Auto-saving in OS X

As I mentioned a week ago, I have a strong dislike for the “Save” dialogue boxes that pop up every time you close a document. It seems someone at Apple, and by someone I mean you–know–who, agrees with me. The next version of Mac OS X will include auto-saving and applications will automatically resume where they were when they closed.

In other words; just like on the iPhone. This looks very promising, as long as they still let the rest of us organise our own work in whatever way we want. The iPhone way of having each document exist “inside” the application that created it works fine for casual use, but for any project or task that requires the use of more than one application it is very restricting. We need to be able to keep different types of files that belong together in the same place.

I’m not quite sure how this is going to work though. So lets say you open TextEdit for the first time. An empty document appears. You type some text, move and resize the window, and close the application. Without being asked any questions about saving, name or location. Later you open TextEdit again, and it opens exactly the way it was when you closed it, with the window in the same position and the same size, and the same text inside it. This is as it always should have been.

But then you close the document. Then what? Does the application close too now that there are no documents open? And where can you find the document again? Will all applications come with their own built-in libraries?

If you want to move the document while it’s still open I guess you can select “Move to…” from the “File” menu. Which will have plenty of free space now that the “Save” and “Save as…” items are gone.

Seeing as many (most?) casual computer users don’t really understand the concept of files and folders I hope Apple succeeds in bringing some of the simplicity and usability of the iPhone platform over to the Mac, but without sacrificing the flexibility that easy access to the filesystem provides for the rest of us.

Dumbest question ever

Some survey once showed that the dumbest question known to mankind is “Are you sleeping?” I don’t get it. That seems like a perfectly valid question. If you get no answer it means “yes” and if you get any answer at all it means “no”. Couldn’t be simpler.

No the dumbest question ever must surely be this one:

It is also probably the one question computer users are asked most often. I feel this most pointless of all questions can only be properly answered like this (click to enlarge):

I recently started using Scrivener, and it is intelligent enough to just assume that you want to keep your changes when you close a document; it automatically saves while you’re working on it. It also assumes that you are intelligent enough to use the “undo” command if you have made changes you don’t want to keep. I wish more applications would have this kind of confidence in its users.

Dragon Dictate 2.0 for the Mac

I have been a bit harsh on MacSpeech in the past, but since then they have been bought by Nuance (makers of the excellent Dragon NaturallySpeaking dictation software for Windows). If there is anyone who can finally release a decent dictation application for the Mac, it’s them. And recently they released the rebranded Dragon Dictate 2.0. Looking forward to finally not having to launch Windows in Parallels Desktop every time I want to dictate something, this of course filled me with much joy and hope. But judging by MacSpeech’s own forums this version has caused a lot of problems for many people, first and foremost because of a bug which crashes the application when you launch it! After making absolutely sure that I can indeed get my money back within the first 30 days if the application is not working properly and am therefore in no way running the risk of giving even more money to MacSpeech for a faulty product, I bought and installed it. The aforementioned bug was easily avoided by leaving the start-up mode to “Idle – Microphone off”.

Here are the results of the first test:

She sells seashells by the seashore.

Impressive. How about this one:

How much would be debuted chuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood
How much would with a booby-trapped truck if it would chop the truck would
How much would really would truck truck even good truck woodchuck would

The first one was pretty close, the rest not so much, but in all fairness it’s a very tough phrase. And all in all the accuracy is outstanding. Even better than Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, which is only natural considering it is using the same underlying engine as Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11. The editing commands are at first confusing for someone who is used to Dragon NaturallySpeaking (when I started this post I was actually planning on doing a fair bit of complaining about them), but by now I’m pretty happy about them. There are occasional crashes and bugs, like sometimes leaving out the last character when dictating single words or punctuation (which, in the latter case, leads to a whole lot of nothing). But when Nuance fixes those I think we finally, at long last, have a good dictation solution for the Mac.

Dictating on a Mac with Dragon NaturallySpeaking

As I have mentioned before I’m not a big fan of MacSpeech Dictate. So I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking in Windows XP running under Parallels Desktop 4 when I need to dictate something. It’s working very well, but it is of course very tedious to have to copy and paste everything I dictate from Windows back into my Mac applications. Luckily Tim Harper has made tightvnc-dns, a Windows application that reroutes the generated keystrokes from Dragon NaturallySpeaking back to the Mac side. You can’t use Dragon to edit the text you dictate this way, but for shorter pieces of text it is very practical. Read the rest of this entry »