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Apple iPad

by patrick

The iPad? Really, Steve?

That is one epically bad choice of names. I over-heard one female colleague suggest that it may be the first pad that most males won’t feel ashamed to purchase. I’m not sure that I’m convinced…

Apple is making a bold statement about the viability of micro-niches with the iPad. Wedging open the position between the iPhone and the MacBook, Apple seems to want to take on the NetBook and Kindle markets in one fell swoop. One elegant and well-thought-out swoop.

The iPad hits most of the major sweet spots for such a device. It has the horse-power, the graphics capabilities, the form-factor, the user-interface, the extant 150K+ apps ready to go, the iBook Store, the provocative price-points, and Apple’s legendarily elegant industrial design and marketing prowess.

One would have to be a fool to bet against the iPad’s game-changing success.

Only one thing has irked my ire in regard to the iPad:

3-month wait

Oh, well, maybe also the name. Steve, call me next time you need to brainstorm product names, ok?

Speaking Words With Dictate

by patrick

I’ve been playing with a new piece of software for the last few days. I’m quite excited about it.

The software is called Dictate, by the folks at MacSpeech. Dictate is voice recognition software for the Mac. I must admit, I’ve played with voice recognition software in the past and have never been very impressed with the performance. I had been reading fairly good reviews of dictate over the last several months, but I still came to it with the expectation that I would be disappointed.

The installation of Dictate was a snap. Once installed, the software takes you through a five-minute reading session to train the software to recognize your voice. Once you’ve done this you are good to go.

My first test was reading a few paragraphs from a book into Microsoft Word. I spoke with my normal voice and at a normal pace. Dictate wrote the words flawlessly. MacSpeech claims that dictate will work with pretty much any software. So my next test was to open Pages and speak stream of consciousness for a dozen or so sentences. Again, Dictate performed without a flaw. I am a hopelessly slow typist, so I was becoming excited about the possibilities .

Next, I opened iChat and began chatting with one of my friends. I was able to bury my friend with several sentences of words in a matter of seconds. My friend was certain that I had overdone on the cappuccinos.

I must say that I am pleasantly impressed with Dictate’s performance. I’m excited to think about all the ways I can use Dictate. As I speak, I am in Wordpress and writing (speaking) this blog post. I will even be exploring the possibility of using Dictate as a way to caption movies. To really use the full power of Dictate, it’s necessary to learn a few dozen commands for things like text editing and movement, capitalization, and punctuation.

As I’m speaking and seeing what is written, it makes me think about the differences between how we think when we are writing on a keyboard versus how we think when we are speaking. I’m experiencing some real differences in my thought processes as I speak aloud the words I wish written. I wonder if Dictate will give my writing style a more conversational tone. That might be a good thing.

The software comes bundled with a Plantronics headset with mic, and sells for about $200.

How Magic is Apple’s New Mouse?

by patrick

The Magic Mouse

Maybe it’s not magic. But it’s well-designed and cool.

First, I have to say that it took me awhile to get over thinking I was pushing around a very hard and high tech Madeleine (as in the pastry). I suppose that had something to do with me drinking coffee at the time of my first magic mouse experience.

But once I had the short-cake metaphor out of my head, I found Apple’s new mouse to be quite efficient and easy to use.

The top of this mouse is basically one shiny touch-pad that responds quite well to all finger movements and clicks. You can program the behavior of this surface quite easily with the Mouse System Preference pane. I especially like the Scroll with momentum feature which lets you scroll in any direction with a natural slowing-down effect.

The Magic Mouse Preference Pane

My primary complaint about wireless mice in the past has been poor battery life. And I was skeptical about Apple’s claim that this mouse would last on average 4 months on two AA batteries with normal use. I noticed that the mouse automatically turns itself off at shutdown, and seems to go into a sleep mode after a period of inactivity. While I’ve only had it for 3 weeks now, my battery life is still at 95%, so I’m optimistic.

The $69 price tag seemed a bit steep for me, but I’m starting to understand that excellent design and quality come at a price. If you’re completely happy with your current mouse and don’t think that these new features will add much to your computing experience, then save your money. But, if you are looking for a better way, or maybe just curious about new technology, I’d suggest test-driving one of these puppies down at your local Apple store.

You might be pleasantly surprised.

Video Tutorials with Camtasia for Mac

by patrick

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a moving picture is worth a thousand pictures.

OK, I made that last part up. But you get the idea. When it comes to creating rich learning materials, a well done video can often make a concept or procedure very clear.

Until a few weeks ago, the offerings for Mac screencasting software were sparse. While Snapz-Pro and ScreenFlow did allow you to capture screen movement on your Mac, they were limited in their ability to edit.

Now, TechSmith has released its Camtasia product for the Mac. Camtasia allows you to capture screen movement and voice, and then bring these captures into a relatively robust editing environment to create cuts, transitions, callouts, titles, and more.

Camtasia's clean editing interface.

The interface is reminiscent of iMovie, with it’s simple and friendly look and feel. The video and audio editing is done on a timeline at the bottom of the interface. The play window is in the upper right. The media storage, transitions and filters are located in the upper left.

The selection of transitions, filters and actions are in the upper left.

If you’ve done any work in iMovie or FinalCut, Camtasia should be easy to get up and rolling within an hour.

One of the greatest strengths of Camtasia over most of the competition (including Adobe’s Captivate on Windows) is the vast selection of output formats.

Quickly share with iTunes, ScreenCast, and YouTube.

The Advanced Export option lets you export into a wide variety of output formats, including various flavors of QuickTime formats, with full control over output parameters via the Options button.

The large selection of export options.

Given the prevalence of video enabled mobile devices, I’m especially pleased to be able to output to the .m4v format for playback on iPod/iPhone devices.

This is version 1.0 of Camtasia for the Mac, so TechSmith will likely be fine tuning and adding features as this software matures. One thing I’d like to see is built-in captioning. But for now, you can’t beat this feature-set and the $99 debut price.

See more information about Camtasia for Mac.

Snow Leopard – First Impressions

by patrick

Here kitty, kitty...

It’s been 4 days now with the new cat… so far, so good.

Right off, there’s a noticeable performance boost in startup, shutdown and general Finder tasks. That, along with the 7GB reclamation of disk space makes Snow Leopard worth the price.

The new QuickTime is slick, but lacks the export features of the previous version of QuickTime Pro. Thankfully, Apple anticipated this disappointment, and put the old QuickTime in the Utilities Folder in Applications.

Some folks will undoubtedly be using older applications which require Rosetta to run. Again, Apple found an elegant solution for those who chose not to initially install Rosetta. When starting an older application, a dialogue box appears asking if you’d like to install Rosetta. If yes, then your system connects to an Apple server, downloads and installs Rosetta, and launches your application. Pretty close to hassle-free.

There are still a few software developers racing to make their applications play nicely with Snow Leopard, but most of the major developers are already on board.

The Snow Leopard upgrade is highly recommended.