Good news for Mac fans

I know most of my readers use PCs rather than Macs. (Google gives bloggers statistics that reveal this sort of thing.) In fact, only about 10% of you are on Macs. This post is for you.

If you've upgraded to Mavericks, you can dictate now without sending the voice record to Apple to be deciphered. That's the old way of doing it. The old way works, of course, but you have to wait for Apple to respond -- and when Apple's servers are busy, you get no assistance and have to type the damn thing yourself.

But that was before Mavericks. Now, you can go into Settings/Dictation, turn on Dictation and then click the line below it, where it enables "enhanced" dictation. If you click this option, your computer will download nearly a gig of data, and then you'll have your own dictation engine on board. And you don't have to be online to use it. And it's quicker! You talk and it turns your voice into text almost as fast as you can speak. On my first try, it did everything perfectly.

How can anyone use a PC these days? They're relics of a long-gone dinosaur era.

Update: Curiously, I find it only works if I choose the option where I hit the Command key twice to engage Dictation. The other options don't work. Fine. I'll use either Command key.

Sometimes Siri gets drunk

Siri, Apple's virtual assistant, is usually reliable. But every now and then, it seems like she's dead drunk.

First, understand that Siri and dictation both use the same engine. If Siri understands your words, so does Mac's dictation function. I often speak to my iPad in the evening. I'll dictate an idea for a post, or a note for a novel. It's quite helpful.

The way dictation and Siri work is that when you speak you speak to your iPad (or computer), it records what you say and sends the recording to Apple, whose servers decipher its meaning and return text to you. As I say, it's usually quite good.

But when the circuits are busy -- like on a Friday night or, really, anytime after school lets out -- Siri screws up. Last night I tried to input a title for a post. I dictated "These people are onto something" and Siri returned "Are Pontoosuc". See what I mean? Drunk. I think it's wild how wrong it gets it. I mean, are pontoosuc? Well, I guess it got the "onto" part right.

Anyway, if this ever happens to you, just wait a moment and try again. If it still doesn't work, wait ten minutes. That should take care of it.

Okay, I'm officially in heaven

This is the joint! When I set that accessibility option on my Mac earlier today, to enable me to zoom the screen on my Air, I noticed another option.

I'd seen it before: "Invert colors". For some reason, those words never meant anything to me. I'd seen them many, many times. But suddenly I realized what it was for. I enabled it and now I can press a simple combination of keys to turn a white page with black letters into a black page with white letters. And I can toggle back and forth with ease.

Now the screen doesn't look too bright when I visit the NY Times or any other site that uses a white background. And this capability applies to all programs. So when I open a new Word doc at night, for instance, I can make that blinding white page black. Same goes for Mail. Those programs look way too bright to me. The problem was always that if you turned the brighness down, you lost contrast. But this accessibility option makes things crisp and clear -- without the eye pain! I couldn't be happier. This is the solution for my most pressing computer problem.

I'm writing this post on a black page with white text. It's soothing. This may mean nothing to readers but it's a dogsend for me.

PS: You do this through System Preferences/Keyboard/Keyboard Shortcuts/Accessibility. Then check the invert colors box. Voila. 

Green snowflake trails quite helpful

A Pinpoint cursor

I wanted to make an opaque title. Did I succeed? Yet it also describes what I want to talk about.

If you're on a Mac and using a very large screen (mine is 27 inches, and there are even bigger Mac screens) you may have experienced a problem with seeing the cursor. I sure did. I could see it at times but the damn thing was so small! It's from having a high resolution screen. In effect, the cursor disappeared all the time. I was forever moving my mouse to see if I could find it. This is especially pronounced when in a writing program like Scrivener or Word. Those I-beam cursors are gone on a big screen.

So I went to the Mac App Store, typed in cursor and voila! For $1.99 I got a program called Pinpoint. It lets you change your cursor all you want. I opted for one that leaves a trail of snowflakes when you move the mouse. (The flakes disappear instantly when you stop moving it.) I chose a bright green for the snowflakes because they're equally visible on light or dark backgrounds. That's another one of their cursor options pictured top-left. There are all kinds of circle-around-the-cursor cursors; that's just one of them. Meh, I like the snowflakes.

Problem solved. I always know where the cursor is now. Macs are cool and the App Store makes life on a Mac even better.

Free stuff for Macs

It's amazing that there are so many open-source applications out there for Macs. I mean, first Apple gives you 17 tons of useful software with a new Mac -- and then you can download major programs for free.

For instance, I always use NeoOffice instead of Microsoft Office. I don't want anything Microsoft on my Mac. NeoOffice is a great replacement for Word and you can even save files in .doc format to exchange with poor slobs who are merely on PCs. You can download it here.

I also found an open-source Mac alternative for Adobe's Illustrator, which I never found easy to use but nevertheless relied on for simple tasks. I was sad to lose the program's functionality when I switched from a PC to a Mac about five years ago. Thankfully, I recently discovered Inkscape, an open-source program that pretty much does the same things as Illustrator. Mind you, this one isn't even halfway to a 1.0 designation -- it's very much a work in progress. But for the simple uses I plan for it, it seems fine. You can download Inkscape here.

And finally, I've just located an open-source substitute for PageMaker. I used to be a PageMaker maven on my PC, making newsletters for tons of good-guy organizations. I can really work PageMaker. When I switched to a Mac I bought Quark Express but I can't even transfer it to the new computer I just got, and anyway I hated it. So I recently downloaded Scribus, an open-source Mac alternative to PageMaker and Quark. This one is beyond 1.0 so it's pretty stable. I haven't used it yet (and it seems it may be difficult for folks who aren't already familiar with desktop-publishing concepts) but it seems quite functional, at least to me. I grok what all the buttons are for. You can download Scribus here.

So much free stuff! My thanks to all the developers who worked so hard to make these programs available for mere mortals. May they live long and prosper.