s less a commuter vehicle than a $130,000 variant on water-skiing/parasailing, but clever nonetheless. Makes me feel a little more Jetsons.

It’s 2009

So what does “21st century” mean?

Jet packs

Jetpack

and

flying cars, of course.