I used Shelock for finding movies and loved how it gave me all the
movies, movie times and location in a easy to read table. I use to
wonder when tech inthusiast would say remember this or that program
that came with Panther, wouldn't it be great to have that again? Well
now I fell the same way about my Sherlock.
On Oct 27, 2007, at 7:12 PM, Josh de Lioncourt wrote:
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.
