NEW RESOURCES

IBM has released a tool to help app developers make sure their programs can used by people with disabilities. “The tool, which can be used while the app’s code is being written, automatically checks an app for features that like keyboard spacing, color contrast, and focusing of elements—the kind of design considerations that can make it easier for people with diminished sight to read it. It’s not just about visual elements, either. IBM’s tools also aids in integrating more speech recognition software into apps—it makes sure a user can navigate an app using only voice commands, for instance.”

The state of Iowa will get a public digital photo archive of its history at the end of the month. “FORTEPAN IOWA will launch in March 2015 with at least 2,000 photos in the archive. Many of these have been obtained with the assistance of students in UNI’s Interactive Digital Studies (link is external) program. The photos represent the broad span of the twentieth century, and contain images of everyday life from across Iowa: recreation, family gatherings, fairs and festivals, political events, agricultural activities, business and innovation (e.g., the archive has extraordinary photos of the earliest John Deere facilities), education, and much more.”

Now available: an app for highlighting and tweeting screenshots of text. “A pair of Twitter vets today launched a handy mobile application called OneShot that makes it easier to share screenshots of text to Twitter, along with your comment and a link to the page in question. The new app also optionally allows you to crop the image, highlight a selection of text, and even add a brightly colored background to make your screenshot stand out better when displayed in Twitter’s stream.”

The Digital Library of Georgia has launched an archive of north Georgia historical newspapers. “The North Georgia Historic Newspapers Archive provides online access to six newspaper titles published in three north Georgia cities (Dalton, Gainesville, and Rome) from 1850 to 1922. Consisting of over 33,000 newspaper pages, the archive provides historical images that are both full-text searchable and can be browsed by date. The site is compatible with all current browsers and the newspaper page images can be viewed without the use of plug-ins or additional software downloads.”

USEFUL STUFF

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Twitter has launched embeddable video. “YouTube has let publishers embed videos for years, but starting Monday, tweets on twitter.com began sporting an embedded video market generator that publishers can copy and paste into their stories. The feature is under the ‘more’ prompt, which leads you to generate HTML code.”

Google has released a new version of Contacts. It’s not available for Google Apps customers yet, which seems to be standard for Google nowadays.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

ISIS supporters are making threats against Twitter employees.

Are we going to see government channels on IFTTT? “New terms of use means that U.S. government agencies can create their own channels that demonstrate to end users and developers what can be achieved by using government APIs and open data. The process is interesting for any API or SaaS provider that hopes to work with any level of government in future.”

Over on Medium, Steven Levy has a huge article on Marissa Mayer and what’s happening at Yahoo.

YouTube now has an NCAA March Madness channel.

Another day, another horrible security problem. “Security experts have discovered a potentially catastrophic flaw that for more than a decade has made it possible for attackers to decrypt HTTPS-protected traffic passing between Android or Apple devices and hundreds of thousands or millions of websites, including AmericanExpress.com, Bloomberg.com, NSA.gov, and FBI.gov.” Good morning, Internet…

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