ATMac

Posts about a specific piece of third-party software - anything that’s not part of OS X itself.

Speech-to-text software, sometimes known as dictation software, is something that lets you talk to the computer in some form and have the computer react appropriately to what you are saying. Here’s a rundown on the types of speech-to-text software that exist and what’s available for Mac OS X in these areas.

Have you ever wanted to make phone calls on the net using a synthetic computer generated voice? If you’re an AAC user, then this is a great way to communicate with people remotely. This article will show you how to set up Wiretap Anywhere to send your speech voice to Skype’s internet phone system.

Ever realised that you can set up your computer so it will do different things depending on whether you are close with your Bluetooth phone, and on what wireless networks are available.

BBAutoComplete adds word auto-completion to scriptable applications. You type the start of a word, press a key, and BBAutoComplete types the letters to complete the word. If BBAutoComplete guessed wrong, you can keep pressing the key to cycle through other possible completions.

The iPhone and iPod touch come with very accurate accelerometers - the programs which are running can know when the device is being moved, and how much/how far/which direction it’s being moved. Game developers have taken advantage of this capability to develop some games which just rely on the device being moved or shaken!

Mail Act-On is a plugin for Apple’s Mail program which gives you the ability to assign a keystroke to almost any action that can be done with a mail message. It’s simple to configure and simple to use and free - couldn’t get any better than that!

pearPad is a two-part application that lets you use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a wireless trackpad or keyboard for your Mac. There is a program you run on the Mac - available for Tiger or Leopard - and a program from the iTunes App Store which is run on the iPhone or iPod Touch.

PDFpen is a PDF editing and form-filling application for Mac OS X. PDFs are important to many people with disabilities because scanned documents are usually converted to PDF format. So for those who can’t handle physical paper, being able to edit or add to a PDF file is important.

Do you have problems with getting distracted by the other windows on your screen, but you don’t want to hide them completely from view? Isolater and Menu Eclipse might be just what you need.

Mindmaps are diagrams used to represent ideas - they use pictures, colours, position on the page and text together. MindNode is a free mindmapping application which is simple to use but does the job extremely well. It is fully keyboard accessible and the developer is interested to receive information about any access problems.