A photo object is a photo of an object without any background that you can can insert into a webpage or word processing document. Online clipart services such as photo.com and istockphoto have photo objects you can purchase, but here he’s how to make a photo object from any photograph using Pages, the standard OSX word processor.

Here is a photo of a camera, before and after we turn it into a photo-object.

Before

After

Step one is to open the image in pages. It helps if the background colour is different to the photo. For example if you have a black object on a black background it will be hard to differentiate the two.

Open the image in a new pages document

Next select “Instant Alpha” from the “Format” menu.

2. Select Instant Alpha from the format menu

The cursor will now turning to a cross-hair. Click anywhere on the background of the photograph behind the main object, an drag the cursor. This will cause the instant alpha tool to select all parts of the background that have a similar colour. You may need to do this multiple times if the background has various colours. Keep doing this until all the background has been selected. In the picture below you can see me highlighting a small section of the background in the middle of the photo – It is highlighted in pink.

Here I am selecting a part of the background using the instant alpha tool.

Once you have finished selecting all the background, click anywhere else in the pages document to finish the Instant Alpha process. You can now move the object wherever you want it in your pages document, or if you would prefer to use it elsewhere, for example in a webpage, simply take a screenshot using Shift-Apple-4 as described here, and this will save the image to your desktop.

Heres’s how to change the default font, size, colour etc of a new Pages document, so that every new document will have the style you want.

1. Open a New document
2. Select some text in the document
3. Change the font and color to what you want
4. Go to View: Show Styles Drawer
5. Click on the red arrow next to “Body” and & select “Redefine Style from Selection”
6. Delete all the text that you typed. Otherwise that text appears every time you open a new document.
7. Go to File: “Save As Template…” and Save the document as a name that is clear e.g. “100 black”
8. Go to Pages: Preferences
9. Under the General tab click the “Use template” for new Documents.
10. Select ‘”Templates” and select the template you just saved.

Choose your own page template for new documents.

It will now use that template for new pages documents.

Quicksilver is the first app I install on any Macintosh and I’m lost without it.

With Quicksilver you press the Apple key once and a window appears on top of everything else. From this window you can pretty much do anything:  launch an app, find a file, find a contact, email someone, you name it.  Here’s how to get it going…

1. Download  Quicksilver from here: http://qsapp.com/download.php

2. Run though all the setup screens to set it up, notice that the ‘hotkey setup’ defaults to Apple-Space

3. Press Apple Space to launch Quicksilver, and click on the little triangle in the top right corner and select ‘Preferences’

In the quicksilver window select 'Preferences'

4. In the ‘Command’ tab select the box that says Modifier-only Activation. (Se Below) This was my personal suggestion and they implemented it. It’s not enable by default as it goes against Apple’s guidelines for the use of Modifier keys, but what it does is that if you just press the apple key briefly, it launches Quicksilver.

Turn on Modifier-only Activation

5. Quicksilver is now up and running.

Let’s try it. Press and release apple key: Quicksilver window appears. From there you can do all sorts of things:

• Type ‘m’. press return. Apple mail opens.
• Type ‘ph’ return and iPhoto opens.
• type ‘calc’ return and calculator opens.
• Type ‘documents’ and your documents folder opens, press right cursor then up/down to scroll through it. Press return to select a folder or document to open.
• Type the name of a song or playlist, scroll through the playlist, or press return to play the song.
• Type in the name of a document to open the document. You don’t’ need to know where  the document is.
• From the ‘save dialog’ of any application you can press apple, invoke quicksilver, find a folder, then drag the folder from quicksilver to the save dialog to save there!
• Quicksilver learns from your typing, so instead of typing ‘mail’ just type ‘m’ and scroll down to ‘mail’ and open mail. The next time you type ‘m’ it will open mail.
• Type the first few letters of a name name, and the address book entry appears. press ‘tab’ to go to the next pane, then type ‘compose’ or ‘email’ return to open an email to that person.

The list goes on and the more you use it the more surprises you will find.

There are plugins that you can access from Quicksilver preferences to give even more options to quicksilver,  e.g. address book, iTunes, mail, calculator.

You can customise the catalog in Quicksilver Preferences to include more or less of your files and folders.

There are forums everywhere on people’s favourite ways to use quicksilver:

http://lifehacker.com/247129/hack-attack-a-beginners-guide-to-quicksilver?tag=softwarequicksilver

http://superuser.com/questions/11095/what-are-your-best-uses-for-quicksilver

http://jxpx777.com/blog/five-of-my-favorite-quicksilver-tips

My advice is give it a full week because it takes you a while to get addicted to it.

When you plug in a second monitor to Macintosh computer, it may display an exact copy or ‘mirror image’ of what is on your first display.  This is called mirroring.  This is fine if you are doing a presentation and you want to see on your laptop screen exactly what is on the projector,  but it’s not very useful at home to have the same thing on both screens. If you’d like to see different things on each screen, so the second screen gives you more desktop space, you need to turn mirroring off. Here’s how.

1.Go to’ system preferences’  in the Apple menu,  and then to ‘ displays’  and  click on the ‘arrangement’  tab.

2. Deselect the box that says ‘ Mirror Displays’

3. You have now turned off mirroring and should have two separate desktops!

NOTE:

On some machines,  for example lower end of iBooks and iMacs,   to differentiate them from the higher models, Apple have disabled the ability to have two separate displays so that your external monitor is permanently mirroring what is on your main monitor.

There is a program that can re-enable this feature to turn on the ability to have a separate second display.  It’s  called  screen spanning doctor. It automatically checks that your Mac is able to run a second monitor and then makes the appropriate changes. You can download it from here.

I’m hesitant to fork out the $49.99 to try it out but I was wondering if anyone else had tried it?

It’s like a clever version of the built in keychain. It’s $59 – so might be prudent to wait till it’s in some kind of bundle deal, but I have over 400 passwords stored in my 1Password – that’s a lot easier than writing them all down on post-it notes, and a lot safer than using the same password for all my logins which is what I used to do.

Even if you don’t use 1Password, you should use a different password for every site you visit. If you enter a password for Bob’s blog, you don’t want Bob to have access to the password you use for your bank accounts, which is what can happen if you use the same password for different sites.

It now has an iPhone app so all your passwords can be with you everywhere.

If you’ve ever been given a pdf file that you want to edit, or a pdf form that you need to complete and return electronically, you’ll realise it’s not obvious how to edit a pdf file. The good news is that the OSX built in pdf reader app – ‘preview’ – can edit pdf files. You can’t move around or change what’s already in the pdf document, but you can add text and graphics. Here’s how. 
If you double click on any pdf file in OSX it will open in an application called preview. You can read the pdf and scroll around etc.

Go up to the View menu and select the menu item called ‘Show Annotations Toolbar. This will give you a toolbar along the bottom of your preview window to help you edit the pdf file.

After you select  the ‘View: Show Annotations Toolbar’ menu you will see a toolbar across the bottom of the preview window that looks like this:

These buttons will allow you to edit the pdf file. The left three buttons make an arrow, a circle or a rectangle. The fourth button along allows you to add text to the pdf.

If you click on the text box button – the 4th button across,  you can then go up to your document and add in a text box like this:

If you click on the text button you can add a text box to the pdf document like this.

This is a very easy way to fill in pdf files that are forms.

If you highlight the newly added text you can change the font by pressing Apple-T and the font window will appear.

You can’t delete  what’s already in a document, but you can draw a rectangle over it to hide it and type something new over the top.

You can cover over existing text using a rectangle with a white border like this.

You’ll notice you can’t change the rectangle color from being black, but you can put a very fat white border around it so it looks like a white rectangle!

If you want to totally change the images and text on an existing pdf file you will need an application like Adobe Illustrator that can actually edit the content of pdf files, but if you only want to make small changes the built in preview app will do the job!

Yesterday Nuance released to Dragon dictate 2.5.

So what’s it like?

STOP PRESS: Even though initially I wrote this great review, after using version 2.5 for a week I find that  it often crashes when I try to use the correction window. There are a lot of complaints about this in the Dragon Dictate forums. I’d hold off  till the next update comes along . Dragon Dictate 2.5 is quite unstable.

 24th August 2011: Dragon Dictate 2.5.1 was released this week and  all the stability problems seem to be fixed. 

Accuracy.

The first thing we want to know about is the accuracy of course. Dragon Dictate 2.5 is based on the speech engine from Dragon 11 for windows!  So for users who like to use the Windows version instead of the Mac version, it seems like we’re finally on par in terms of recognition accuracy.

To tell you the truth, I was pretty happy with the previous version of Dragon Dictate, although it did stumble over a number of words, Australian (it would say a strain), Jesus (it would sometimes say cheeses), and acronyms like DPC.  The new Dragon Dictate passes on all those, and I didn’t really have any other problematic words to test  it on. So 10/10 for recognition.

 iPhone Microphone App

This is a cool little iPhone app that turns your iPhone into an external wireless microphone. You load the app onto your iPhone, and then when you create a new profile in Dragon Dictate where you choose your iPhone as the microphone. I didn’t like the idea of having to hold the iPhone up to my mouth while I dictated, so I tested it with the iPhone headphones and it worked fine.  In terms of accuracy it seemed to be as good as my normal microphone, which was surprising. The only drawback with the iPhone microphone app  is that there is a slight delay between when you dictate and when the words appear on the screen. I assume this is because the iPhone has to send the audio over the wireless connection to your Mac computer. I don’t think i’d ever use this but it’s a neat trick and might come in handy if you are travelling with your laptop and iphone and don’t want  to take a microphone along.

Mixed editing.

With Dragon Dictate 2.5 Nuance have finally addressed the issue of mixed editing. Previously if you corrected some  words with your computer and mouse and others with the built in speech correction, the program would get confused.  Apparently this was worst in Microsoft Word, and I don’t use Microsoft Word, but this has been addressed and it now works in the latest version of Microsoft Word 11.

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?

Here are some of the options you have.

VERSION 1. An ‘analog’ microphone with a USB adapter. 

This is the most basic option. You need two items: a simple USB adapter that plugs into your mac USB port and a microphone that plugs into the adapter.

This is the kind supplied with Dragon Dictate.
Dragon Dictate comes with a simple computer style headset mic that has a 3.5mm lead that plugs into a USB adapter and then into your computer. You can upgrade the analog part of the microphone later to a better microphone if you want to. Here are some better quality headset mics you might like to upgrade to. I’d rate the built in Dragon mic about a 7/10. I’ve used an SM58 vocal microphone (costs around $300) plugged into an Andrea USB adapter and I’d rate it 9/10, so it depends on the microphone you use.

VERSION 2. A ‘digital’ Microphone.

A ‘digital’ microphone is not really a digital microphone at all – it’s just an analog microphone like the one above with a built in USB converter!  The converter can be tailored to the mic however to achieve better results. I’ve used the Andrea NC181VM and it’s pretty good. I’d rate it about an 8/10. It costs about $35-$40 on amazon.com, or about $119 in Australia from here. Here is a list of good ‘digital’ microphones.

3. Bluetooth headset.
There is a version of Dragon Dictate Bluetooth that ships with a bluetooth headset – I’ve never tried it. Voicerecognition.com.au says that the ‘DECT Headset offers far superior accuracy compared to Bluetooth.’  One of the mics that Nuance gives a high rating to is this Sennheiser bluetooth mic available here from Amazon but you need to get two extra parts with it to connect to a mac: part number #094703 and #05374.  I can’t comment, I’m just listing it for completeness.

4. Wireless Microphone.

This is just an analog microphone like Version 1 above plugged into a USB adapter, but  for the microphone you use a good quality wireless vocal microphone – the kind of mic you would use for singing and performing etc. See some examples here.   I use a SAMSON QV wireless headset mic. It is designed as a vocal microphone for drummers so it has excellent background noise rejection. You can buy them from ebay or from any music store. I’d rate it a 9/10.

The wireless mic has an Audio out cable that is plugged into a USB adapter. You may beed an adapter for soem professional quality mics –  a mono 6.5mm to stereo 3.5mm lead, available at any electronics store.  You can get the Samson headset and Andrea adapter from Knowbrainer and they will supply it with the leads.

Microphone lead (left), adapter (bottom) and usb interface (right) - unplugged

plugged in

Summary.
1. The easiest option is to use the  cheap headset mic with USB converter that comes with Dragon Dictate.
2. The next sstep up would be to buy a ‘digital’ mic like the Andrea 181.
3. The best option is to use a good quality USB adapter like Andrea PureAudio and a good quality wireless mic (eg Samson QV10  Airline).

For some other reading on mics see voicerecognion.com.au and knowbrainer.com and for some  mic comparisons see here for wireless or here for wired. Here’s another article on selecting the right microphone.

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?

This is the inspector window. It is is Pages and Keynote and you use it to adjust things. To access different inspector panes you click the appropriate icon – document, text, shapes, rulers etc. Here’s a great tip: If you hold down option while clicking it will open a new inspector window alongside the existing one!

You can have more than one inspector window open at a time. Simply option-click the icon instead of clicking it and a second inspector window will open.

After the window opens you can move it where you want it to be.

To open multiple inspector windows just use option click when clicking an icon in the inspector window.