-- Tuesday -- (Not the normal Monday)
Doors open at 7:00
Meeting starts at 7:30
[Agenda]
- News and Views
- Five minutes in the Lion's den
- Five minutes with your head in the Clouds
- Tips and Tricks with Safari 5
- Text-to-speech
- Reader and Reading Panel
-- break --
- Is that a Movie Studio in Neil's pocket?
- LeRoy talks to his iPad (and it listens!)
[/Agenda]
We will also head out for tea and desert at the Royal Oak next door for an after-meeting-meeting
Pay by iPhone (or other Android, Blackberry) now in Ottawa
- Based on http://www.paybyphone.com/
- Free iPhone app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paybyphone/id448474183
New Intel Ivy Bridge processor coming to Mac
- http://www.macworld.com/article/1166515/intel_releases_ivy_bridge_new_mac_models_coming_soon_.html
Use iPad or iPhone Airplay to stream video to a Mac (which can then be connected to a projector)
- http://www.airserverapp.com/
Other direction (Mac to Airplay receiver, like an AppleTV2)
- http://www.cultofmac.com/147115/get-airplay-on-your-mac-right-now-with-airparrot-airserver/
- or wait for Mountain Lion, OS X 10.8
Related to some of our presentations tonight
- Comparison of Cloud drives including iCloud and Dropbox
By Microsoft so obviously SkyDrive "wins", but still interesting and useful
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/skydrive/compare
- Exhaustive List of iOS editors
http://brettterpstra.com/ios-text-editors/
- 3rd party voices for your Mac's text-to-speech
http://www.cepstral.com/demos/
Safari can read to you. I demonstrated setting up some shortcuts in my presentation so that you can reduce all the mousing around. Here are the setup instructions:
A) Choose a voice
The default voice and pace may be pleasant to your ears. If so, you can proceed to item B). But if you'd like to experiment with other options, here's what you need to do:
1) Open the pref pane and go to the Speech pane
2) Choose "text to speech" (vs. "speech recognition") tab if not already selected
3) Choose your preferred voice (drop down list) and speaking rate (slider) -- test with the Play button
4) Return to the main panel of the System Preferences pane
B) Keyboard shortcuts
Safari does not have keyboard shortcuts for starting to speak and stopping to speak. I prefer to use the keyboard. If you don't plan to use your keyboard to start the text-to-speech, you can proceed to item C). Here's what you need to do to program my setup:
1) From the System Preferences main panel, choose the Keyboard pane
2) Choose "keyboard shortcuts" (vs. keyboard) tab if not already selected
3) Choose Application Shortcut (from the list in the left pane)
4) Choose plus symbol (below right pane)
5) Identify Safari as the application from the drop down list
6) Type "Start Speaking" for the Menu title -- check your spelling and spacing!
7) Insert the cursor in Keyboard shortcut field and type "control-command-1" (results will appear in the field using the standard Mac OS symbols) -- note that you can choose a different shortcut but be aware that it needs to be unique -- no, "command-q" isn't a good choice! :-)
8) Choose Add
9) Choose the plus symbol (again)
10) Repeat steps 5) through 8) but use "Stop Speaking" and "control-command-2"
Open Safari and choose Edit > Speech > to review that the keyboard shortcuts were applied properly. They should be visible in the menu for both commands. If it does not appear, return to the Keyboard pane where you set this up and check your spelling and spacing.
C) Speaking text
So you have the voice, the pace and the keyboard shortcuts. Now you need some text. Most news stories have a clutter of non-story content. This includes text buttons, advertisements and even the weather. To get Safari to concentrate on "just the facts", use the Reader feature.
1) Load the page you are interested in
2) Look to the URL field (the one that includes the address at the top of window -- e.g., http://www.website.com/...) and wait for a gray/blue button with the word "Reader" appear)
3) Click on the button or choose "command-shift-r"
4) Choose "control-command-1" to have your Mac start speaking the article