Now look, I have two kids, one of whom is still a baby. There may have even been two, according to a colleague who swears he spotted another. Youngest Attendee and Worst Judgement - There was a baby in the keynote. MacSpeech Dictate will cost $199 with a headset upgrades from iListen 1.8 will cost either $79 (for purchases made in 2007) or $29 (for purchases in 2008).
The software is slated to ship in February 2008, with a lot of improvements to come within six months, including learning from corrections and specialized medical and legal dictionaries. Saw a short but effective demo of the pre-release MacSpeech Dictate software at the Expo under extremely noisy conditions and was suitably impressed. (David Pogue wrote up how this came to be in his New York Times column last week.) It’s going to play extremely well, because many Mac users were running Windows simply to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Most Welcome Brain Transplant - MacSpeech has been working with a good, but not world-beating speech-recognition system in their iListen product for years, before scoring the deal that they apparently wanted all along: a license to use the engine that drives Nuance Communications’ Dragon NaturallySpeaking Nuance’s software is and has been available only for Windows. The plastics of the iNo seemed a little flimsy, but it looked like something that could be a lot of fun with friends. The game lists for $99.99 but is available from for $49.99. The first person with an answer presses her remote control button, which stops the music and lets her guess, checking against the iPod for the correct answer. Plug your iPod into the iNo, flip a card to pick what aspect of the song should be identified (artist name, album name, etc.), and press Play on the iNo. With the new iNo from Sababa Toys, you can use your iPod’s music collection as the basis of a four-person music trivia game. Most Social Use of an iPod - iPods generally encourage anti-social behavior, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Discounts kick in for licenses purchased for
Buying 1.5 now gets you a free upgrade (and thus $5 discount) for 2.0 when it ships in February. BusySync 1.5 currently costs $19.95 per computer, but the price will rise to $24.95 for version 2.0. It’s a hack, but it’s a nifty one, as Google Calendar is free. With Google Calendar support, you publish a calendar to Google, then other computers subscribe to that Google Calendar. You might use Google Calendar already, but if not, you can adopt it as a sort of publishing relay to enable synchronizing between a Mac with a private IP address and computers elsewhere on the Internet. The latest version of BusySync – due to ship in February 2008 – skirts that problem by supporting Google Calendar. BusyMac’s limitation is that it can’t work over the Internet without the publishing computer for a given calendar having a publicly reachable IP address. One computer acts as the calendar host, but other Macs with BusySync can have as much access to that calendar as the publisher chooses to offer. BusySync is a tiny server product that runs in the background and lets multiple people share iCal calendars as if they were completely readable and writable over a local network or via the Internet. Most Welcome Fix for Glaring iCal Failing - BusyMac shipped their BusySync software a few months ago, but brought a new feature to Macworld Expo that’s sure to help. Contributions this year come from Adam Engst, Glenn Fleishman, Tonya Engst, and Rich Mogull. It’s once again time for our annual roundup of all those things at Macworld Expo that caught our attention for one reason or another and deserve to be called out.
#1627: iPhone 14 lineup, Apple Watch SE/Series 8/Ultra, new AirPods Pro, iOS 16 and watchOS 9 released, Steve Jobs Archive.