sinéad's lifestream

As promised the HTC Legend (thank you Meteor) is now up for auction on ebay. Proceeds from this eBay auction will be donated to the Irish Autism Action charity. The reason I choose this charity is because I wanted to highlight the need for the donation and recycling of used iPhones and iPod Touch, for children with Autism, so they can avail of the incredible Grace App – Picture Exchange for Non-Verbal People

A simple picture exchange system developed by and for non-verbal people allowing the user to communicate their needs by building sentences from relevant images. It can be customised by the individual using their picture and photo vocabulary with the user taking photos and saving pictures to the app.

The application works in real time and allows the user to select their preferences, then rotate the device to present a full sized sentence to the listener – who will read it with them and respond to their request.

The beauty of Grace is that it ensures the interaction of the user with the listener, and mutual understanding of the user’s real needs help to increase communication opportunities and build trust.

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I had set myself a challenge to swap my iPhone for a HTC Legend for a whole week and I completely failed. After day 4 struggling with what had evolved into over-complexity I just gave up and happily retreated back to the “evil” non-open source iPhone and heavily policed iTunes.

During this experiment I also had to discontinue using the Meteor network due the 2G to 3G handover problem (there’s a neat little video demonstrating this here) which left with me with no signal far too many times, but the phone worked perfect on O2. Hoping Meteor can fix that issue promptly, as many other HTC users are reporting this issue in the customer forums.

Day 4 With my Android

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I went along to a Meteor blogger event yesterday where we chatted about their new pay as you go data charges (250mb free if you top up by €20 per month, as well as free  Meteor texts – not bad at all) and us bloggers got to try out all the iPhone alternatives you could shake a stick at. They also sent me home with a HTC Legend.

Only last week I had tweeted about how I really wanted to try out an Android handset to do a compare and contrast against the iPhone. I usually change my phone on a yearly basis, and my iPhone 3G is nearing its first birthday, so trying out an alternative is a great way for me to discover if I should stick with Apple or not.

Before I got my iPhone a year ago I had always been a huge Nokia fan, what changed my mind was trying out Jen’s iPhone (she’s an avid Apple fan, so of course she had one months before me) as I was simply blown away by the web browsing experience, something that previous Nokia smartphones (running the Symbian operating system) I had owned simply didn’t compare to.

First Impressions of Android

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Twitter is a great place to share and receive information about all sorts of things and each of the users are entitled to control who sees their tweets. This is why you are able to either have a public account or private one. You are also able to block users that you don’t want seeing your tweets. However, this doesn’t work very well with public accounts because all the user has to do is sign out of Twitter and then visit your profile page to read all of your tweets, but I suppose this is pretty inconvenient, even annoying.

Recently Fianna Fáil, who runs a public account (obviously) blocked David the editor of Politics.ie. So, out of spite to Fianna Fáil, I have set up a new twitter account for anyone that has been blocked by them, this account will essentially tweet everything they do, except it will never block anyone, ever. You can follow this new account here.

This works because basically any public account on Twitter is the same as an RSS feed, you can even follow Twitter accounts in a feed reader (which is pretty handy if you don’t use Twitter but are interested in one or two people’s daily mutterings). To follow someone in a feed reader simply find the link to the RSS feed of their Tweets (underneath their followers mosaic) and add this URL to your feed reader the same way you would with a blog.

Now I’m no political analyst and won’t get into how ghastly it is for Fianna Fáil to block any member of the public from viewing their “informative” messages, but let this be a small lesson to them that they’ve absolutely no idea what they’re doing online.

Have you been blocked by Fianna Fail on Twitter? Has any other Irish political party started blocking members of the public online?