the blog of a bear

this is where a bear will post stuff.

cell phones

people seriously had the balls to whine about this app going free?

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while trolling the tech blogs I frequent, I came across
this story
and for your sanity, I post it below. Comments, etc. to follow.

State of Touch Typing – Fleksy goes free
by fleksy on 15/2/2013
Fleksy was first released on iOS in July 2012. As we turn Fleksy into a free app 8 months later, we feel we are starting an exciting new chapter in our story, and we take some time to explain our decision.
Fleksy started from our own frustration when typing on today’s touch-screen devices – a frustration shared by two thirds of smartphone users today. Right from the start, we felt that typing was one of the functions that made smartphones feel not so smart.
We set the bar really high – a typing system that is so intuitive, you don’t have to always look at the screen to type. Just as you do on your laptop. And thus Fleksy was born.
We looked for a market to launch our technology to – a group that we felt would most benefit from our inventions, and arguably a group of users that would challenge us to keep innovating until we deliver on our promise. So we launched an app for blind users.
In a space of a just a few months, our users have propelled us from an accessibility app to being recognized as a mainstream technology and one of the biggest innovations to come to mobile devices in a while.
Firstly, we want to say a big and honest thank you.
We have always seen our keyboard as a universal technology, and as something that can help millions of users be more productive in their daily lives. We are today very happy to see that we are well on track on this mission, and we are working hard to integrate our technology in the next generation of hardware and software to come.
We realize that a good virtual keyboard is something users expect to be integrated on their device and be available in every application. This is by far the biggest request from our iOS users, and one that we can unfortunately not provide until each platform we target supports such functionality.
In our effort to bring Happy Typing to even more users, what we can do is make Fleksy on iOS free for everyone. We feel that making Fleksy part of the daily lives of many more people will help us continue to showcase how smartphones can be made both more accessible and useful for everyone.
Your App Store reviews, tweets, feedback messages, support, and advocacy can help us achieve this. Please, keep it up – there’s even a button in the app to do that!
We will continue to innovate and research, as well as support and update the Fleksy iOS app in the way you’ve come to expect from us. We stay fully committed to the iOS platform.
And as a final thought, we wanted to thank all those users who have downloaded and purchased Fleksy to date. We would have not been able to create or support the technology without your help, let alone expand our efforts to bring it to the hands of many more users.
If you haven’t experienced eyes-free typing, try Fleksy. We think you will never look back.
Thank you, again, from all of us here in San Francisco.
Happy Typing!
The Fleksy Team

OK, so let’s move on to the responses.
I’m apart of the
VIPhone
mailing list hosted on
google groups
and when the blog post I posted above is mailed out, this andy person replies with the following, and I quote the message for you.

—–Original Message—–
From: viphone@googlegroups.com [mailto:viphone@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Andy Baracco
Sent: Saturday, February 16, 2013 1:46 AM
To: viphone@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Fleksy is now free
This is the kind of thing that really pisses me off.
Andy

I replied to this fool, basically telling him the following, in list form.

  • companies have the right to make there apps free
  • what right do you have to complain about an app that’s gone free that you had to pay for?
  • if people like yourself hadn’t supported this app, weather at it’s original price of $15, it’s sale price of $9.95, it’s then reduced perminant price of $4.95 and the odd sale for $1.99, would the app have then gone free? a big fat no!

in summary, nock off the complaining, it’s unwarranted, and unnecessary.
I bought this app at a reduced price, as I caught a sale, would I have paid $15? Now that I’ve used it so much? Yes. Did I initially think it wasn’t worth the price? I’ll honestly say I did, but after I finally decided to bite the bullet and purchase it, I wouldn’t live without it. Will I complain that my support made this app free? Absolutely not. It’s the nature of the beast, and people need to remember this.
Thanks for reading.
Have a great night all.

nice going, HTC.

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Yep I haven’t been around in awhile. But today’s blogging starts out with this little ppiece of information about a security leak in HTC android phones. Here’s the article in it’s entirety. and all I gotta say is smooth move, HTC.

HTC Phones Suffer Major Security Exploit
Latest Update Provides Easy Access to Personal Data
by Karl Bode
The folks over at Android Police note that several HTC model smartphones suffer from a rather major security exploit that can give a hacker access to personal information, e-mail addresses, and your location. The vulnerability is part of HTC’s Sense UI and affects several popular HTC phones, including the EVO 4G, EVO 3D, Thunderbolt, EVO Shift 4G, MyTouch 4G Slide, and several more. The problem began with a recent HTC update that introduced a suite of logging tools that creates a HTCLoggers.apk file accessible by any app with Internet permissions. That provides easy outside access to:
•The list of user accounts, including email addresses and sync status for each last known network and GPS locations and a limited previous history of locations phone numbers from the phone log.
•SMS data, including phone numbers and encoded text (not sure yet if it’s possible to decode it, but very likely).
•System logs (both kernel/dmesg and app/logcat), which includes everything your running apps do and is likely to include email addresses, and phone numbers.
HTC was contacted on September 24th but has yet to comment on the vulnerability. “In my experience, lighting fire under someone’s ass in public makes things move a whole lot faster, which is why responsible disclosure is a norm in the security industry,” notes the website. Only stock phone firmware is impacted — users who have modified their Android HTC devices to run CyanogenMod are not impacted.
Update HTC is telling news outlets they’re “investigating” the security flaw.

according to further research, this issue only effects factory firmware for the android.
We’ll see what HTC does about this in the coming days.

welcome to open communication, pizza pizza.

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I love pizza, and hey, so does
james
So niftily enough
pizza pizza
one of the major pizza places here in canada has an iphone app.
Nifty, I thought, and hey, it’s free. no complaints.
Um, except their was.
The accessibility of this app, leaves their a lot to be desired.
With a lot of patience, you can find, and by trial and error make voice over read things, and you can put together an order, if using specials, but attempt to design your own pizza? not so much.
Buttons don’t read, the process is not explained, in short, pizza pizza didn’t design this app with the voice over user in mind.
So, I sent the following short and simple message to their iphone feedback address.

From: Shane Davidson
Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2011 4:45 AM
To: iphone@pizzapizza.ca
Subject: iphone app feedback.
To Whom this may concern;
I am writing you as a blind iphone user, who uses voice over, the built in screen reader.
The app would be useful to myself, and other blind iphone users if you took the time to make it usable with voice over.
At this time, some of the app is accessible, but it has a long way to go before it can be successfully used to order and manage previous orders with your company.
I am happy to help test this apps accessibility if your company is willing to build accessibility into the app so it works more flawlessly with voice over on the iphone, and other similar IDevices.
This is being posted as open communication on my own personal blog at
http://stickbear.me
and on another blog, welcome to knowwhere, that I help manage, at
http://www.the-jdh.com
so any response, or lack their of, will be read by a lot of users, both sighted and blind alike.
Thank you for your time and attention to this issue.
Sincerely;
Shane Davidson

In short, let’s see if pizza pizza cares enough to come up with a response or a reworked app with voice over support, shall we?
Feel free to comment, and give your thoughts on this app and things.

an early upgrade, a service provider change, all over stupidity., thanks, rogers.

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so thursday, I got paid.
Nifty, fantastic, wonderful.
Until my attempt to pay my
Rogers
wireless bill.
I now have this nifty thing that’s a debit/credit card all rolled into one.
Yeah US readers, you’ve had them for freakin’ ever, I get it.
Anyhow, so I decide, on a wim, what the hell, let’s use the credit card portion of this thing, pay this stupid bill, and go about my erands for the day, that included, in no particular order, and the fact that some of these didn’t get done not withstanding.

  • ram my foot up someone’s ass for driving like a fucking moron, totalling their car, and then wining to me because they decided to drive drunk. Thanks for that by the way, next time, don’t drive home drunk, k?
  • attempt the thing that involves picking up groceries, please note this counts on
    james
    mother giving more than 30 seconds notice when dropping by. We thank you for that, to.
  • Pay the rest of the outstanding bills, and curse at primus who’s automated system was down for maintenance.
  • find some form of sleep in their somewhere.

most of those got accomplished, in one form or another.
Back to the original topic here.
So I decide to pay the rogers bill. It initially goes through, then *there* system decides it’d be nifty to take a flying leap off a cliff and tell me my cards declined.
Leaving me in the middle of financial holy shitsville.
A couple phone calls later, determines that, no my cards fine, the funds were requested, then rejected.
Ok, back to square one.
Attempt it again, thinking maybe the system wants to play nice. Nope, not happening.
So I get a person on the phone, and basically tell them, here’s the situation, here’s what I did, your systems broke, I paid you, get your shit in order and fix it, or my business is gone.
Himmed and hawed with this frontline moron for 20 minutes, finally get tired of the crap, ram them through to james as I had other things to do and james is the account holder, and he goes a round or 2 with these twerps.
Accomplishes nothing, bounces to level 1 management. You guessed it, gets told we can’t help you even if it is our problem.
Requests next level, gets told, it’ll take 24 hours, his response? I’ll have a call by 11AM, or by 11:15AM you won’t have this account.
To make a long story short, my, james, our numbers, and our business will be as of somepoint today, no longer be with rogers.
We switch to the
apple iphone
and
telus mobility
so long, rogers.
related: I get to save money in the process, that’s nifty.
related number 2: I’m gonna attempt to break the poor store repts brain later today and have him turn voice over on for me. Yes, their *will* be audio, in the event amusement happens.
That’s it from here.

welcome to durable, much?

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so I’ve been eyeballing these iPhone tthings since voice over now comes built into the phone.
I got to play with a 3gs thanks to a friend I got to meet while in fitchburg.
Who ever knew a phone could
survive
a 1000 foot drop from a moving airplane.
Shows you apple’s durability, maybe?

a note to TMobile in the UK, this is the 21st century, not the 1990's.

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I was utterly appalled to read a story while browsing the news this morning that TMobile in the UK is
cutting
their data plans expinentially.

“T-Mobile in the UK has revealed a new fair use policy, cutting caps from 1GB and 3GB to 500MB, saying mobile browsing doesn’t include videos or large downloads. ‘If you want to download, stream and watch video clips, save that stuff for your home broadband,’ the company said.

In other words TMobile, at least in the UK, has decided to revert to the 1990’s.
Welcome to a step backwards, much?
It gets better.

Any user that goes over the new limit won’t be charged, but will be blocked from downloading or streaming for the rest of the month.”

why! this is the 1st I’ve heard of a provider *ctting* you off for exceeding your limitations.
Another thing, that needs to be answered, are you still gonna charge your customers the same prices? for a plan who’s issentially had it’s nuts chopped off by this?
TMobile UK, get your head outta your ass and get the hell back into the 21st century or get the hell outta the way.

attention ottawa citizen, a reminder, the IPhone's not that special, ok?

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as
james
posted
here
We’ve got everyone up in arms about this, well, a reminder to the
ottawa citizen
it’s
great
their was an arrest made, but the IPhone 4, isn’t specially adapted for the blind, the speech software is built into the phone even for you stupid sighted fucks to use, so enough already, ok?
Put the theves in jail, an move on with your lives.
We do thank the
rogers
employees for replacing the phone, but enough of this the software’s specially designed for the blind, and it only built into the phone for blind users, crap, because it’s not!
thanks for playing.

an open letter to wind mobile, gets sent for a second time. this time, from me, the actual customer.

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I’ve previously linked to the original
post that contains the letter
regarding this issue in multiple other places on this blog.
Take note that this post is dated october 10, 2010.
As of October 29, 2010, I called
wind mobile
regarding their not being a response to the original letter.
They provide me a ticket ID saying, oh we’ll look into it, fine, whatever.
I give them 48 hours, still nothing, so I call them back, the same run around, oh we’re looking into it.
So I finally get testy, and ring them up while I’m in the states, today.
I spent 20 minutes on the phone, most of it on hold, (not surprising.) and finally get put through to the back office, and speak to a manager their, who informs me that well your letter probably got ignored since james is not a customer.
I basically tell her outfront that because of this, even if you guys get out to petawawa neither of us will be returning as either knew or returning customers because of this incident.
I give you the resend in it’s entirety, minus the e-mail address I wrote to per the instructions of the manager at wind mobile.

From: Shane Davidson [mailto:va3duk@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, November 15, 2010 7:50 PM
Subject: a resend of the letter re: Wind Mobile’s fair usage policy, and accessibility concerns.
Importance: High
To whom this may concern,
I am contacting you at the instruction of kaieasha in your escalations/back office.
As you’ll see below, in a colaberative efort, myself and james, sent ken campbell, the CEO, the following letter on october 10th, 2010, and it is posted to
http://www.the-jdh.com
as an open communication, and referenced in multiple locations on my blog at
http://stickbear.me/blog
and this version will also herein be posted to my blog, and probably be referenced in james blog as well.
This to keep the lines of communication open, between you, and me, as the customer, and to attempt to show the public, that yes I am communicating with wind mobile, and when you write back, this will also be added to my blog linked above, as your answer to this letter.
I would like to make you aware that because of my pending move, I will have no choice but to move away from you as a company, but in light of it being over a month since this was initially sent and finally getting someone that cared enough to put me in touch with you, I may or may not return if you ever get out to the petawawa area.
This all depends on your communication with me, from hereon out.
Please remember all communications regarding this matter are either posted or linked to on
http://stickbear.me
and
http://www.the-jdh.com
With that said, here is the letter that still to this date has not received an answer.
Shane Davidson
From: James Homuth [mailto:james@the-jdh.com]
Sent: October 10, 2010 5:19 PM
To: ‘kcampbell@windmobile.ca’
Subject: Re: Wind Mobile’s fair usage policy, and accessibility concerns.
Mr. Campbell,
I’d like to draw your attention to a policy of a somewhat questionable nature. That policy, being your “fair usage” policy, grants Wind Mobile the authority to intentionally drop calls without warning after approximately the 2 hour mark. As a potential customer who has at one time considered switching to Wind Mobile, this policy has served only to confirm that, in the event I am in need of a change of carrier, Wind Mobile will not be on my list of potential alternatives.
In the first, at present you are the only company who currently disconnects customers, with or without warning, for perceived reasons of fair usage. Given how little network resources are actually consumed by a typical call over a typical cellular network, the reasoning behind this policy fails to be anything more than a perception–and, at the moment, not one that has been viewed favourably. In the second, as this restriction also affects users on your unlimitted packages, I believe advertising those unlimitted packages in light of such a restriction is misleading at best, and extremely dishonest at worst. And in the third, you are aware of customers’ genuine disapproval re: the dropping of calls by the major networks, who claim those calls are being dropped accidentally. To then announce in a “fair usage” policy that you will be intentionally dropping those calls indicates to me, as a potential customer of wind Mobile, that you are either ignorant of that fact, or simply unconcerned. In either event, this policy flies in the face of what I believe to be Wind Mobile’s intentions are re: differing themselves from the major carriers. We don’t need a carrier intentionally doing precisely what the major carriers regularly receive criticism for. We particularly don’t need it from a carrier who spent most of its pre-launch marketting time advertising itself as not like the major carriers. I would strongly encourage you to reconsider and correct what I see as a policy malfunction, as I am aware of a growing number of your current customers who, in light of this, are presently reconsidering their decision to remain with Wind Mobile.
My second concern is re: accessibility of information available on your website. Currently, both your terms and conditions and your “fair usage” policy are available only as PDF’s from Wind Mobile’s website. From an accessibility viewpoint, that is simply unacceptable. It is no guarantee that those without disabilities will be able to open and view PDF files, thus rendering them unable to access the afore mentioned documents. It is even less likely that, in the event the system in use is able to open and display the PDF files, a disabled person will even be able to read them. Which, again, virtually guarantees they will not be able to access the documents in question. You are encouraged, strongly, to consider converting the PDF documents to a more readable format, such as HTML, or have an HTML document available–and easily obtainable–in the alternative. Failure to provide this accomodation may leave you in violation of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, among other regulations.
Wind Mobile’s available offerings, these limitations notwithstanding, stand head and shoulders above Rogers, Bell and Telus–all of whom I have previously had dealings with. The removal of the restrictions outlined in this communication will, in effect, also remove the last of the major concerns I have re: possibly switching from my current carrier to Wind Mobile. I sincerely hope you will take this under advisement, and I will be available for further questions/comments on the issues addressed in this letter. Please also be advised that, due to the significance of the issues raised, this will be an open communication, viewable publicly at http://www.the-jdh.com. I will continue to address these issues on this website until such time as they are resolved. I look forward to further conversation with you on how best to resolve the issues in question.
Sincerely,
James Homuth

Let’s see what that does, this time, coming from me, as an actual customer, yes?
We’ll find out in the coming days.