Victor Tsaran | guitars | music | technology | and more

Although I generally keep this blog as close to music-related issues as possible, I could not resist to take some time and share my first impressions of the recently-released (well, as early as today) iPad, a new device from Apple. I may later expand on some of the notes below, but for now here is a quick summary of what I found.

1. There are not too many changes to the Voiceover screen reader (same voices, same gestures) except for:

• When in “keyboard mode”, Voiceover will now spell phonetically the letter you are touching. This is useful in situations where it may be hard to hear the difference between similarly-sounding letters such as “b” or “v”. This is a very welcome feature, in my opinion.
• Voiceover will intonate (raise the voice pitch) on uppercase letters better than before. It will also lower the pitch when speaking names of controls such as “dock” etc.
• When in dialogs with multiple sections, eg “settings” screen, Voiceover prefixes every section with the heading such as “apps”, “iPad apps” etc. You can then use “browse by heading” gesture to move between those sections.
• There is a new gesture (at least I didn't know about it before) which allows you to scroll through long lists of items continuously.

2. I noticed that there are new sounds when using Voiceover, which may be significant for some.
3. iBooks store is fully accessible, as promised. The only feature I could not get working is the one that allows you to pull the definitions from the built-in dictionary when tapping on a word in the book. I didn't play much with it so there may be a work-around. You have to tap twice and hold to pull down the respective menu, but the options in that menu do not seem to read with Voiceover.
4. iPad is a great device for those who rely on screen magnification because of the built-in Zoom feature. With Zoom you can modify any screens of the iPad and apps even if they do not natively support magnification. Needless to say that bigger screen estate helps tremendously when using Zoom because more information can fit on the surface as compared to that on the tiny screen of the iPhone.
5. iPad feels really great in your hands and works well with Apple's Bluetooth keyboard. Keep in mind that the keyboard will only work in editable areas and cannot be used to navigate through iPad's interface.

I can't wait for the next iPhone update to come out so that we can get all the same features.