This is a strange ‘how to’ but these things are so cool I couldn’t help writing something about them – the ardrone – a helicopter controlled by your iPhone with a camera on the front that transmits the image to your iPhone screen! 

They are a ‘quadro-coptor’ – helicopter with 4 propellors, they have a camera in the front, they are controlled by your iphone, and you can see the image (640×480 resolution) from the iphone as you fly them. Basically this is one of those spy drone’s you see in the movies. And they are only $299. It’s incredible that something so powerful can be so cheap. They market it as a games device –  I’m wondering if there would be all kinds of privacy issues if they marketed it as a spy drone!

It has some built in intelligence so that it will auto-pilot itself if you stop controlling it, and I love this bit – ‘if you receive a call while flying the quadricopter, the autopilot stabilizes it and lands after few seconds.’

It can fly at 18km/hr for 12min on one battery, and operates by wi-fi so I’m guessing about a 50m range in open air.

They are for sale from amazon.com for US$299, or check out the ardrone website, I’d love to hear from anyone who has one!

My search for a good notetaking app has been a little on the obsessive side, but to me, the one thing a computer should be able to do well is take notes. I have spent 2 years on this one. I’m talking about an application where I can make a short note to myself and come back later and find it easily.

The combination of Notational Velocity on the mac, synced with Simplenote on the iphone, is for me the winner.
Step 1. Install Simplenote on your iphone.

Step 2. Sign up for a Simplenote account.

Step 3. Download Notational Velocity

Step 4. Enter your simplenote account details into the preferences of Notational Velocity.

Step5. change Notational velocity preferences to store the notes as rtf files in a folder instead of a single database file so that spotlight can find them.

That’s it! Now  all the notes in simple text on your iPhone will be synced with notational velocity on your  desktop computer.

Why I like these apps.
Simplenote is very SIMPLE, and Notational Velocity is soooo FAST. They are both elegant, and the best thing of all – they don’t get in the way.

Notational Velocity is a bit of a head spin the first time you use it. It’s so simple and it only has one box to type in – whether you’re writing a new note or searching for an old note you type in the same box!

And it is so FAST to search – the results appear INSTANTLY. It’s almost as if it’s reading your mind!

I use notational velocity for all kinds of things…

- writing down how I did something so that next time I need to do it I can remember.
- storing trivial information like the ranking of poker hands, or a list of things to take on holidays.
- lists of birthday present ideas for people
- poems and song lyrics
- lists where things are stored
- menus, letters, vision-setting, bits of computer code and so on.

I currently have 355 notes in it, and I don’t need to remember note titles, keywords or anything, I just type a word and it finds the note. It’s great.

For a long time SOHO notes was my favourite, but the worst problem is that you have to manually sync the iphone with the desktop app – I never remember to and get caught out looking for a note that is not yet synced to!

Likewise, Shovebox is a nice app  to capture notes into, but harder to search and browse them once they are in.

Aa good storage system for IDEAS is essential.

Today the iPhone companion app for my fav desktop notes app – SOHO notes was released.

First, the good…

It has a very nice,  easy-to-use interface, including a nice search feature.

Then the not so good…

It doesn’t  have automatic synchronisation like almost every other iphone app. You have to manually go into the preference window and click on the synchronise button!

If you have a note in Soho notes that has pictures or different fonts in it, the moment you edit it in notelife your pictures disappear and so do the fonts. It doesn’t even make a copy of the original notes – you have just lost all that information forever. So it’s only really useful for editing notes that are plain text notes.

SUMMARY:

A great way to access your SOHO notes on the iPhone if you have SOHO notes.

But not the one-solution answer to everything – no auto sync!

Like any other area of interest on the iPhone, when it comes to the Bible there are thousands of applications out there but the new kid on the block the ‘ESV Bible‘ is easily the best and here’s why…

Up until now, ‘Bible‘ has been my favourite iPhone Bible reading application. – it is simple to use and has pretty much every version you would want – NIV, CEV, NASB, ESV The Message and so on. The problem however is that it requires an Internet connection to work, and for that reason, it’s also a bit slow to use.

But having just tried out the new ESV Bible application, I have instantly fallen in love with it. Sometimes it takes a really good application to comes along to make you realise what you were missing and this is definitely the case with ESV Bible.

The navigation system is simple to use. You select a book of the Bible, it slickly pens out to give you a list of all the chapters. It’s so smooth it’s actually fun to use. To me that’s what makes the Apple experience and this app is an Apple style bible! Click on a chapter and the Bible opens at that chapter.

Click on any verse and a window slides open with cross-references to other similar verses that you can click on and navigate to, as well as a button to add your own notes to any verse, or post a verse to twitter or send averse to the e-mail app!

Click on the bottom of the screen and you have access to a ‘history’ of all the passages you’ve looked at recently – I’ve already found this very useful – and favourites section where you can add any Bible passage to your ‘ favourites’ and look it up instantly.

Of course there’s the standard ability to search the Bible, but again I like the way it is implemented with ESV Bible. The results are displayed by book of the Bible, giving you the first two results in each book, with a ‘more’ button should you wish to see more results.

You can grab it for free from itunes here: here.

You might have wondered how to get more RAM on your mac. You can replace it yourself, but you need to be careful where you buy it from.

In case you haven’t yet realised,  Apple Memory is different to normal PC RAM,  so if you go to a cheap PC shop or ebay and buy some memory it probably won’t work in your Apple computer. Here’s a reliable place I have found to buy RAM that works well in your Macintosh.It’s not that you need ‘Apple’ memory,  but you do need high quality RAM with certain specifications that are not obvious so you need to buy from someone who knows the differences. You can buy RAM that is the right speed (eg 667 MhZ DDR2 FB-DIMM etc) but it still won’t work.

After much trial I have found a very reliable source of Mac RAM to be crucial. (Crucial is the name of the shop!)

Check them out at Crucial.com They even have a little program here that you can download and it works out what computer you have and then pops you onto their webpage on the page showing the memory you need to buy!

Their prices are very good too. For example 1Gig of RAM For my 1.67 Ghz PowerBook was only $49 US and shipping to Australia was only $25.

When Macspeech Dictate was first released I gave  it a negative review. I have left the reviews of earlier versions here as a reference – you can read them below….

The most up to date review is here.

28th April, 2008 Macspeech Version 1.0

Ever since I first used Dragon Naturally Speaking Version 4 in 2000, I have been waiting for it to be released on the Macintosh.  Well  it’s finally arrived, it’s called “MacSpeech Dictate”, and it’s powered by Dragon. Unfortunately there are still a few hiccups. My advice is if you have been using voice recognition already – Viavoice or iListen, then make the switch – it’s an improvement. But if you are not currently using speech recognition, wait a little longer. It’s not quite there yet, and the adjustment to speech recognition combined with some bugs makes for a steep learning curve.

Now in terms of dictation and recognition, MacSpeech 1.0 Dictate is fantastic. The accuracy is very impressive  and it does not take much training.  In fact I think I was reading stories for about five  minutes and then I was ready to Dictate. It’s also a very stable application,  unlike IBM ViaVoice which was frequently crashing.

It integrates very easily so that you can dictate into any Macintosh program. IBM ViaVoice was meant to do this but in reality whenever you were dictating into anything other than the ViaVoice speakpad it was tediously slow.

So what are the problems in 1.0?

Firstly there is a bug in it so that if you correct anything with your mouse and keyboard, it gets out of sync and loses it’s place, and you can’t keep dictating.

Secondly, it doesn’t train itself from your mistakes.

One of my favourite features of Dragon NaturallySpeaking was the correction window where the program automatically learnt from your mistakes. When it mis-recognised a word, all you had to say was  ”correct that” and type in the  correct word, and Dragon NaturallySpeaking would automatically train itself so that whenever you spoke that word again it would get it right.

When Macspeech Dictate makes a mistake it just keeps misrecognizing the word, and you can’t re-train it. The manual promises that this correction feature will come in an update – let’s hope it’s soon.

Conclusion – Macspeech Dictate Version 1.0

If you have been using ViaVoice or iListen, then you will be blown away by the accuracy of Macspeech Dictate – it’s simply the best voice recognition software for the Mac.

On the other hand, if you have come across from the PC using Dragon NaturallySpeaking you will be taking a step backwards due to the lack of automatic correction, and the buginess of the software.

It’s a very nice piece of software, but with its current lack of features and bugs, it should be a beta version. In my opinion, it’s worth $100, $200 if you really need it, but at $300, it’s way overpriced given it’s problems.

NOTE: All these features that I mentioned needing improving have been fixed in version 1.3 and even more features have been added to 1.5  Macspeech now automatically learns from it’s mistakes so it trains itself as you use it. Also editing your text after you have dictated is much easier. And it’s much more stable.

 
Other posts on Speech recognition:

• Dragon Dictate – Dragon Naturally Speaking v11 on the Mac
• Dragon dictate 2.5 released!
• Dragon Dictate Released!
• Dragon Naturally Speaking arrives on the Macintosh!
• How to buy Macspeech Dictate in Australia
• What Microphone is the best for Speech recognition?