Do you want to turn that facility off so the Mac keeps the file zipped?

(This is useful if, say you download a WordPress plugin as a zip file from a website then want to upload it into your own website.)

This is how you do it.

Go to Preferences in Safari…

Under the General tab you’ll see this window…

…and do as I say in the image above and untick the box against ‘Open “safe” files after downloading, so the window looks like this…

That’s it!

By the way, I created the images above using a program called LittleSnapper, which generates the drop shadow and enables me to annotate the images with arrows, text, boxes etc. Find out more in my LittleSnapper review

I add text to these notes in Notational Velocity maybe once a week.

I love both programs.

However…

I get text repeating in Simplenote, often when using it when I’m on 3G.

You can see the way the sentence “Listen…” below gets duplicated…

What’s WORSE is this: you’ll see my comments in this shot: I was typing a sentence and it got deleted and replaced. Yuck!…

And it happens again in this next photo: I typed in “Fearless Speaking” and it was replaced by Superstar Book Author and THEN “that was replaced by” suddenly appeared! — so that’s 2 sudden duplication of text in a few minutes…

Finally the following may help locate the bug… The top line of the note also got duplicated here…

I’m sure you can see that this bug is REALLY annoying — but I love the Simplenote and Notational Velocity combination so much that I continue to use them.

Please can you resolve this issue

Today I’m going to show you a very similar, but more sophisticated application for the Mac, called Snapheal.

Here’s a video I created to show you what it can do…

In this second video I show a number of photos I improved using Snapheal…

Below you’ll find side-by-side comparisons of the photos in that video, plus my closing words about this application.

First, heere are a series of ‘snaps’ I ‘healed’: I have 2 sons, Toby and Felix. These photos of them were taken when they were at various ages. They are now aged 12 and 9 respectively.

ALL these tasks using Snapheal took just a few minutes to accomplish.

Here’s a photo of my son Toby in front of a soccer net. Ignore part of the Close box top right of each set of before and after images…

My son Felix…

On this next shot of me and Felix, I used Snapheal’s Clone Stamp tool to help get the best finish to the shot…

Here I removed shadows etc behind this photo of me and Toby…

My wife and boys: I removed the cabin, beach light, and wall between Catherine and Toby…

Here’s a photo of me with Neil Strauss, author of many best-selling books including The Game, The Rules of the Game, and Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead: Journeys into Fame and Madness. I removed the poster behind Neil, and other little distractions…

In summary, Snapheal is superb. Here are 8 reasons why…

1. It has 3 different routines to clean up an image (compared to the one routine in Inpaint).
2. Snapheal also has a built-in clone tool ( which Inpaint doesn’t have).
3. It has a great Compare mode so you can see the ‘before’ and ‘after’ images side by side.
4. It’s a much cheaper product than Inpaint.
5. When I emailed the publisher on 2 occasions, I got a clear, helpful, and friendly reply within 12 hours. Delightful!
6. The program’s publisher, MacPhun, has put lots of videos on YouTube showing how to get the most from this software.
7. The program has a built-in help mod which links to some of their YouTube videos so you can see exactly what you need to do.
8. Snapheal helps turn me into a much better photographer!

10 out of 10!

Go to MacPhun‘s site for more details about Snapheal.

Or go right to the App Store now and buy it!

Chris Payne helps people triumph over the challenges in their lives: one-on-one, by phone, and via video calls. He also creates websites like this one for people, and teaches them how to earn a part- or full-time income from their website. See this page for more about him.

Alfred really helps – and the ‘standard’ version is free!!

Alfred is a productivity application for Mac OS X, which aims to save you time in searching your local computer and the web.

What’s extra great is that Alfred learns which apps you use often and prioritises them when you search.

Watch this video I created to show you how I use it…

Alfred’s developer, Andrew Pepperrell, has done a fab job creating it. I used to use a similar app called Quicksilver, but I think Alfred is much better for my needs.

Get this app for free from www.alfredapp.com.

Chris Payne helps people triumph over the challenges in their lives: one-on-one, by phone, and via video calls. He also creates websites like this one for people, and teaches them how to earn a part- or full-time income from their website. See this page for more about him.

Or are you debating whether to get an 11-inch, 13-inch, 15-inch or 17-inch MacBook?

You may want to consider getting an iPad 2, if you haven’t already got one, and the low-cost Air Display app.

This app enables you to site the iPad 1 or 2 to the right or left of your MacBook (or PC laptop for that matter) – and drag windows or palettes across to it.

In other words, if you’re buying a new MacBook, instead of getting a 15-inch model, you may consider getting an 11-inch MacBook Air and an iPad 2 and using them together with Air Display – at a combined price that could be less than a 15-inch model.

In my setup below, I have my iPad to the right of my 17-inch MacBook Pro, where I’m editing a post on one of my site, and I’ve dragged a Safari window to the iPad so I can see what the post looks like in a browser…

Equally you could put a Twitter feed on the iPad screen, your Mail app Message Viewer, palettes for a painting application, or whatever you want.

To get the Air Display app working you need to download a free application for your Mac, install it, and run it…

What if you don’t want to get an iPad?

Fair enough. What you could do is use any spare notebook or laptop you have to hand and use that as a separate display – so you can drag your Mac windows to, say, a PC laptop you put next to your new MacBook.

How do you do this? You use an application for the Mac called Screen Recycler. You connect the two computers together using a simple Ethernet cable. (You can get one of these very cheaply from ebay if you don’t have one to hand.)

You can download Screen Recycler for free to try it out. If you love it, you can buy it for a nominal fee.

Enjoy!

Chris Payne helps people triumph over the challenges in their lives: one-on-one, by phone, and via video calls. He also creates websites like this one for people, and teaches them how to earn a part- or full-time income from their website. See this page for more about him.

128gb storage is the minimum you’ll need to do serious work. Questions to consider…

How much space do the following take up on my current computer?

• Songs
• Photos
• Files
• Mac applications
• Apps for iPhone plus backup

What do you plan to actually DO with your notebook?

Battery life is longer on the 13-inch models compared with the 11-inch models.

If you plan to do a fair amount of movie rendering or other processor intensive work, consider paying extra to upgrade to a faster processor.

I own a MacBook Pro 17-inch which I upgraded in the checkout on Apple’s Online Store to 512gb of SSD storage for the much faster loading and saving speed, 8gb of RAM and the faster processor. I justify this investment as this MacBook Pro is my workhorse for producing videos for YouTube, etc.

Accessories

MacBook Air SuperDrive: useful if you have files or movies on CD or DVD you want to access.

Carrying case: You can get these at a much lower cost on ebay. Decide if you want a front pocket to hold the charger and any cables you may own.

To consider…

How will you get your data from your current notebook to this new notebook? Your new device will come with very clever Migration Assistant, but you’ll need to know which sockets you have on your current notebook so you can connect to this new one. For example, you could use an Ethernet cable to move the data across. In which case you’ll need this cable. (Borrow one or get one very cheap from ebay.) If you get a MacBook Air you’ll need an Ethernet Adapter which costs £25. You may find a cheaper ‘copy’ one on ebay. Bear in mind that moving the data can take a couple of hours, and you’ll want to do this as soon as you get your new notebook.

Backup storage: It’s useful to backup your entire notebook from time to time. My advice is, if you get 256gb of flash storage on your new notebook, to buy a 512gb hard drive with at least a USB2 connection or, even better, a FireWire 2 or Thunderbolt connection for speed. Then use the free Carbon Copy Cloner software to clone your internal drive and then do incremental backups every week or 2. This procedure isn’t so important now that iCloud has been launched, but personally I’d rather have a clone of my MacBook Pro on an external drive than rely on the cloud completely. For a start, a full recovery from a hard drive will be faster than downloading from the cloud!

Please note: if you’re unsure what screen size to get, do read this companion post I wrote about using an iPad with the Air Display app to give you more screen to work with.

If you have any questions about this quickly put-together guide, let me know!

Chris Payne helps people triumph over the challenges in their lives: one-on-one, by phone, and via video calls. He also creates websites like this one for people, and teaches them how to earn a part- or full-time income from their website. See this page for more about him.

What keeps me buying is often noticing I have a problem, and wanting to fix that.

I have kept a digital daily journal for about 12 years. I have typed more than 300,000 words, mostly detailing the things I did each day. I started entering text into a Palm device which slotted into a folding keyboard, then moved up to an Alphasmart keyboard which used the Palm OS: this was a truly fabulous device. I ADORED it. I later upgraded to an Alphasmart Dana. As the Alphasmarts had a full-size keyboard it was easy for me to stick to my discipline of entering text every night.

I recently threw my Dana away as I now spend so much time with my iPhone and iPad.

I have been keeping a diary sporadically, sometimes typing in a Diary document in Pages. Sometimes I’d type into the Together side box (see separate review), and use Typinator (see my review) and type ddate to get the date to appear, and ttm to get the time. So during a working day I’d occasionally stop, enter the date into the side box, enter ttm for the time, and start typing what I had just been doing, or what I was about to start. Then I’d later copy these logs into the Pages diary document. Not elegant, especially if my Mac crashed, in which case I lost whatever was in my side box. Steve, the programmer of Together, has no plans to have an auto save for the side box so I really wanted a better solution.

So my situation…

• I wanted an app which would encourage me to write daily.
• It would log my entries simply.
• It would sync with my iPhone and iPad.
• It would be password protected.

So the other day I bought Day One, a journalling / diary app. Price: £6.99 (US$9.99) for the Mac app and £1.29 (US$1.99) for the Universal iOS app, which runs on other iPhone and iPad.

Day One for Mac consists of a standard application and a popup window that you can trigger on the menu bar, and which can pop up every x minutes during the day…

And the application itself looks like this (I’ve ghosted out an earlier entry for today)…

What’s good about the Mac version…

• it syncs its files with Dropbox — so whatever I type on my Mac appears on my iPhone
• it can’t lose my data as it’s in Dropbox: so a crash of my Mac won’t cause me to lose a diary entry
• it’s password protected
• I can set reminders on my Mac so I have set the Day One pop-up box to appear every 30 minutes at the top of my screen.
• exporting all the entries is very easy: Day One creates a simple text file

What’s not so good about the Mac version…

• there is no user guide: just a few questions answered
• the documentation seems out of date: for example, it says a password feature will be added soon when in fact it’s here now
• I can’t find a way to edit an entry
• I don’t like the ‘inspiring quotes/messages/tips’ that appear at the top of the journal in big type. They look pretty, but there aren’t that many of them, and come across as a nice idea that may get dropped in a few versions time, or be much improved. They look like this at the moment…

• I have my reminders set for every half an hour: so if I call up the popup and enter in a diary entry and click the Save button at 10.29am, at 10.30am the popup jumps onto the screen again. Logical, but annoying, for me!
• the exported feature is simple at the moment, so output looks like this, with “starred: false” appearing before each entry which I’d like to see stripped out myself…

Here’s what the iPhone version looks like. When you launch the app you’ll see this password entry screen if you selected this in Settings…

The main menu where you can see that I have made 13 entries so far over 4 days…

…and when my last entry synced via Dropbox, this is what it looked like…

What’s good about the iPhone version…

• it’s very easy to edit an entry
• I love the shadow effect behind each bullet as I enter each digit of my password
• the whole app is very elegant to use, and very functional

What’s not so good about the iPhone version…

Some of my entries have times in them: for example “We arrived at the swimming pool at 1pm.” Well all these times are in blue and are underlined. So you can get an entry that looks like this…

…and this…

…which I think is a real nuisance. It’s the same in the Simplenote app for the iPhone. Ugly, distracting and unnecessary.

Reminders seem to work in a different way on the iPhone: the idea is you set each reminder individually.

What I’d love…

I’d love it if the popup box could be made smaller – for me it takes up too much space. I’d make the Save button smaller and the text entry area smaller.

Even better, I’d rather have an option so the popup box didn’t appear at all every 30 or whatever minutes. This is maddening to be honest. Occasionally I’d rather quit the app so I can concentrate on my work!

Instead I’d like the bookmark on the menu bar to pulse at each reminder time, and maybe even have the option to play a simple sound to remind me. The app could give me a choice of a few such alert sounds, and be able to set the volume to. (And make me a cup of tea while it’s at it.)

This idea is used in a brilliant little app called I Love Stars which costs 99 cents on the Mac’s App Store. Then, if I tap on the bookmark icon on the menu bar, I’d see the popup.

I’d love it if Paul Mayne, the very skilled programmer who created these apps, explained in detail why he created Day One and his thinking behind it.

Why did he have a starred entries tag? What’s it useful for? Why have a time for each entry? Why did he do this rather than let people put their own times in? What’s the best way to use the app? And so on.

Personally, I’d love the option to get rid of the dated entries system: I just want an app where I can add the next chunk of data. If I want to put a time in front of it, I can do this manually, or use Typinator to drop this in myself. Ultimately buyers of this app will be exporting several months or years of diary entries to a text file so that one day their children can read them, or they themselves can read them. Do they really want that file to look like this??…

…I think not.

Despite my reservations above I am very happy I bought the Mac and iOS versions of this app. What I am doing is entering text each day, and that’s what I want. The text is safe, and secure with the password protection. This app may be just what you are looking for too. If so, find out more on Paul’s site here.

Programmer Paul Mayne kindly sent me an email: “Thanks for the review and it’s great feedback. I’m definitely improving the export formats soon.” In response to my idea above regarding a more subtle reminder to post an entry Paul replied, “Thanks Chris, great idea, I will considerate this.” Great news!

Chris Payne helps people triumph over the challenges in their lives: one-on-one, by phone, and via video calls. He also creates websites like this one for people, and teaches them how to earn a part- or full-time income from their website. See this page for more about him.

Update (November 2012): I am now using Dragon Dictate version 3, and it is much better than version 2.5.2 reviewed below, but some of the bugs mentioned in this review are still in version 3.

I was one of the beta testers for version 3 and reported the bugs, but as of now, November 2012, Dragon Dictate is still rather frustrating to use at times.

My review…

I’m using version 2.5.2 of Dragon Dictate for Mac with a Plantronics noise cancelling headset I bought from ebay.

My MacBook Pro is new as of June 2011, has 8gb of RAM and a 512gig solid state drive. It has a 2.3Ghz i7 processor. So it’s very fast.

Dragon Dictate’s speech recognition is excellent. Really excellent.

However… there are many silly inconsistencies in the software which make Dragon Dictate a real nuisance to use at times.

I find Dragon such a nuisance to use at times that I started noting down all the daft things it did, so…

Here are 45 ‘weirdnesses’ I’ve come across recently…

1. I’m a Brit. If I say “I now weigh 120 pounds” Dragon types out “I weigh £120″.

2. If I say: “I am not the first person to point out this bug in Scribe”, Dragon types ’1st person’ with no option to choose ‘first person’. Equally it types “I have a 6th sense about things” whereas I’d like the fourth word to be “sixth”.

3. I said the word ‘reader’. The cursor went back to the first word of the document and a spoken voice said ‘are’! This happened twice!

4. If I say a phrase, then say ‘new line’, whether the first word of the next thing I say appears in caps or not seems inconsistent. I find this to be distracting.

5. Whether the first letter after a colon is a capital letter or not seems also inconsistent.

6. Sometimes, after a dash, the first letter is capitalised for no reason. “This is great–Ultimately…” Yuck!

I dictated the exact same sentence again later and this time the word “ultimately” was lower case. So the transcription is inconsistent.

7. When I say “I’m using Dragon Dictate for Mac” Dragon types, sometimes “I’m using DragonDictate for Mac” – with “DragonDictate” as one word being the primary option and “Dragon Dictate” as the second option. Why do that? Why not stick with “Dragon Dictate” as 2 words as it’s written on Nuance’s site?

8. If I say “Dragon Dictate can be inconsistent DASH which is a nuisance”, Dragon types “Dragon Dictate can be inconsistent–which is a nuisance”. This may look fine in America, but in the UK we always put a space before and after the dash. Always. So we expect the following: “Dragon Dictate can be inconsistent – which is a nuisance”

9. If I say: “It’s one fifty three pee emm” Dragon types “1:53 PM” I would love to be able to get “1:53pm” – which is what we’re used to seeing in the UK.

10. If I say: “This will take you 5 minutes.” Dragon types: “This will take you 5 min.”

11. While I was dictating, my son Felix blew a raspberry into the mike, and Dragon launched an app called Yep!

12. I dictated the following as text: “Open the pod bay doors” – and Dragon Dictate launched an app called Clipstart!

13. I said “delete hardy” (a word DD transcribed) and Dragon recognised that as Read High, and spoke the word ‘High’

14. I said “new paragraph find the book”. DD typed “findable”, I said “scratch that, choose 2″, and DD typed “find the book”. The ‘f’ should be in upper case after a ‘new paragraph’ instruction, but it’s not. If I say “new paragraph fiver”, again ‘fiver’ is in lower case.

15: If I say “Caps on journey outside” DD types “Journey outside”. Why is ‘o’ of outside in lower case!

16: I said the word “buy” and DD offered only one choice: “by” . It didn’t offer the spelling “buy”.

17: I said “Get other people to list theirs”. DD offered the word “there’s” but didn’t suggest “theirs”

18: I said “four half cups” and DD typed  ”4 /2 cups” instead of  ”4 1/2 cups” or “4 half cups”

19: If I say 8% and say delete 8% it deletes the 8 and changes % to percent!

20: In Pages, I said the word ‘us’ after stonewall and Dragon went up 2 lines and bolded the word ‘is’!

21: If I say “New line”, the cursor goes to the next line, but if you say “bullet”, the bullet appears at the end of the previous line! Even if I say “new paragraph”, the bullet STILL appears at the beginning of the previous line!!

22: I dictated “You can write a long ad” (by ‘ad’ I meant advert) — and Dragon typed “You can write a long” — the word ad didn’t appear!!

23: If I say “and include upper case holy cow”, Dragon types “AND INCLUDE holy cow”. Bizarre. (I know I should have said “and include caps on holy cow” — I wasn’t thinking straight!)

24: I said “Have 120 to” and Dragon typed “120 122″!!

25: I said “Buckminster Fuller” (the man who invented the geodesic domes (as seen at Disney’s Epcot). Dragon typed “book minster Fuller” with no option of “Buckminster Fuller”. A day later and Dragon got the guy’s name right! So Dragon seems to me to be inconsistent at times.

26: I said “look” [pause] “up” and Dragon launched an application called Yep.

27: I said “settee” (a popular word in the UK for a couch) — and Dragon only offered the word “city” as an option.

28: I said “caps on more than a carpenter” and Dragon typed “More Than a Carpenter”. I wanted the ‘a’ to be capitalised.

29: I said “a tea made of myrtle and rosemary” – but there was no option for ‘myrtle and rosemary’ – just ‘Myrtle and rosemary’ or ‘myrtle and Rosemary’.

30: I said “caps on essential adverts to get your message across” and Dragon typed “Essential Adverts to Get Your Message across”. I want the ‘a’ in ‘across’ to be capitalised.

31: I said “appendix a” and Dragon typed “Appendix a”. It offered 2 choices: (1) Appendix a and (2) appendix A. I said Choose 2, but it still displayed “Appendix a”. Why didn’t it put a capitalised A in my text? However when I said “appendix B” Dragon got that right.

32: I said “and strengthen the book’s focus” and Dragon typed “and strengthen the books focus”. There was no suggestion of “book’s” with an apostrophe.

33: I said “reveal that” and Dragon typed “reveal that *” — i.e. it put an asterisk next to the word ‘that’! Weird!

34: I said “possesses a knack” — and Dragon didn’t type anything. I said ”possesses a knack” again, and Dragon still didn’t respond! The internal fan came on and when I said “has a knack” it took several seconds for that text to appear.

35: I lifted up my arms and stretched and Dragon launched Yep. Dragon does seem to like Yep!

36: I said “swot analysis” and Dragon typed “swot analysis”. I think Dragon should know this phrase and offer “SWOT analysis” as an option (where SWOT means ‘Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats: SWOT analysis is a common phrase in business.)

37: I said “re-think” and Dragon interpreted that as a command: Read think — so my Mac said the word think out loud.

38: I said “dot org” and Dragon typed “.or”. I said “org” and got “all”.

39: Dragon doesn’t have the word “intuitives” in its dictionary. It would be FABULOUS if there was a way to send words to the Nuance team to update the dictionary for everyone so Dragon Dictate got smarter!

40: I said “I read the book called steve jobs by walter isaacson” and Dragon typed “”I read the book called Steve jobs by Walter Isaacson” —  i.e. ‘j’ was lower case instead of upper case. I think Dragon Dictate should have “Steve Jobs” as a phrase in its dictionary by now!!

41: I said “what site or book” and Dragon typed “What site to pull”. I said “delete pull” [pause] “delete to”. Dragon moved the cursor back 2 paragraphs, one character space at a time — which took about 10 seconds — until it found another ‘to’ earlier in the text and deleted that!

42: I said “Nobody gives a damn” and Dragon typed “Nobody gives a dam”. I can’t get it to write the word ‘damn’.

 43: This one drives me mad: I dictate, say, ‘new paragraph then “Product idea”. Dragon suggests “Products idea” and ‘product idea’. If I choose the second one, it types “Product idea”. Here’s an example…

Can you see that Dragon gives 3 options? Options 2 and 3 have a lower case ‘p’, yes? But if you say ‘choose 2′ or ‘choose 3′ you’ll get that text with an upper case ‘P’ pasted into the notepad. I find this very distracting.

Equally, when I say “caps on dream sculpture” I get the following…

…and if I choose options 2 or 3 then all the words will be capitalised: so why not show it this way in the Recognition window??

44: If I say ‘you tube video’ Dragon offers ‘you Tube video’ ‘u-tube video’ – but not ‘YouTube video’!…

45: Here are some words/phrases Dragon doesn’t know, which I would like it to know!: ClickBank; CreateSpace. Dragon knows the word ‘ebook’, but I can’t get it to type ‘ebooks’.

What all this means…

When I use Dragon Dictate, it does one of the silly things above every 5-10 minutes – and I find this VERY distracting. It gets in the way of my dictation. Dragon Dictate simply isn’t polished enough using its own Notepad. 

I tried dictating in Pages, but it’s disconcertingly slower than in Notepad. I abandoned that option.

Here’s a video I created to show Dragon Dictate in action in its Notepad mode so you can see how fast/slow it is at transcribing my dictation…

I have reported a few problems with Dragon Dictate to the customer support team at Nuance, and I wasn’t happy with the replies I got back: maybe they are very busy, but they didn’t get to the root of my issues.

I read a post by a very knowledgable guy on the Nuance forums called Philip Blair, who is a US-based speech recognition consultant. I tracked down his email address using Google, and dropped him a line. He kindly responded, and confirmed that Nuance’s customer support has been, and continues to be, poor in his experience.

I wrote this on the Quora website…

“I think the reason bugs/issues like this exist is that Nuance’s tech support team don’t seem operate in the way other software companies do. They don’t seem to check their forum. They don’t reply consistently to emailed issues. And I’m guessing that, as a consequence, customers aren’t emailing them with the problems they are having. And maybe tech support aren’t relaying problem issues to the programmers.”

Furthermore, I wonder if Nuance are focusing on so many areas: the new low-price Mac App Store app, the various smartphone apps, and so on, that they’re too stretched to make each product remarkable, which is what I want!

…but I could be very wrong!

By the way, I emailed a link to this page to one of the managers of Dragon Dictate around February 2012 – and we have had a brief correspondence about my issues, but I didn’t feel I got any real feedback to assure me that some or all of these issues are being addressed.

Using a digital recorder

I dictate a lot of audio on a digital recorder. Dragon Dictate will only handle transcribing live dictation. You need MacSpeech Scribe from Nuance to handle audio files, and you can only get Scribe to process one file at a time. The PC version, Dragon Naturally Speaking, handles audio files as well as live dictation. And you can ask it to transcribe a batch of audio files.

You will find a good review of Dragon Dictate here where the reviewer, Steven Foskett, expresses his utter frustration with it.

Erica Hill from Nuance replied to him, and Steven commented on her response on this page of his site. Maybe by the summer of 2012 Dragon Dictate will be a better product. We’ll see!

(You’ll find my review of MacSpeech Scribe here.)

Summary

What’s good…

• Really really excellent recognition: I am often delighted when Dragon again and again accurately types exactly what I say!

What’s not so good…

• Inconsistency in transcription (for example, sometimes the software types Dragon Dictate and sometime DragonDictate)
• Weird transcriptions (“1st” instead of “first”, “I weigh £20″ instead of “I weigh 20 pounds”, etc)
• If I dictate the first few words of a new sentence, I expect all alternative suggestions in the recognition window to have the first letter in upper case, but it doesn’t. Instead many of its suggestions have the first letter in lower case, but if I choose one of these alternatives, Dragon will put it in upper case into the notepad. (See point 43 above (with photo). This, to me, is a silly bug which should have been ironed out long ago.
• Customer service isn’t great (questions on forum ignored, issues like the inconsistency in transcription ignored or skirted around (“it’s your headset”) when I’ve sent emails to the team)

What I recommend…

From comments I have come across on the web, Dragon Naturally Speaking for PC is a much more polished program.

For example, this is what speech recognition consultant Philip Blair, MD, wrote to me in an email…

“Dragon NaturallySpeaking on the PC side is so superior to Dragon Dictate it’s hardly comparable.”

(If you think you would benefit from online coaching from Philip in how to get the very most out of Dragon Dictate, do get in contact with him (he’s based in Viera FL, USA): cell 360-991-4791;  Skype: abledoc.)

Here’s my recommendation to you…

If you are serious about using speech recognition on the Mac, and you want to process multiple audio files in one go (I think the PC version can do this), you may want to consider the following…

• Buying Dragon Dictate and MacSpeech Scribe together will cost more than the PC version.
• Dragon Naturally Speaking for PC is a more mature product.
• MacSpeech Scribe is very buggy and, for me, not fit for purpose.
• Look at setting up Parallels on your Mac, or use Bootcamp and install Windows.
• Buy Dragon Naturally Speaking for PC and use that.

This is what I’m seriously considering!

Apple Mac Enthusiast rating…

Chris Payne helps people triumph over the challenges in their lives: one-on-one, by phone, and via video calls. He also creates websites like this one for people, and teaches them how to earn a part- or full-time income from their website. See this page for more about him.

MacSpeech Scribe is a companion application to Dragon Dictate from Nuance.

Dragon Dictate only transcribes live audio. You cannot ask it to transcribe from an audio file like you can on Nuance’s Dragon Naturally Speaking for the PC.

So if you have a device like an Olympus digital recorder and you want to dictate onto that and have it transcribed, you need MacSpeech Scribe.

Below is my review. To save you time, here’s a quick summary…

• Scribe is buggy. Its main bug is silly – it splits some words down the middle and then tries to understand the word it splits as 2 separate words. So…

“I like using Dragon Dictate” can be transcribed as ” I like using Dragon dick” “tate” (inverted commas are mine)

Here’s another example of what I got from Scribe…

It’s 1:53 PM on September 13 two thou sand and 11

Why? Scribe split the word ‘thousand’ in 2! And I dictated this short phrase into an app called iTalk Recorder Premium on my iPhone which records in aiff format. And I said the sentence in a ‘clean’ way. When I played back the audio I couldn’t hear any ‘hiccup’ in the word ‘thousand’ – I said it well with no background sound.

This simple bug should have been fixed more than a year ago. Instead, MacSpeech Scribe has not been updated. People like me have posted on the Nuance forum about this problem, but I haven’t seen any response from Nuance staff to these posts.

In addition, you can only feed Scribe with one file at a time. I have dozens of audio files so feeding each file one after the other to Scribe would be very time consuming. With Dragon Naturally Speaking for the PC you can pass it a batch of files to process.

Bottom line: I recommend that you do not buy this product until it is updated! (It’s now October 2012 with no software update in the nearly 22 months I’ve owned this product!!)

MacSpeech Scribe is very frustrating to use. Instead, it would be faster if you played your audio files through headphones and re-dictated what you heard into Dragon Dictate.

This is the text I posted onto the Nuance forum in early 2011…

I have the same problem with Scribe: I lose the ability to edit the next section of text. So in some cases I have to abandon the editing completely.

My sense is that Scribe is not yet polished enough to be used seriously. 
If a friend asked me if I would recommend buying it, I would have to say no.

I dictate a lot of ideas in the car, transcribing thoughts from lectures I listen to as I drive along, into an Olympus DS-40. 
I then have to run the wma files through Scribe to convert them.

After 2 weeks of using Scribe, and enunciating my words very carefully, transcription accuracy is about 80%. This is not high enough, and editing the text is very time consuming.

The editing controls, to me, are very confusing. I don’t think the user interface was thought through.
If I press the ‘wrong’ key combination then I lose the ability to edit the rest of the text: Scribe is very unforgiving.

Scribe currently splits words down the middle, then tries to guess the first half of the word in one phrase and the second half of the word in the other phrase.

Scribe also breaks dictations at places other than the end of sentences. I don’t think I have ever seen it present me with a neat phrase or full sentence to edit.

It provides sentences like this…

“Once upon a tie” “muh there lived a prin” “suh <comma> who lived in a castle with” “his mother and father, the king” “and queen. One day a” “black knight appeared at” “the gates. He demanded” “to see the prince, but” “the prince was too afraid to go down so…” etc

For me, editing text like the above is unnecessarily hard work: I have to look to the next phrase to correctly edit the first phrase if Scribe makes errors. Does that make sense?

What I would like is that Scribe reliably presents phrases as follows…

“Once upon a time there lived a prince <comma>” “who lived in a castle with his mother and father, the king and queen.” “One day a black knight appeared at the gates.” “He demanded to see the prince, but the prince was too afraid to go down so…”

Also what Scribe does is that it transcribes all the text and presents it as a solid mass of words.

Sometimes it’s hard to see where I am if the audio file is more than a couple of minutes long.

This is completely impractical, for me.

I would much prefer to have a way to see each phrase or sentence stand out, perhaps even by crudely adding a line break onto the screen like this…

Once upon a time there lived a prince,

who lived in a castle with his mother and father, the king and queen.

One day a black knight appeared at the gates.

He demanded to see the prince, but the prince was too afraid to go down so…

THEN it would be much easier to fix mistakes in the transcription and Scribe would be more fun to use.

The User Guide is complete, but it’s brief. As a result, it’s not helpful. It simply does the minimum, but that’s it.

What you won’t find anywhere is the following…

“We designed Scribe to be used with digital recorders. We focused on the following models for these reasons…  If you have one of these models, set the x mode to position y. Scribe works best if you’re in a room with soft furnishings and you don’t keep pressing the Pause button. If you’re in an echoey type room, do *this* to maximise accuracy, otherwise expect a drop of 10% in accuracy. If you’re in a car, do *this*, but generally expect a 15% drop in accuracy.Let us know if you’re using a different recorder, tell us your results, and we’ll add your info to an easily searchable knowledge base which customers can refer to.”

With the above info, I would happily buy a ‘better’ recorder!

Moving on… Cory in tech support was helpful as he played a recording I emailed him where Scribe split some of my words down the mi dull and analysed each half separately.  I’ve changed the way I dictate, and I’m still getting this problem.

As I dictate so much in the car, and getting it transcribed by a person via guru.com takes time and checking, I stopped doing this to try out Scribe.

Scribe’s 80% accuracy for me simply means that I can use it to get a good idea what is on each recording. I am currently considering listening to each recording and then re-dictating into Dragon Dictate. I think this would be faster than trying to edit the Scribe file.

I think that Scribe will be far far better in a few months if or when a new version comes out which addresses people’s issues. There may be an additional price to pay if it is rebranded as Dragon Scribe. If that happened, I wouldn’t feel that’s fair as I really believe that Scribe isn’t really at a version 1.0 yet.

It’s more like a version 0.8 with the potential to be really great.

-end of post on Nuance’s forum-

What do you think? I’d love to know.

On the positive side, as it has been at least 18 months since this product was last updated, I am enthusiastic that the next update will be far, far better. (After all, it can’t get any worse!!)

Apple Mac Enthusiast rating…

Chris Payne helps people triumph over the challenges in their lives: one-on-one, by phone, and via video calls. He also creates websites like this one for people, and teaches them how to earn a part- or full-time income from their website. See this page for more about him.

Would you like to send an email and be able to find out if the recipient ever opened the email and, if so, on what day and time?

Would you like to send an email to a friend or colleague with a link to a page on the web – and be able to tell if or when they clicked on the link?

If any of the above interests you, then the software program to get is Direct Mail from e3Software.

I started using it myself today, and it’s easy to get started!

Here’s what I did to get the ball rolling and test it out…

1. I entered 3 names and email addresses into the main window of Direct Mail: 2 of my own email addresses, plus my brother’s details.

2. I wrote an email that looked like this…

You can see that Direct Mail will put the person’s first name after the “Hi” as it sends the emails.

3. I clicked Send.

I then went to my InBox in my Mail app and opened the first email to myself.

A few hours later I checked the stats in the program. You can see that my brother Mike looked at my email 3 times and clicked on 2 links, and that I opened my email at 16:52. My son Toby hasn’t opened my email yet…

Which links were clicked on?…

You can see in the shot above the addresses of the emails Mike clicked on.

And here is a pie chart showing that 2 out of my 3 emails were opened…

I can also select to see what percentage clicked on links – and see a bar chart of how many emails were opened over the last few days, etc. (Notice that the legend for the pie chart overlaps the chart. A very minor issue in what is a superb application.)

Here’s a map which will plot where people are in the world who opened my emails…

I’ll find out in the next day or so from e3Software why the map wouldn’t load, then post here an updated photo.

Ideas…

Let’s say you have a prospect and you want to know which of 3 services may be of interest to them. What you can do is include links in the email to 3 pages on your website, or to 3 pdf reports they can download. By looking at the statistics later you’ll see which, if any, links they clicked on!

Support

I emailed e3Software twice before I decided to invest in this software. A guy called Ryan replied promptly – and with a detailed response to each question I asked. This kind of service is far rarer than you think: I buy a lot of software, and it’s amazing how often I ask a question and get no reply, or half a reply, or one question answered, but my second was ignored – etc!

I also heard part of a telephone interview with the programmer of Direct Mail, and he came across really well.

This means that I feel I can trust these guys – and you may feel the same way to.

Downsides

1. The instructions to use this program are not ideal. On the e3Software site are dozens of topics, and the relevant answers are spread over dozens of pages. And the words seem to have been written by the programmer or someone close to the software, so they’re brief and don’t quite fill in every gap, so I felt a bit confused at times. Ideally they could do with being pulled together into one pdf with a friendly introduction and more hand holding.

2. The guys at e3Software are terrific programmers, and not highly skilled salesmen, so they don’t do the best job showing off just how brilliant this application is. They focus more on the features of Direct Mail, and not much on what the program can really do for you, and how best to make the most of it.

However, having said that, Direct Mail is really excellent, and I managed to get the program working just fine, and get out my first batches of emails – quickly and easily. And that’s what matters!

Free trial

You can try out Direct Mail for Mac yourself at e3Software’s site: you can send 5 emails free of charge to test out the way it works and how it reports back to you who opened the emails and who clicked on the links.

You will need to invest in the Pro version to get the reporting, but I’m sure you’ll recoup your investment quickly.

If you choose to buy this program, please enter my email address – chrispaynelifetools [.at.] mac.com – as I will get a small commission. That’s fair, isn’t it?

Bottom line…

If you want some software to enable you to send out bulk emails to a prospect or customer list, or simply have a far better idea of who is opening your emails and what they’re clicking on – at a price that’s less than the competition –Direct Mail may be just what you’re looking for.

5 out of 5 stars!

Chris Payne helps people triumph over the challenges in their lives: one-on-one, by phone, and via video calls. He also creates websites like this one for people, and teaches them how to earn a part- or full-time income from their website. See this page for more about him.