A hand (but too many fingers)

Although I gave mum the iPad in November, progress has been slow. You can't really appreciate just what a change it is to move to a touch screen device like an iPad, especially for someone who was only ever an occasional keyboard and mouse user. Picture the trouble people used to get into with a mouse when they reached the end of the mouse mat and didn't know where to go with it and transfer that to an active surface like a touch screen. Telephone "support" is also difficult because talking to her about it - asking her to describe what is happening or trying to direct her is made more difficult when there's no common vocabulary and it's not even clear which of the things on the screen will respond to being touched. I hadn't really noticed that somewhere along the line there stopped being a clear distinction between 'buttons' and text. Everything is done with comparatively subtle changes of colour.

I was reminded of this today because mum had become so frustrated with it that she asked me to bring back the computer that she'd asked me to take away and clean before she gave it away. I thought there's no way an iMac running OS9 will be able to open Facebook (true, it couldn't). It would need to be upgraded to OSX. So I installed 10.1 and noticed how obvious all the elements of the interface were. Big glowing buttons. Anyway 10.1 was no good. Safari wasn't launched until 10.2 so I installed that. Seems to work although I can't be sure because it hadn't finished all the updates by time I had to head home. So it can't be used yet. Anyway, I need her to persevere with the iPad. Frankly, if you can't get on with an iPad, I don't see how adding a keyboard and a mouse to a near obsolete computer (with its 320MB of RAM and 10GB drive) is going to help. No more than I thought Windows XP on a netbook would have been a help.

But I did get to the bottom of one of the problems - look at the hand. I persuaded her to tuck those spare fingers away. They've been touching the screen and causing mayhem with zooming, unintentionally clicking links and 'pressing' keys when typing passwords.

Also had an interesting experience with the dangers of in-app purchasing. She downloaded (or rather she let Ewan download) a silly talking giraffe because it was free but the thing was hardly on the iPad before Ellen was running amok (unwittingly) buying add ons while the password was cached. To be fair, it did ask for confirmation but Ellen was just clicking OK with abandon.