Hi All, I noticed that Nebulous Notes, which is reviewed by Rose at the AppleVis site for iOS apps, is now gone free. It typically only goes free for 24 hours, which means that it will probably continue to be free for about half a day.
What's interesting is a recent change that they made to the Settings menu of this app that allows you to take advantage of features with improved accessibility. At the time Rose reviewed an earlier version one year ago, she wrote that the developer could have labeled one or two buttons more clearly, but you could tell what they are. Well, there is now a button in the Settings menu that allows you to customize your Keyboard Utility Bar with your own labels. This Keyboard Utility Bar is normally toggled off, and people have been using the app just for its ability to sync with Dropbox, and also (in the case of low vision users), select very large fonts for text (up to 50 pt), and choose the color of the text and background. But if you turn on the switch button for the "Keyboard Utility Bar" that is the first item in the Setting Menu, you get a "Customize Utilities" button that becomes undimmed just underneath this switch. And when you double tap that button, you get access to the list of macros that are active as extended keys in the "Keyboard Utility Bar" just above the top row of the virtual keyboard. Now, you can edit the list of active macros by double tapping the "Edit" button in the top right corner of the "Macros" window. That places buttons to activate the "delete" option to the left of each macro. I was going to delete some of the keys with label icons that VoiceOver does not announce from the list of active macros. Then I found that to the right of each macro description is a "Compose" button, and if I double tapped that button I'd get an "Edit Macro" window. The first field would be "Text to insert:" and would define a macro function. For example, the first entry is "$undo", and it's never announced by VoiceOver because the key uses an icon image. This icon is given in the next field, which is "Alias:". What is new is that I can double tap in the "Alias:" text field, use the delete key to remove the icon that VoiceOver can't announce, and then type in "Undo". If I save these changes, when I bring up the virtual keyboard with the "Keyboard Utility Bar" providing a top row of extra keys, flicking through the first key now lets VoiceOver announce the alias label I typed in, "Undo". Double tapping the "Undo" key acts just like Command-Z to undo an editing change with a Bluetooth keyboard. Similarly, the next button is "Redo", which act like Command-Shift-Z to put back an editing change. You probably don't want to keep all the macros that are activated, but there are some handy keys, especially now that you can label them with the functions you can read in the Macros menu. For example, there are arrow keys for moving left, right, up, and down through text that VoiceOver didn't announce because they were icons. Well, you can label these yourself, by deleting the present "Alias" icon, and typing in "left", "right", "up", and "down" for these macros. There are also macro keys for left a word or right a word entered as "$l-word" and "$r-word". (I've inserted a hyphen between the first letter and "word" to make this more evident, since the macro definitions pronounce this without the hyphen). Again, these keys were not announced because they use icons that VoiceOver doesn't pronounce. You can change the "Alias" labels for these keys, too, from their icons, if you want to use them. I'll just add that there are two lists in the "Macros" window, with an "Add Macro" button at the top that allows you to define your own Macro. (This is a button, even though it's not labeled as such for VoiceOver). There is a list of "Active Macros" and then a list of "Reference Macros". You can go through the list of "Reference Macros" and add any that you want to the "Active Macros" list by flicking the "cell add btn" button to the right of each entry. Some of the default macros are neat: there's a button labeled "date" that inserts today's date when you double tap that key, and a similar one for "time". There are too many option keys to easily fit at the top of the keyboard without some kind of scrolling left or right, and you have to do this with a passthrough gesture (double tap and hold, then swipe left without lifting your finger to get the other keys), so you probably just want to choose a convenient subset. Try this out, if you feel adventurous. As I said, it's currently a free app. I think that most users will want to simplify the "Keyboard Utility Bar" if they use this. Here's the link to the App Store entry: • Nebulous Notes (usually $2.99, free for a short time) by Nuclear Elements: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nebulous-notes-for-dropbox/id375006422?mt=8 There's also a free, Lite version of this app, which is Universal binary for both iPhone and iPad: • Nebulous Notes Lite: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nebulous-notes-lite/id392778235?mt=8 This app supports TextExpander snippets if you have TextExpander, and supposedly the latest version lets you define a key with your own TextExpander definition, too. HTH. Cheers, Esther <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to [email protected] You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/>. 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