Whenever my daughter wants something she just says “papa can you get ‘whatever she wants‘ for me in the box”. The box she is referring to is the box in which UPS delivers the goodies and she is asking me to order it online. This gives an idea that how important computer access is for me.

My hands are so weak that it is impossible for me to use a regular keyboard and mouse/trackpad. As a result of this weakness I have to use a switch to access the computer. A switch is small device that sends a signal when activated. There is wide range of switches to choose from, and the one I use is called a bean switch. It just needs a light touch to activate. The switch is connected to a usb device called a switch interface. A switch interface is designed to convert the signal from the switch and send it as a mouse click to the computer. Switch interface can generally emulate key press or a mouse click or a joystick. And again there is a wide range to choose from. I am currently using a switch interface called Swifty.

On the software side I use a scanning program called SwitchXS. SwitchXS is activated when I press the switch and with few presses it allows me to do anything on the computer. I am also using a predictive typing software called KeyStrokes to help with typing. This screen shot will give you an idea about how it works.

The way scanning works is: the first switch press activates SwitchXS which in turn starts scanning a panel. I then press again when the scanning line highlights the row which has the function I want to use. SwitchXS then starts scanning the row and I press again when it highlights the button for the function I want.

To a regular computer user this might sound slow and tiring but the fact is that it is not and with some clever scan panel design I can do things faster and easily. I have designed two scan panels to make my life easier. here is one for general computer use.

This is the one I use for typing.

When time to use a speech program comes, I simply need to add a text to voice software to the mix making my Mac a full-fledged AAC. And in future if my current switch does not work for me any more than all I need to do is get a different type of switch that will work!

As part of preparing for future, I started exploring software and hardware solutions which can help me to use a computer after my hands give up. There are various tracking devices (mouse alternatives) available in the market. The one I’m looking at is a headmouse variety. You control the mouse pointer by moving you head. One of such devices is SmartNav from NaturalPoint. It costs $499 and provides basic mouse pointer functionality. There are two other brands (you can see them here), but they are way expensive.

So headmouse takes care of moving the mouse pointer, but what about clicking? It turns out there are both hardware & software based solutions for it. The software solution is called dwell clicking and the software ‘sends’ a preset click if you dwell over a region (like icon) for an adjustable time (like 1 sec). These software range from $99 to $199. You can see them here. There is a free version as well. It’s called Point-N-Click. The hardware solutions are called ‘switches’. You can connect the switch to your computer and it can then ‘send’ the click when you press it. Again have a look at them here. Prices for switches range from $30 to over hundred.

How about typing? Well there is a software for it too. It’s called On-Screen-Keyboard (OSK). You can see comprehensive list of such software here. Over last couple of days I have looked at each one of them and haven’t found one which I like. The one that comes close to my liking is be-Key. All of them are costly, they start around $199 and can go anywhere up to $500. I think these OSKs are just priced too high and don’t provide functionality that measures for the price charged. I mean you can buy a operating system for $199, but if you want to buy an OSK then be prepared to shell out lot of cash. If you are interested in writing a functional OSK, then let me know, I’m all for it. There is a free version as well, it’s called Click-N-Type. Bottom line: pay lot of money to just be able to type one or two words per minute. 

I could definitely use one of these. It will nice to have a robotic arm around to help me with stuff in future.

More Details: Researchers Develop "Brain-Controlled" Wheelchair Robotic Arm

Being a geek by profession, I find it hard to not talk about technology. From time to time I will post about technology on this blog. So here are my impressions about Microsoft’s latest offering called Windows 7. I downloaded the public beta yesterday and installed it as well.

Installation

Installation took about 1 hour and went smoothly. I installed on a MacBook which was already running Windows Vista Ultimate. I did the upgrade version of install, so was worried about boot camp drivers. But the fears were baseless, not only did Windows 7 install without any problems, but it used the boot camp drivers as well. As a result I didn’t had to do any post install “cleanup” as well. My other installed programs are working fine as well.

Desktop

Desktop look and feel is same as that of Vista, except for one major thing: the taskbar. Here is a snapshot of my desktop

Taskbar

Taskbar has gone under some major changes. It looks really sharp and has lot of cool features. Here is how it looks

Notice how the running app is only shown as an icon. Windows 7 groups all running instance of the application under one icon. If there are no instances running then icon looks something like:

See how IE icon’s look is different from explorer and MSN messenger’s icon. If I want to see a snapshot of all IE windows then, I can do it by moving mouse over IE button. Here is how the snapshot looks:

Taskbar has new feature called “pin/unpin”. It is very similar to MacOSX’s dock feature. Say you start an application which doesn’t have a shortcut on taskbar, and you would like to have it stay on the taskbar for easy access. Then all you have to do is pin it up to taskbar.

On the opposite if you want to unpin already pinned application, then you again right click on the icon and select unpin.

Taskbar allows you to change how icons look, in case you don’t like the new feature. Just right click anywhere on the taskbar and choose properties.

Desktop Preview

In above screen shot you can see an option called “Use Desktop Preview”. This feature is useful to take a peek at your desktop. All toy have to do is hover over you mouse to the end of taskbar and this is what you get

Right-Click for options

For running applications, if they offer a right-click context menu, then it can be accessed by right-clicking on the application’s icon. Here is one for MSN Messenger

Wireless Options

One of my biggest complaints about how a user has to go through confusing menus to choose a wireless network to connect to. Well not so in Windows 7. Clicking on the wireless connection icon in the notification area brings up the list of available connections and an easy way to connect or disconnect.

Well folks this is for this time. If anything good pops up, I will write about it. In short it’s more like adding eye candy to the existing Vista platform.

Yesterday I got a legitimate fully unlocked iPhone 8GB from Hong Kong. After opening the package, I just popped in my ATT GoPhone sim and it worked. Even though the phone was brought from Hong Kong, it’s locale was set to US-English, so didn’t had to do anything with the regional settings. In case you didn’t know, iPhone is available in Hong Kong for sale without any contract. You can read more about it on Gizmodo. The reason I got it from Hong Kong is because I hate cell phone contracts and am not in a big need of a data plan.

From Future of Things:

A surgical procedure performed by a team from Boston University, Massachusetts led by Professor Frank Guenther, has enabled a mute man to speak again. An electrode implanted in the patient’s brain made it possible for the patient to produce vowels by thinking them, using a speech synthesizer. In the future, this breakthrough may help patients with similar injuries produce entire sentences, using signals from their brains.

Will there ever be a implant similar to this to help me out?

Over the past weekend I moved away from Mac to Windows. I have a MacBook, which now proudly runs Windows Vista Ultimate. There are many reasons for switching to Windows, but I won’t list them here.

One of the things I was annoyed with is that I have to enter the address in my GPS manually. I didn’t find anything that will "send" the address to GPS from my computer. For my upcoming trip to Hawaii, I wanted to add lot of addresses, and typing them in would be pain. So while playing with Google maps I found this neat trick.

1. Connect you GPS to the computer (using USB)
2. Browse to Google maps and find your address, this is particularly useful when you are planning your trip online. In such a case you can find the address online, and locate it in Google maps.
3. Now click that "Send" link
4. Clicking on send will bring up this box:
5. Choose GPS and the brand. For now it’s only available for Garmin, Pioneer and TomTom.
6. Click send. This will take you to get GPS manufacturer page which will do the remaining.
7. Done.

This saved me a lot of time. If you own a Garmin device, you can also read about it here. In case you own a BMW or Merc, you can send it to the car as well.

Any site that asks you to login, does provide a way for you to logout as well. I have found that it’s easy to find the login button because the login page is at times very simple. But how about logout? I am always frustrated to find the logout link after I login. Below are some examples of my frustration. Notice how some sites have different words for this link, ex: logout, log off, sign out… Because of different wordings, it’s hard to find it and over that each site has their own style, making the link’s position, look and feel different. I don’t blame the site developers for this, as they are developing the site in their own silos. But can there be a W3C guideline for placing the logout link/button always on the top right making it easier for site users to find it?

I will be traveling to Hawaii in October. During this trip one of the places I want to visit is the Polynesian Cultural Center. So as geek traveler, I did my duty and pointed my browser to their site. While I was shopping around for tickets, I noticed this:

It was just hilarious to see the discount. I don’t know what the site developers were thinking. I my opinion, user interface should be designed with the user at the heart and not the geek. I am pretty sure it doesn’t take more than a function call to round these numbers.

Have you ever tried using two monitors with MacOS X? Recently I tried and was really frustrated. The reason of my frustration was the menu bar, there is no way to get the menu bar on second monitor and if you ever need to access the menu bar from an app running on second monitor, you need to go to the first monitor. Clearly this is a failure of the OSX UI. One more reason to switch back to windows.