One of my very favorite Mac utilities, Noodlesoft’s Hazel released an update this week with several interesting feature addtions. You can now add sequential numbers to your rules and reference a source folder allowing you to mirror folder structures when moving and copying files. The update is free to registered users and a new license for Hazel is $22. You can learn more about Hazel at my review here and one of my favorite Hazel workflows here.
A long time ago I resigned myself to the fact that I will buy the long fabled Apple Tablet if it is ever emerges from the land of make believe. So my observactions of the whole JooJoo fiasco have been sporting at best. Andy Ihnatko, as usual, nails it.
I’m looking forward to giving a warm-up of my “Mac at Work” presentation on December 16 at the Irvine Spectrum Apple Store at 8:00 a.m. Yes, I know it’s early but at least the store will be quiet and free of shoppers. See you there.
Reports are coming out that Apple has softened its stance toward third party iPhone application developers. It has begun to approve video streaming applications (bet I’m not the only one waiting for Qik) and Macworld reports Apple is even letting applications with private API calls through (temporarily at least). While this is great news for developers, I suspect Apple’s laser focus on the user experience will prevent it from ever opening the floodgates like other mobile providers are doing. That is a good thing for those of us who like things to work. Still, it is nice they seem to be backing off some of their more jack-tastic moves of late with respect to the App Store. At this point they’ve had long enough to sort out the deluge. Let’s hope this is the first step.
I will be speaking again at the American Bar Association’s TechShow in Chicago March 25-27, 2010. For any tech-minded attorneys or legal professionals, this conference is ground zero. Every year they assemble a fantastic group of speakers and vendors that help you find out how to practice more efficiently and take advantage of the most recent technology.
My sessions this year will include using a Mac in a PC firm and using technology for settlement and mediation. I will also be participating in the open forums concerning the iPhone and other Mac related topics. You can learn more about the conference here.
I am a big fan of the voice recognition software. I use Nuance’s Dragon Dictate on the PC and MacSpeech Dictate on my Mac. I was very pleased to see that Nuance, the developer of the Dragon engine, has released a Dragon Dictate iPhone app. For now, at least, it is free. I immediately downloaded and tried it out. Indeed, this post was written using it.
With no training whatsoever, the application immediately began recognizing my speech. This application does not perform the speech recognition on your iPhone but instead sends the voice file to the Dragon servers which do the heavy lifting and then send it back. It is all rather seamless. However, in order to work, you must be on a wi-fi or internet connection.
The only frustration is that it only works in short bursts. After two or three sentences, it will stop, send the voice file to the Nuance servers, processes your blurb, then be available for you to resume dictation. It also doesn’t like swear words, as discovered by Andy Ihnatko.
If you’ve ever been curious about dictation software, go download it now.
BusyMac recently released version 1.1 of BusyCal. I really like this release. In addition to ironing out the wrinkles, BusyMac added 64 bit support, a mini-month calendar and three finger scrolling. The three finger scrolling in iCal (try it sometime) quickly became second nature on my laptop. I’m glad it is now in BusyCal.