My responses to your statements are mixed throughout your comments,
marked with, "Josh says..."
On Oct 27, 2007, at 3:08 PM, Justin Harford wrote:
I have installed leopard and have been overwhelmed with a variety of
mixed feelings about it. It is like, some things are easier and
other things that were easy and doable in tiger, are not in leopard.
Josh says:
I think this is just a learning curve. I felt that way at first with
certain things, but after getting used to the new ways of doing
things, it gets easier and, I think overall, better than Tiger.
You say:
Spaces, while accessible to set up, is completely useless for
someone using the keyboard. Here's why. You move from space to
space with ctrl arrows which is wonderful, but when you move to a
new space, open, say, safari, then go to another space and open
textedit, you can still command tab between each of them. It does
not separate the apps in th the space that is not being focused on.
Josh says:
I agree. This is an annoyance as Spaces would be very useful to me.
I suspect we'll get either a fix or a tweak to change this behavior
before long, as several reviews I've read mention this problem.
You say:
Where's sherlock? I used to use that app a lot for finding movies,
translating, and reading rss feeds. It made things very easy and
practical but now it is not here.
Josh says:
Sherlock's demise has been foretold for quite some time. You are the
only person I've ever heard, in the VO community or not, that used
it. Most agreed it was a useless app, which I'm sure is why Apple
dropped it. Not enough interest killed it long ago.
You say:
I don't know about you guys, but I can't stand the entonation.
Anyone tried fred lately? He is speaking with accessive entonation
to the point of sluring his words. Alex is ok, because they
obviously focused on him more than fred. But he still does not read
near as fast as fred. It is great for people who don't listen to
speech very fast, who don't really have to skim a long text, but
otherwise, not so good.
Josh says:
You can change the intonation. Use VO-Command_Left Arrow until you
hear the Intonation setting, then use VO-Command-Up and Down arrows to
adjust it.
You say:
In groups mode, the cursor still will go out of the html content on
some pages, most notably when you go and read articles on sfgate.
We used to be able to solve this by hiding the bookmarks and the
tool bar, and by pressing refresh a couple times. Now, the zoom,
close, and zoom buttons make this impossible. Apart from that, they
are just a redundant navigation hazard.
Josh says:
As previously explained, the window control buttons are there now for
a good reason, and I agree with it. I don't think they pose any
problem at all. As for your navigation issue on the web, I've not
personally experienced that yet with Leopard, but in the past I had
the Tab key set in Safari preferences to only highlight links. When
I'd run into the problem you described, pressing tab a few times until
it started reading links usually sorted things out. I never tried
your method.
You say:
Stacks is just not accessible. Forget it. As though we don't want
to use that. Personally, I would have liked to be able to access my
files from the dock, make things more efficient not having to tab
over to the finder to access something. Just saying because you'd
think that new additions like this would be properly written.
Josh says:
Maybe there's some trick to it, but I too am frustrated with Stacks,
especially since the equivalent functionality in Tiger, where folders
became menus on the dock, was totally accessible.
You say:
What happened to the bilingual support? And the ability to
customize the way VO reads elements?
Josh says:
If by "bilingual support," you are refering to localization in other
languages, it is there. It is useful if you have the Infovox voices
or others that speak various languages, so taht the VO utility and
feedback will be spoken in the appropriate language when sent to one
of these other synthesizers. That is what Apple advertised, and as
far as I can tell, that's what they delivered.
You say:
All in all, I have mixed feelings. Some of these things I simply
can't believe would be overlooked during the testing process.
Unless they simply were ignored for whatever reason by the developers.
I noticed on the webpage, that it compares VO to jaws and
"windowseyes". I definitely get the impression that they have been
so busy trying to lure the windows users into os x, that they have
let some of the old things like groups mode, things that made
voiceover 1.0 unique, slip.
Remember that the VO developers were on a time limit too. Perhaps
there just wasn't time to fix everything. We can only speculate.
HOwever, groups mode works better than ever, IMO, so I don't think
they've let that slip at all.
