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User Name TimA
Member Since 0000-00-00
Total number of Feedback Posts: 6
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Last 10 Feedback Posts by TimA [ Search for All ]
JanusNode 2.08 (Mac OS X)
As of 5/9/08 this VersionTracker download page links to JanusNode, an OSX random text generator by the same author as McPoet. While I no longer see the ability to generate actual poetry, it now has a much better range of choices such as Haiku, Fortunes, Bureaucratese, Insults (my favorite), Blessings (which sound disturbingly similar to insults, TVGuide, Definitions, ArtSpeak (very similar to the BS I heard and read in college-level art classes), and more. Amazing little program, prettier than McPoet, and now, of course, OSX-capable. Easy to use, but with a 70-page manual if you really wanna delve deeply into it. [alert admin]
Friday, May 09 2008 @ 09:11 AM PDT
Burnz 1.1.32u (Mac OS X)
I have a CD that was burned on a previous version of OSX. I copied it onto my iMac, did some housecleaning, deleted some files, and then tried to burn the files onto a new CD. But I got the message that there are too many files to fit on the disk. This is funny, because the disk was originally 657 MB, and the files I wanted to burn onto a new disk totaled only 626 MB! My guess is that the newest versions of OSX (Tiger and Leopard) add so much overhead that even a smaller number of files will no longer fit. Fortunately, in my first test run with Burnz, all the files fit onto a new CD without complaint. [alert admin]
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Saturday, May 03 2008 @ 11:29 AM PDT
Infovox iVox 1.1.2 (Mac OS X)
Decent voices with some caveats 
Acapella group gives you a generous length of time to evaluate the voices -- 30 days of unrestricted use. If you haven't decided whether you can live with the voices after that amount of time, you probably weren't using them in the first place. If, however, you find that you miss the voices after the trial period ends, that's a sure sign that you should purchase the voices. The American voice pack comes with several voices. However, only the HQ voices are of any real quality. The HD voices sound more robotic than even the low-quality voices that come with the Mac. There are five HQ voices. However, narrowing them down a bit further, the child voices, Kenny and Nelly, are just high-pitched versions of other voices. That leaves you with three truly high-quality voices, Heather, Laura, and Ryan. At $99 for the voice pack, that puts the best voices at about $33 each (no you can’t purchase them individually), $13 more than the individual Cepstral voices. The best voice of the bunch, Ryan, however, sounds excellent (aside from a few ideosyncrasies). The worst trait of the Infovox Ivox voices is that they pronounce some punctuation marks, such as asterisks and dashes. This is especially annoying in e-mails when these characters are used as separators such as: ********************************************************************* When the voices get to such strings, they insist on stupidly saying, “asterisk asterisk asterisk asterisk asterisk asterisk asterisk asterisk asterisk” ad nauseum. Apple's voices have not read punctuation marks like these for over a decade. Come on Acapella, what were you thinking? Get with the program! This is ridiculous when a natural sounding voice suddenly starts reading “asterisk asterisk asterisk” or “dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash dash” etc.This is pointless and unnatural. And annoying. [alert admin]
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Monday, April 28 2008 @ 09:18 PM PDT
Haiku 1.03 (Mac OS X)
The way it works is each of the three lines of the haiku are swapped in and out from the widget's predefined repertoire. How many different haikus you can get depends on how many phrases were originally entered into the widget by the designer. [alert admin]
Thursday, January 24 2008 @ 12:00 AM PST
IdeaKeeper 2.1b7 (Mac OS 9)
In Macworld's March 2006 roundup of brainstorming tools, there was no mention of this program (which was intriguing, in it's day) but plenty of alternatives were listed. It looks like this one's dead, Jim. [alert admin]
Sunday, June 25 2006 @ 08:47 PM PDT
Cepstral Voices 3.2.1 (Mac OS X)
I like the Cepstral voices. Nice to finally see a voice choice on the Mac. “David” and “Diane” seem to be the best (perhaps they are newer than the others?) with “Diane” being slightly more realistic than “David” (I think she is the newest of all). Voice synthesis technology continues to advance. The voices range from so-so (the novelty voices) to fair (the British voices) to good. Its interesting, but each voice seems to be built from the ground up with its own speech engine, peculiarities, inflections and so on, not just the same engine with a different pitch applied to it like the built-in Apple voices. I think a single voice is definitely worth $30 if you do a lot of listening or use them to make “audiobooks” to take on the road, but it would be nice if there were a discount if you buy multiple voices. One good voice is reallly all you need, though. Cepstral has a well-designed site that allows you to test each voice, plus you can download the voices to test them out (but with annoying nag messages). One word of caution: the voices each run about 90 MB! [alert admin]
Thursday, April 07 2005 @ 01:06 PM PDT
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