I'm breaking up with my apps

Okay, it's the final app round-up and I have given my soul to Satan, uh no, wait a minute...I mean to NoteSuite. That's it. I just got confused for a moment.

I've moved lock stock and barrel into this app. And speaking of moving, I feel like I moved four times in the last two months. I tried out four apps and gave each of them my all.  I moved everything, and I mean everything, into these apps to try them out.

I thought I'd found real happiness. But the sad truth is that I have a roving eye. I'd see a new app in an ad and before I knew it, I was trying it on mentally with my eyes. I'd find myself leering at screenshots in the App Store. I'd think "could that app be the one for me?" But I felt cheap; after all, I'd given my life to those other apps.

And seriously, my relationship with my old apps worked for a while. Like husbands, I thought each one was wonderful…at first. I was immersed in their charms and believed I was the luckiest guy in the world.

But then they showed  their darker sides. I'm no fool. I packed up my stuff and moved out immediately. And you know what? It was all worth it because I finally met my dream app.

NoteSuite, with you and Scrivener -- I shall go to the ball!

Good news for Mac fans

I know most of my readers use PCs rather than Macs. (Google gives bloggers statistics that reveal this sort of thing.) In fact, only about 10% of you are on Macs. This post is for you.

If you've upgraded to Mavericks, you can dictate now without sending the voice record to Apple to be deciphered. That's the old way of doing it. The old way works, of course, but you have to wait for Apple to respond -- and when Apple's servers are busy, you get no assistance and have to type the damn thing yourself.

But that was before Mavericks. Now, you can go into Settings/Dictation, turn on Dictation and then click the line below it, where it enables "enhanced" dictation. If you click this option, your computer will download nearly a gig of data, and then you'll have your own dictation engine on board. And you don't have to be online to use it. And it's quicker! You talk and it turns your voice into text almost as fast as you can speak. On my first try, it did everything perfectly.

How can anyone use a PC these days? They're relics of a long-gone dinosaur era.

Update: Curiously, I find it only works if I choose the option where I hit the Command key twice to engage Dictation. The other options don't work. Fine. I'll use either Command key. 

Sometimes Siri gets drunk

Siri, Apple's virtual assistant, is usually reliable. But every now and then, it seems like she's dead drunk.

First, understand that Siri and dictation both use the same engine. If Siri understands your words, so does Mac's dictation function. I often speak to my iPad in the evening. I'll dictate an idea for a post, or a note for a novel. It's quite helpful.

The way dictation and Siri work is that when you speak you speak to your iPad (or computer), it records what you say and sends the recording to Apple, whose servers decipher its meaning and return text to you. As I say, it's usually quite good.

But when the circuits are busy -- like on a Friday night or, really, anytime after school lets out -- Siri screws up. Last night I tried to input a title for a post. I dictated "These people are onto something" and Siri returned "Are Pontoosuc". See what I mean? Drunk. I think it's wild how wrong it gets it. I mean, are pontoosuc? Well, I guess it got the "onto" part right.

Anyway, if this ever happens to you, just wait a moment and try again. If it still doesn't work, wait ten minutes. That should take care of it.

Okay, I'm officially in heaven

This is the joint! When I set that accessibility option on my Mac earlier today, to enable me to zoom the screen on my Air, I noticed another option.

I'd seen it before: "Invert colors". For some reason, those words never meant anything to me. I'd seen them many, many times. But suddenly I realized what it was for. I enabled it and now I can press a simple combination of keys to turn a white page with black letters into a black page with white letters. And I can toggle back and forth with ease.

Now the screen doesn't look too bright when I visit the NY Times or any other site that uses a white background. And this capability applies to all programs. So when I open a new Word doc at night, for instance, I can make that blinding white page black. Same goes for Mail. Those programs look way too bright to me. The problem was always that if you turned the brighness down, you lost contrast. But this accessibility option makes things crisp and clear -- without the eye pain! I couldn't be happier. This is the solution for my most pressing computer problem.

I'm writing this post on a black page with white text. It's soothing. This may mean nothing to readers but it's a dogsend for me.

PS: You do this through System Preferences/Keyboard/Keyboard Shortcuts/Accessibility. Then check the invert colors box. Voila.