Cory Bohon

I’ve been extremely vocal in my support of Net Neutrality. After all, I even wrote my English proposal on it over the spring semester! I want the Internet to remain the one place where I can go to access unfettered information/data. I don’t want anyone sniffin’ my packets and I definitely don’t want my ISP to limit my quality of service because I stream videos or download legal information via BitTorrent.

Today could be the start of a great time for Net Neutrality supporters (and c’mon, who doesn’t support neutral access to the Internet?). Today the FCC announced that on Monday they will propose new “rules” regarding Net Neutrality at a speech in New York. The AP gives the full details about the story. One important note they hit on is the fact that this could work, if the rules are detailed enough that the ISPs can’t wiggle around them and find loopholes.

No matter if you support/oppose the Obama administration, you can at least say that the administration is trying to get things in order on the technology front. And this fight probably would have went absolutely no where if consumers hadn’t spoke up.

Google Books is a great project that has been around for years, but Google received a lot of gruff about agreements between publishers. Although they’ve now settled a lawsuit. Today Google published a video about a feature of the new Google books that will be rolling out soon. They will be using an Expresso Book Machine to print out of copyright books on demand for pennies per page. Watch the video above or on YouTube to see the machine in action.

Last week I started working on a research project with Professor George H. Williams at the University of South Carolina Upstate. We’re trying to find out the best practices for developing accessible web sites while keeping Digital Humanities in mind. We are attempting to turn Omeka, a CMS for digital cataloging, into the most accessible form of accessing scholastic information no matter a persons disability.

While I was thinking about the different techniques we could use to make these accessibility options available, and I pondered a cool idea. What if, in the same way we can use OpenID to log into multiple websites, we could use a standard accessibility options “plug-in” that anyone could install/code into their site to make it more accessible. Different preferences, like the ability to use a screen reader or use a braille display, could be carried from one website to another without the user having to setup these options again.

Perhaps this task could be completed easily with a Firefox extension that could communicate with the code on the website to load a specific CSS file that would allow for better interaction with a screen reader or braille display.

There is the possibility that someone has already come up with and implemented this idea of a tool for universal web accessibility, and if you know of a project that currently does this same thing or does it better, feel free to leave a comment and let me know!

I would like to give a big “Thank You” to all of my readers and followers for the support you’ve shown over the past 3 years. It has been quite a journey for me beginning to write applications for Mac/iPhone, blogging at TUAW, and beginning my college career. Without my readers, I would not be where I am today. Of course, life is full of changes, and today I’d like to tell you about one of those changes.

As some of my readers may recall, I wrote a few articles for Mac|Life last year. Today, however, I started writing on Mac|Life’s website. You will be able to read my posts over there (I’ve already written two). I will mostly be writing Apple-related news, but you might also see me write articles of other interest.

In addition to reading my posts at Mac|Life, you can also read my rants on my Twitter feed (I’m @coryb).

I have a few more exciting projects I’m working on, but I’m not quite ready to announce anything just yet. For the latest, read this blog or follow me on Twitter.

Thanks for following!
-Cory

I have been talking about this cool little application since it first launched, and it was updated just yesterday with even more features! I’m talking, of course, about Nmobile from Njection.com. This GPS-enabled application gives you a turn-by-turn like display of police speed traps and school crossings.

The app gives you speech notifications of upcoming speed traps, and also lets you know the distance. If driving with your iPhone unlocked is not your cup of tea, the developer also allows for the application to still work while the iPhone is locked. One of the main points of this new version is the ability for brick-and-mortar retail stores to advertise and give coupons to users. Based on your location, you will be able to get coupons for local stores — the ads will be delivered directly to your phone to the application. The location-based ad engine will launch on July 20, 2009.

This very useful application is also very free and works with iPhone 3.0. Check out the new version today on the iTunes App Store [iTunes link].

While some might say that this application is comparable to apps like Trapster, in my testing, I have faired better in using Nmobile.