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Download Totally Accurate Battlegrounds for Mac OS + Torrent:Date: 6 June 2018Platform: M. Hello Sometime between 11/01 7am and 11/04 9pm, my Watch's GPS went from super accurate to wonky. When I go for a run, the map used to be pretty much all nice and square and follow the streets. Now it look slike I'm cutting through buildings and cutting corners. Three things happened during.
In October 2018, Nuance announced that it has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac and will support it for only 90 days from activation in the US or 180 days in the rest of the world. The continuous speech-to-text software was widely considered to be the gold standard for speech recognition, and Nuance continues to develop and sell the Windows versions of Dragon Home, Dragon Professional Individual, and various profession-specific solutions.
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This move is a blow to professional users—such as doctors, lawyers, and law enforcement—who depended on Dragon for dictating to their Macs, but the community most significantly affected are those who can control their Macs only with their voices.
What about Apple’s built-in accessibility solutions? macOS does support voice dictation, although my experience is that it’s not even as good as dictation in iOS, much less Dragon Professional Individual. Some level of voice control of the Mac is also available via Dictation Commands, but again, it’s not as powerful as what was available from Dragon Professional Individual.
TidBITS reader Todd Scheresky is a software engineer who relies on Dragon Professional Individual for his work because he’s a quadriplegic and has no use of his arms. He has suggested several ways that Apple needs to improve macOS speech recognition to make it a viable alternative to Dragon Professional Individual:
- Support for user-added custom words: Every profession has its own terminology and jargon, which is part of why there are legal, medical, and law enforcement versions of Dragon for Windows. Scheresky isn’t asking Apple to provide such custom vocabularies, but he needs to be able to add custom words to the vocabulary to carry out his work.
- Support for speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition: Currently, macOS’s speech recognition is speaker-independent, which means that it works pretty well for everyone. But Scheresky believes it needs to become speaker-dependent, so it can learn from your corrections to improve recognition accuracy. Also, Apple’s speech recognition isn’t continuous—it works for only a few minutes before stopping and needing to be reinvoked.
- Support for cursor positioning and mouse button events: Although Scheresky acknowledges that macOS’s Dictation Commands are pretty good and provide decent support for text cursor positioning, macOS has nothing like Nuance’s MouseGrid, which divides the screen into a 3-by-3 grid and enables the user to zoom in to a grid coordinate, then displaying another 3-by-3 grid to continue zooming. Nor does Apple have anything like Nuance’s mouse commands for moving and clicking the mouse pointer.
When Scheresky complained to Apple’s accessibility team about macOS’s limitations, they suggested the Switch Control feature, which enables users to move the pointer (along with other actions) by clicking a switch. He talks about this in a video.
Unfortunately, although Switch Control would let Scheresky control a Mac using a sip-and-puff switch or a head switch, such solutions would be both far slower than voice and a literal pain in the neck. There are some better alternatives for mouse pointer positioning:
- Dedicated software, in the form of a $35 app called iTracker.
- An off-the-shelf hack using Keyboard Maestro and Automator.
- An expensive head-mounted pointing device, although the SmartNav is $600 and the HeadMouse Nano and TrackerPro are both about $1000. It’s also not clear how well they interface with current versions of macOS.
Regardless, if Apple enhanced macOS’s voice recognition in the ways Scheresky suggests, it would become significantly more useful and would give users with physical limitations significantly more control over their Macs… and their lives. If you’d like to help, Scheresky suggests submitting feature request feedback to Apple with text along the following lines (feel free to copy and paste it):
Because Nuance has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, it is becoming difficult for disabled users to use the Mac. Please enhance macOS speech recognition to support user-added custom words, speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition that learns from user corrections to improve accuracy, and cursor positioning and mouse button events.
Thank you for your consideration!
Thanks for encouraging Apple to bring macOS’s accessibility features up to the level necessary to provide an alternative to Dragon Professional Individual for Mac. Such improvements will help both those who face physical challenges to using the Mac and those for whom dictation is a professional necessity.
TMO Reports - 'The Real Deal' On Mac vs. Linux Market Share; Is It Accurate?
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by Brad Gibson, 11:00 AM EST, February 20th, 2004
Operating system market share. Personal computer market share. Installed base market share. The list goes on and on.
It can all be confusing for the layman, and because there are so many numbers from lots of different market research companies, figuring out who is king of the mountain in the technology world can be just as confusing as reading The Daily Racing Form.
A recent story by BusinessWeek Online that caught the ire of many Mac readers proved the point that numbers can not only be deceiving, but can be difficult to interpret - even for reporters.
The story focused on the continuing popularity of the Linux operating system (OS). The story quoted data from market research firm IDC saying it would 'announce within weeks that Linux' PC market share in 2003 hit 3.2 percent, overtaking Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh software.'
The fact is that after some careful explaining, it appears there's a more accurate way to look at the numbers than what was quoted in the BusinessWeek story. Let's clear up the confusing.
PC market share
BusinessWeek identified Linux OS as soon to have a 3.2 percent market share of PCs sold. IDC's Al Gillen, research director for systems software, explained to The Mac Observer that the number quoted is not for PC market share, but actually Linux's market share of new, licensed operating systems shipments worldwide.
'Let me explain the key difference,' said Mr. Gillen. 'Operating environment/new licensed shipments is a measure of OS packages that are either shipped with or without a PC. There can be different numbers for PCs and operating systems because operating systems can be used for upgrades and conversely operating systems can be deployed as non-paid and pirated OS copies. You can wind up with some difference in the actual numbers,' he said.
Not new data
Contrary to what BusinessWeek Online wrote, Mr. Gillen said the 3.2 percent market share for paid operating systems is actually a projection from research released last September by IDC, and there is no new data on Linux market share on PCs coming out anytime soon.
'We're about two months away from producing final numbers for last year,' he said.
The projections for 2003 were that Apple's shipments for new, licensed operating systems shipments would be flat year over year. 'And because the market share for Apple's competitors was expected to grow and Apple's was not, their projected market share would decline slightly to about 2.6 percent,' Mr. Gillen said. 'I want to iterate that this was a projection from last September and not new data.'
Market leader Microsoft was projected to have a little less than 94 percent of the paid operating system market share.
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Confused yet?
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Besides the all important market share for new, licensed operating systems shipments, Mr. Gillen explained another important measure of dominance is the share of installed operating systems, in which Apple is clearly out in front over Linux.
For competitive reasons, IDC does not release specific numbers of the installed base, but Mr. Gillen confirmed Apple's market share was 'nearly double that of Linux,' putting it in second place behind the dominate OS leader, Windows by Microsoft Corp. As for the market share of PCs using either Linux, Mac or Windows operating systems in 2003, those numbers are collected by another research team at IDC and will be released later this year.
A question of accuracy
The methodology of how different market shares are calculated is controversial. Many wonder just how accurate numbers, such as licensed operating systems, can be given the way in which they can be bought and the variety of ways they can be used.
One contention is that just because an OS is bought, doesn't mean someone uses it right away. In the case of Linux, critics caution that calculations of licenses sold only take into affect single copies when one copy can be installed on multiple PCs. In addition, copies of Linux downloaded from the Internet are also not part of the numbers collected.
Also, in total fairness, critics caution consumers and businesses must also take into account that market share numbers are often calculated for clients that stand to benefit from good numbers. In the case of IDC, two of its biggest clients include Apple and Microsoft.
What's most important to watch?
If you believe the numbers, what is most important market share number for companies and technology aficionados to watch?
'It depends what you're looking for,' said Mr. Gillen. 'If you're somebody that's looking for installed base to sell applications software, you look at the installed base. If you're somebody who is selling new systems or a reseller, you're looking at new shipments. It really depends on the individual organization.'
For the Linux OS, Mr. Gillen believes the most important challenge at this point is to put a significant dent into Microsoft's market share,' he said. 'If Linux can't accomplish that, then small incremental increases won't matter.'
As for Apple, Mr. Gillen believes increasing market share over all is crucial. 'If you look at Apple's unit shipment volume, it has not been growing in accordance with the market, especially in the last couple of years. When that happens, market share is going to go down because you're not keeping up with the rest of the market. That is 'Challenge Number One' for Apple.'