Neil, I guess you've got a captive audience. I too would like to know how you're managing the advanced editing I and others have mentioned. I don't mean multiple tabs and adjustable paragraph positions. I mean working with document layouts, reference content, charts, document merge, and formulas, to name a few. Even a good breakdown of how you're managing collaboration through track changes and comments would be nice. No one is doubting the ability to accomplish some or most of these tasks on a Mac as a sighted person. It's the ease/capacity to do it with Voiceover that people are pointing out. I'm all ears to learn how you're making it happen in hopes of reconsidering my position on Mac versus PC.
As to other folks' comments about a terrible experience with JAWS and PCs, remember that the beauty and curse of a PC is the wide range of choices. Older systems with less than adequate specs are lightly to cause problems all around. Too many people pay less for systems and expect them to sing like their more expensive counterparts. The simple difference between a spinning drive and a solid state drive is like night and day. It really does make a huge difference on application performance. I'm no JAWS apologist. I've ramrodded Freedom Scientific in times past, but their product has gotten enormously better, as is true of Window Eyes. I like the community development of things like NVDA. So far as I know, and I'm really hoping to be wrong about this, Voiceover is primarly an Apple product with little to no enhancements from the community of consumers. I don't much care for the garden argument people leverage against Apple. They know enough consumers will be perfectly happy behind that wall, but let's not minimize anyone's positive remarks about the PC as misguided or appalling. Facts versus facts win the day for the informed consumer, and the fact is that, for the moment, the PC still runs the business industry. I work for the feds, and although iPads have begun filtering into our inventory, PCs are going to be around for a while, for them and the thousands of companies that contract with them. Joe -----Original Message----- From: viphone@googlegroups.com [mailto:viphone@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Neil Barnfather - TalkNav Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2012 3:49 AM To: viphone@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Mac verses Ipad Sieghard, You and I were bound to one day disagree. here it is: That shiny new PC laptop which you bought for half the money, well done, yes, Apple products costs more, what you failed to highlight is how much JAWS then cost you to put onto it. Even if you just look at the SMA costs, JAWS is terribly expensive. I bought JAWS Pro in 1997 and paid the Pro SMA for years there after, I've never been impressed with it, and until they do moe to keep it in line with industry updates and work on reliability for new hardware technologies etc JAWS is never a good choice for the power user. This business of power user, of course the term just means someone who knows quite abit about the machine, the software and who uses it for around 8 hours a day. I use my Mac for way more than that and did so with my Windows machines too. Then there's inclusive and consistency of updates. How long before FS will decide that JAWS users may just wish to use Windows 8, or even dare to want to try a Windows 8 tablet? I got so very fed up with FS telling me that JAWS wouldn't support the latest Windows release for months, and often a year or so. That is just beyond unacceptable. Both Lion and Mountain Lion were both fully accessible and usable by us on day one, along with our sighted peers. oh, and how much did I pay for that accessibility over my sighted peers, nothing. As someone who owns multinational businesses I need my computing solution to work, be reliable, functional, up to date and effective. I use spread sheets with formulae, multi page spread sheets. I use wordd processed docs with track changes and other more advanced features, I live in mail and often have 10 plus tabs open in the web-browser. My Mac just eats it all up, JAWS would have crashed hours ago and left me stranded. Regards, Neil Barnfather Talks List Administrator Twitter @neilbarnfather TalkNav is a Nuance, Code Factory and Sendero dealer, as well as an Apple iOS, Macintosh and Android accessibility specialist. For all your accessible phone, PDA and GPS related enquiries visit www.talknav.com URL: - www.talknav.com e-mail: - serv...@talknav.com Phone: - +44 844 999 4199 On 24 Oct 2012, at 03:38, Sieghard Weitzel <siegh...@live.ca> wrote: > Hi Kathy, > > I also really like my iPhone and it's amazing what you can do with it. > However, don't make the mistake to just assume that a Mac is going to > be just as awesome. You can't compare an iPhone to a Mac and while I > am sure Mac lovers disagree, I firmly hold that a PC running Windows 7 > with now Jaws > 14 is a better solution if you are a power user. If all you do is > write emails, do Skype, browse the web and so on a Mac with Voiceover > maybe OK, but then again you can do that with just an iPhone or an > iPad. I am not sure what you mean by "JAWS and internet explorer are > driving me crazy with all the crashes etc.", to me that is such a > generalised statement and while a PC can crash and while Jaws can > sometimes become unresponsive, it's not like a Mac is immune to these > things. If you do a lot of browsing I think Jaws, especially 14 with > the new flexible web feature and all the things like navigation quick > keys etc. will be more efficient and it's not as if you don't have > choices regarding your browser, you can use IE, Firefox and Chrome and > sometimes I use IE for one thing and Firefox for another thing because > I discovered one works better than the other for certain applications. > The nice thing is that Jaws features like navigation quick keys, placemarkers or the flexible web feature works regardless. > > I listened to the announcement today of the new MacBook laptops and > while they sound like awesome computers, I can still buy a Windows > laptop with the same specs (except maybe the weight and thickness) for > $600 or $700 less than the entry level MacBook Pro 13 inch. I bought > an Acer TimelineX laptop last January, so almost a year ago, and it > has very similar specs as far as processor and memory is concerned, it > has a 120 Gig solid state drive and it's actually a 15 inch laptop > with a full keyboard including numeric pad plus it has a DVD Writer. I > also get about 8 hours of battery life and the entire thing including > the upgrade to the solid state drive was $900. I'd have to spend > $2,000 to get a 15" Macbook Pro with these specs or maybe even more and it's not as if I care whether it has a retina display. > > These are just some thoughts for those who are super impressed with > the MacBooks Apple announced today. AS I said, they are beautiful and > definitely sound like fantastic computers, but as is usual, people > tend to think of anything Apple makes as superior and that is not always entirely justified. > > > Regards, > Sieghard > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the "VIPhone" Google Group. > To search the VIPhone public archive, visit http://www.mail-archive.com/viphone@googlegroups.com/. > To post to this group, send email to viphone@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to viphone+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/viphone?hl=en. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "VIPhone" Google Group. To search the VIPhone public archive, visit http://www.mail-archive.com/viphone@googlegroups.com/. To post to this group, send email to viphone@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to viphone+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/viphone?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "VIPhone" Google Group. To search the VIPhone public archive, visit http://www.mail-archive.com/viphone@googlegroups.com/. To post to this group, send email to viphone@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to viphone+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/viphone?hl=en.