Monday 13 October 2014

DragonDictate update and how will Handoff work

Got an update to the DragonDictate application on my Mac and I am hoping that it will allow it to work on Yosemite which will be released soon. I always like to have the latest operating system on my Mac and I am quite happy usually to jump in there as soon as it becomes available. DragonDictate is one of my go to applications that I use just about every day. If it is not available on the new operating system then I will not upgrade. On the last operating system upgrade from Apple I had some time where DragonDictate was not working properly with Mavericks. It was very annoying and I’m not going to go through that again. I would hope that Nuance who are the developers of DragonDictate have got their fingers out and have been working on making sure it works well with the new operating system. Yosemite might be available later on this week, according to the rumour mongers.

DragonDictate

Waiting for Yosemite OS X for Mac

I did try out the first beta version of the new operating system and I wasn’t able to use my favourite applications so I removed it from computer. I have been looking on the Nuance forum of the help system and I have not yet found any details from other users about whether it works or not. So it looks like I will have to give myself a backdoor and be able to roll back to Mavericks again if I find that DragonDictate stops working. I am just hoping that’s the today’s update to DragonDictate is something that is Yosemite inspired.

Handoff and Continuity

I have just been trying to get hand off and continuity working with my iPhone 6 and my iPad. It didn’t work and I think perhaps the reason why, is that the iPad is a third-generation device and I need to have a fourth gen iPad. Oh well, I will be able to rectify this problem in a week or so. Let’s see how things go on Thursday when the new announcement is coming from Apple about new iPads, allegedly. the handoff feature only works with a view application so far, namely Mail, Safari, the office suite of applications, Maps, Messages and Reminders. It is a feature that is available to third party developers and it would be good to see in something like Byword.

If you do have the right hardware to be able to make this work then when you open up your other device lock screen you will see an icon for the application you are handing off from. You swipe up on that icon in the same way as you would swipe up to get into the camera application from the lock screen. You then enter your entry code and away you go. It will be interesting to see how this will work when you are going from an iOS device to the Mac and vice versa.