Speech recognition took first place in last week’s poll on future technologies, so it’s appropriate that this week Matt Neuburg looks at Apple’s PlainTalk speech recognition technology, along with the alternative speech interfaces offered by QuicKeys and ListenDo. Segueing from voice to print, Kirk McElhearn returns with a review of David Pogue’s "Missing Manual" on Mac OS 9, and we ask what factors help you decide to buy computer books.
Quicken 2001 Ships -- Intuit has begun shipping Quicken 2001 for Macintosh, the latest version of its market-dominating personal finance package. Quicken 2001 offers a global search and replace feature which operates across accounts, the capability to notice repeated payments and proactively remind you they're coming due, plus a software update feature which can automatically notify you when updates or bug fixes are available
Poll Preview: Them Tomes, Them Tomes -- Literally hundreds of new computer books appear every year, covering the latest versions of software, passing on tips and techniques for creating everything from Web sites to digital videos, and opining on the state of technology and the industry
As we approach the year 2001, we don't yet have flying cars, a space program for the masses, or (thankfully) red-eyed artificial intelligences with a predilection for shooting crewmen out of airlocks
In 1990, I bought my first Macintosh, a PowerBook 100 that included a whopping 2 MB of RAM, a 20 MB hard disk, and System 7. As a new computer user, I was amazed at how easy it was to use, and, especially, how simple and clear it was to manage the system software.
Those days have changed
In TidBITS-544, I wrote about continuous speech recognition on the Mac using IBM's ViaVoice, which enables you to dictate sentences and have the computer type them