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1. The New York Times-leser For Mac Free

August 23, 1988, Page 00009 The New York Times Archives TWO features of the Mac may be responsible for its increasing popularity for both home and business. One is the Mac's graphical user interface, which allows the user to give commands to the computer by pointing at pictures or menu choices and clicking a button, rather than typing in strings of non-English commands; the other, which is related, is the easy-to-use software. Macintosh users, according to surveys, use twice as many programs as their DOS PC counterparts because software is easier to learn and use on the Mac. The International Business Machines Corporation and other makers of DOS machines are well aware of the Apple Computer Inc. Machine's rising popularity. If imitation is a form of flattery, the Mac will be very flattered in months to come by the arrival of the Presentation Manager feature of the OS/2 operating system for powerful business computers. Presentation Manager is scheduled to be in the stores in a couple of months.

The recent Macworld exposition in Boston marked the first anniversary of HyperCard, the software construction kit developed by Bill Atkinson and Dan Winkler, which is included free with each new Mac sold; otherwise it costs $50. As an indication of its popularity, HyperCard was the top vote-getter in MacWorld Magazine's World Class Awards, a survey of its readers' favorite Macintosh products of the last year. An example: An ornithologist might make a stack that functions as an electronic field guide. Each card contains a picture of a species of bird, descriptive facts and even a sampling of the bird's song, which is stored electronically in the software. Click the button and the bird warbles its distinctive song.

Click another and it shows another bird in the same family. In another stack, users could explore the country inns of California. Each card shows a picture of the inn, a map and information on rooms, rates and reservations.

The aisles of Macworld were filled with similar creative examples of 'stackware,' the genre of home-brew software that HyperCard spawned. My favorite is a children's program called The Manhole, written by Robyn and Rand Miller for Activision Entertainment (phone (415) 329-0500). It will be available next month at $49.95. The program requires a hard disk, though, since it has a voracious appetite for memory, consuming five megabytes of hard disk to contain its 650 cards. The child is encouraged to explore the delightful scenes with the mouse, clicking on anything that looks interesting, such as a magic beanstalk, a fire hydrant or a talking rabbit. Chances are that each click leads to a new adventure. In this way the child participates actively in the story and determines how it unfolds.

In the same category are the Amanda Stories, created by Amanda Goodenough for the Voyager Company, phone (213) 474-0032. Volume One, consisting of four stories for children from 3 to 7 years old, costs $19.95 plus a mailing fee; call for the amount. These stacks are less elaborate than the Manhole tales, and they don't require a hard disk. The central character is Inigo, a fluffy black cat, who takes the child along on adventures that include sneaking out of the house, taking a bath, having a dream and getting a snack. Advertisement In the game, you're a space marshall assigned to investigate mysterious doings at a remote space colony, and when you arrive you discover the place to be deserted.

Alien creatures lurk around every corner as you wend your way through eerie, echoing passageways. Like marshalls of the Old West, your quick draw with a laser blaster is your only asset. It's a one-dimensional plot, of course, but the genius of Colony is in its three-dimensional display. The player can wander the halls of the space colony at will, exploring corridors and doorways, opening desk drawers to look for clues, bumping against walls, firing laser weapons. The sense of imminent doom and claustrophobia is delicious.

Smith, the author, created the game as a hobby. Back on Earth he works on designing things such as a glove that will remotely control a robot hand in space, or closer to home, with as much precision and tactile sense as possible. Within five years, Mr. Smith said, it is likely that game players will wear helmets that give panoramic, stereographic 3-D color views of the game, in essence putting the player inside the game.

In real life, Mr. Smith said, this technology might be used by architects to show clients around the inside of buildings that exist only as three-dimensional designs in a computer.

If you don't have a Macintosh, or if you have one and don't feel comfortable with it, or if you feel comfortable with it but want to know more, get Cary Lu's book 'The Apple Macintosh Book,' third edition, at $21.95 from Microsoft Press. It's the best general guide to the Macintosh, including the latest SE and II models. If you're already up and running and have a craving for hot tips that will allow you to become a Mac power user, try the HyperCard stackware version of Arthur Naiman's 'The Macintosh Bible.'

' It's available for $69.95, plus $5 handling, or $49.95 without the book, from Macazine, (512) 448-4133. For those who want to try to write their own stacks, the most comprehensive guide is Danny Goodman's 'The Complete HyperCard Handbook,' at $29.95 from Bantam.

It’s been a long, crazy journey for Andrew Taylor. He was a young programmer with a dream to write a speech recognition program for the Mac. This was in a day when there were several available programs for Windows, but nothing for the Mac. In the ensuing 10 years, a lot happened in the speech recognition world.

The New York Times-leser For Mac Free

One by one, rivals of best-seller Dragon NaturallySpeaking (from I.B.M. And Philips) disappeared or were bought up by Dragon itself (later Nuance). Taylor struggled along, producing various mediocre incarnations of his program, constantly hampered by the fact that he was an outsider, looking in on Nuance from the outside instead of working with it. The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly e-mail newsletter. In February, however, all that changed. Apparently the resurgence of Apple and the Mac was dramatic enough for Nuance to get interested — and it bought Andrew Taylor’s little company.

It promised to bring its latest recognition technology, the one that drives NaturallySpeaking 11 for Windows, to the Mac — and to let Mr. Taylor’s team harness all of the company’s enormous dictation-software expertise, marketing power and other resources. The result, now called Dragon Dictate for the Mac, made its debut last week.

It’s something that many Mac fans have been awaiting for more than a decade. I won’t say “it was worth the wait” — really, everybody would’ve been a lot happier if a Mac dictation app had been available all along — but it’s almost everything it should be. After 25 years, full-blown, professional dictation software has finally come to the Mac.

Dictate ($200 with headset; $50 upgrade) runs in the background and translates everything you say into typewritten text into any Mac program. (It probably goes without saying that I dictated this entire column — in Microsoft Word.) You can use a U.S.B. Wired headset, a wireless Bluetooth headset or, in a pinch and with compromised accuracy, the built-in microphone of your laptop. Because it uses the same underlying recognition technology as NaturallySpeaking 11, the accuracy is uncanny, at least if you speak fairly clearly and don’t have much of an accent.

You can speak really quickly — the software doesn’t care. In this entire column, the software mistranscribed only once (“or I speak” instead of “where I speak”).

I was easily able to correct the error by saying, “Correct ‘or I speak””; a list of numbered alternative transcriptions appeared. I just said “Choose 2” to replace the error and continue. Over time, each correction like that trains the software never to make that kind of mistake again. So it continually improves. You can also control menus and programs. Out of the box, you can say, for example, “open Microsoft Word.” Unfortunately, you have to manually program other menu commands, like Tools-Word Count or whatever. It’s not like the Windows version, where out of the box, you can speak any menu command.

The addition of the Bonus folder will not appear in the Factory Library menu until Kontakt is either re-launched or, more simply, the menus are refreshed by pressing the “Refresh” button. Kontakt library creator for mac. This is where you can add your own libraries.

On the other hand, this program-your-own mode has incredible powers. My particular favorite is the text macro, where I speak one thing (“buzz off”) and the software types out something entirely different (“Thank you so much for writing about my column. I’m very sorry that you didn’t enjoy it. I’ll try to do better next time. Your friend, Dave”).

On the other hand, you can speak commands that click links in Safari, enable AppleScript and Automator macros, and so on. You can also use smart commands like “search Google for ‘electric curtains,’” “put parentheses around ‘as you know,’” “select ‘the day I flew’; capitalize that,” and so on. You can even control and click the mouse by speaking the numbers in a successively smaller set of tic-tac-toe grid overlays on your screen.

I’m thrilled about the power, the control, the speed and the accuracy of Dragon Dictate. It does, however, have some room for improvement. For example, in the dictation software world, teaching the software to know its location in your text document is a huge challenge. If you never touch the mouse, the program always knows where it is in the text — because it has deposited all that text itself. But if you click to edit somewhere, it’s blind.

It no longer knows where it is in the document. In Windows, Nuance has used some clever tricks to overcome this problem in the most important programs, like Word and Outlook.

On the Mac, however, the program has no idea what you’ve done manually, by clicking. So you can say something like “select fishmonger,” and the program correctly selects that word.

But if you then say “italicize that” or “capitalize that,” the program operates on the wrong words, italicizing or capping something a mile away from the selection. (This problem doesn’t happen in TextEdit or Dictate’s own included word processor.) I found a few other weird glitches like that, too — stuff Nuance says it hasn’t encountered before and may be unique to my system. With any luck, these are the kinds of glitches that will get fixed quickly now that Mr. Taylor’s little team has a huge company behind it. It’s been a long road for him, and for Mac fans who have lusted after the speed and accuracy of Windows dictation software.

I, for one, will be answering a lot more e-mail in a lot less time — with an ice-cold lemonade in one hand and a yo-yo in the other.