ATMac

Articles related to Mac OS X which apply to all OS X computing platforms, including iMacs, MacBooks, Mac Pros, and any other Mac computers.

If you’re a digital cable TV subscriber in the United States you may have noticed the FireWire port on the back of your cable box. The most common assumption about this port is that it’s something for service technicians only but it’s actually something you can use to control your cable box, if you ask the right questions!

MacSpeech Dictate is a great program but learning so many commands all at once can be very intimidating. I’ve put together a full list of all the known commands for MacSpeech Dictate 1.5.*, ordered by their function, to help you learn and remember them.

The TandemMaster Morse-2-USB interface is a fantastic device which converts morse code entered by two switches into keyboard presses and mouse movements. It gives the user complete control of a computer, as much as any regular keyboard/mouse user would have and can be used on any computer, with no drivers or software needed to be installed on the computer itself.

Firefox generally doesn’t let you use a lot of OS X’s accessibility features, including the services menu and some of OS X’s regular keyboard shortcuts. Setting your Mac up to speak highlighted text when you press a key also doesn’t work in Firefox. The Firefox extension SpeakingFox fills this gap with some nifty context menu options to fill this gap.

It’s been announced that the MacSpeech company has been purchased by Nuance. Nuance are the company behind the Windows product “Dragon NaturallySpeaking“ and other recent Dragon products for iPod Touch and iPhone. So what does this mean for MacSpeech Dictate and the other MacSpeech products? What would you like to happen?

One of the major things that the MacSpeech Dictate family has been lacking is the ability to take pre-recorded files and convert them to text. Not any more: MacSpeech Scribe will do just that for you, with up to 99% accuracy.

The Mac Video Tutorial Subtitles Project captions Apple’s tutorial vdeos in multiple languages, including English. They want to make this great resource available to non-English speaking users, and to those with hearing impairments or language processing problems.

This video shows one way to create new commands for MacSpeech Dictate - using the “Menu Item” command type. The article also discusses using the “Press the key combo” command to accomplish things which have no menu entry.

It’s the last day of 2009, and I have some gifts for my wonderful ATMac readers. A LayoutKitchen resources page for KeyStrokes, Proloquo, and SwitchXS users, and five free postcards (real physical postcards!) to you can spread the new year cheer with your friends.

What would you do if you lost all your files because your computer’s hard drive failed? For less than $100 and with no technical knowledge you can have a backup of all the files on your computer, and you’ll never need to worry about hard drives failing and losing all your files.