This week, we are looking at another part of System Preferences: specifically Speech and some of what we can, and cannot do.

System Preferences: Speech: Speech recognition and Text to Speech

Something which is connected to this week's article is the way that with Speech and Universal preferences, Apple is working to make using a computer easier for those with disabilities.

The National Federation of the Blind and Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley announced a cooperative agreement with Apple to make Apple’s iTunes software, iTunes Store, and iTunes U more accessible to the blind.

iTunes 8, contains significant accessibility improvements. Under the agreement, Apple will make iTunes U (a dedicated area of the iTunes Store for content provided by colleges and universities) fully accessible by December 31 and will ensure the full accessibility of the iTunes software and the rest of the iTunes Store to blind people using both Mac and Windows operating systems by the end of June next year.

When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, I remember him saying that it was going to change the industry. When I got my hands on it the next day, it was not hard to believe that as it was so unlike anything that existed at that time. Not so much now as the rest of the telephone industry has been playing catchup since.

I still believe the iPhone has the edge particularly with the way it works to synchronise data with other applications on the Mac; and of course now with the iPhone apps themselves. Let us not forget too, that as well as being a sophisticated mobile phone, its primary function is as an iPod: a music and video player.

Nokia, who are clearly competitors have paid a compliment to Apple when the head of the company, whose name I am not going to try and pronounce, said that Cupertino had done the industry a big favour by shaking the business up. Apple has done that before.

With concerns being expressed about the health of Steve in recent months, and the current economic situation, there was a shock last week when a false rumour concerning Apple's head man suggested he had had a heart attack and was rushed to hospital. Apple put out a strong denial, but damage had already been done and for the first time in almost a couple of years the shares dropped below $100. With the current market fears, the SEC has begun an enquiry into who started the rumour that first appeared on CNN.

As there had been speculation once or twice in the past that Apple shares had been victim to manipulation there are some serious questions being asked and if this was deliberate someone is going to be regretting this. Mind you, along with the rest of the stock markets worldwide, Apple has taken a huge drop and was down to $90 at the start of trading this week, rising to just under $100 by the close on Monday. And if you think Apple was bad, you should see the hits Google took [more below].

The so-called "Brick" has produced some speculation, but there are some fascinating rumours about the manufacturing process that this new device is alleged to use. And it is a process that may have started life (as so much of the current Apple and OS X story did) with NeXT, which Apple bought and thus re-acquired Steve Jobs. Seth Weintraub in 9 to 5 Mac tells us that the process is alleged to carve the computer out of a solid block of aluminium, using lasers and water.

I had heard of a process that used titanium oxide and fabricated parts using lasers, but this takes an opposite direction creating a stronger and lighter machine that has no seams and allows a more flexible approach to the design itself.

Another rumour, which is a bit of a surprise, suggests that NVidia are showing round some of the new MacBooks internally to show off their prowess. It had been thought that NVidia chips would be absent in the new computers.

Sales of iPhones are apparently exceeding expectations, which makes all that share price gymnastics look really silly. Aparently Apple are on track to sell 10 million. We will have a better idea, perhaps, when the fourth quarter financial results are released. Apple plans to conduct a conference call to discuss financial results of its fourth fiscal quarter on Tuesday, October 21, 2008 at 2:00 p.m.

In another story, we hear that the full iTunes store may be allowed in Russia, which is a bit of a susprise as the former USSR had been rumoured to have a copying problem every bit as bad as Thailand's.

Let's put some balance back into the ongoing - and never ending -- Tales of True. Last week I outlined a user's experience of being told that Macs need not apply and the way that he got his Mac running. Last Saturday, I arrived home from the shops to find a network that was as bad as my office, with dropping signals, failed downloads and all manner of problems.

I went through the basics of router resets and then checking the cables; and then I made sure that the phone line that I never use did actually have a signal. I noticed a bit of noise, but nothing severe. Then I tracked the outside cabling to the box and from there to the street. With no meters and just relying on the eye, there were no obvious breaks. That does not mean that, for example, the wind might have rubbed a loose cable on the concrete and half broken it.

I then phoned that number I was given last week and was greeted by an automatic voice response that, when I put my phone number in told me I had not entered my number . . . and then carried on. I finally spoke to someone and here, as I have noted before, the difference between the shop staff and marketing people and the engineering staff is remarkable. The lady listened, asked me some focussed questions, made a suggestion; and then arranged for engineers to attend within 24 hours, pointing out that if the problem is found to be in my house -- like my cables and not their cables in the street -- there might be a charge of 350 baht ($10). That I can stand: it would save me the effort of getting someone to clamber up the walls and check the cables if they were the problem.

An hour or so after phoning the lady, speeds did pick up a bit but the connection still seemed somewhat erratic. I did a couple of tests using the local connection at ADSL Thailand where speeds were aout right; and then the Speakeasy Tests to San Francisco and Washington where we were down to 25% of the local speed.

Later that night it died and apart from a few seconds of activity the next morning, I was effectively offline. The engineer came seconds after the start of the Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix and checked the line at the house which appeared fine then went to check elsewhere. He phoned later and I saw that internet speeds were all fine again: a cable problem somewhere in the area, which is no surprise considering the recent rains.

In the interim, a user from Phuket phoned me on Friday as he had the TOT installer there asking why the user could not use Internet Explorer to get online with his new ADSL line. Over-the-phone analysis, particularly when a third person is involved is not easy -- the user was also using Tiger and we have moved on, I am afraid. I made some suggestions as to settings and the last I heard was that an engineer would come at 5PM. Maybe. I am sure from what I remember of the True installation, although the line went in at 10 am, I was not going to be able to use it for a few hours: until someone spliced the wires at the exchange.

I guess it did work as he sent me email in the morning wondering why, when he got up for a 3am visit to the bathroom it was not working: timeouts or maintenance were my best guess there.

And the end of a tale from Pattaya where a user had been trying for a while to check his mail with a Sierra wireless card he had bought. I made a number of suggestions but nothing happened, so he took the card back.

In Bangkok, he tried an iStudio in Phantip Plaza. His DTAC SIM card did not work, but members of staff tried with theirs and they worked, so he bought the card and went to DTAÇ in Pattaya. With the new card, the laptop worked fine in the store, but when he went home, it sagged like my mother's chocoloate cake and mail just would not work again. Then he tried with a friend's AIS card.

The result is that DTAC has lost a customer.

I wrote up another couple of reviews of apps for the iPod touch and iPhone last weekend and that makes five now that are online. In the latest one, however, I was less than happy about three of them that have shortcomings in various ways. The last was completely different and is an app created by the campaign for Barack Obama with news, images, videos and other information.

In that article, I start by criticising Apple's new approach to its App Store organisation: it has removed the iPhone, iPod touch and Free apps sections, leaving just the classifications (business, education, etc.). This is annoying as I used to take a sweep through every couple of days to look for new stuff.

Fortunately, several sites have filled the gap as we see in an article by Erica Sadun, whose own app we reviewed a couple of wseeks ago. She has an article in which five sites are outlined and I am bookmarking these. Erica herself has another article on the site by Jacqui Cheng who mentions Erica's soon to be released book on iPhone development, that had been held up by Apple's non-disclosure agreement that has now been rescinded.

In this week's podcast we mention ZappTek's iSpeakIt which we will be looking at in greater detail next week. At the weekend, Micael Zapp released an update to another application and this one for iPod users -- not the iPod touch or iPhone. Called iPDA it adds functionality to the iPod (not the shuffle of course) by allowing a user to transfer documents to the iPod and treat it more like a PDA. I had already taken advantage of the address book and calendar functions of the iPods I have, but this may well make it a more flexible device.

Looking at the site, I also see that there are other iPod programs, like iPresentIt which we can use to make presentations using an iPod. It does need the iPod A/V cable. That one works with Windows as well.

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer had the fawning British press slavering last week, with the possible exception of John Naughton of the Observer, who is highly critical of the Beast of Redmond. He writes that it has become an embarrassing shadow of its former self. Once it was a lean, mean, agile and ruthless. Now it is a middle-aged, bloated, sluggish company having difficulty keeping up with internet-driven change. He adds that Microsoft is not a company that knows what it is doing.

Didn't we say all that here several times?

Another Ballmer story appeared in the Register this week and this has the same flavour of some of the US presidential race. MS is being sued over the Vista Capable claims. Whether there is a massive loss of memory or plausible deniablity, he has claimed in a deposition to the court -- excuse the lawyer-speak -- that, among other things, "To the best of my recollection, I do not have any unique knowledge of nor did I have any unique involvement in any decisions regarding the Windows Vista Capable program." Much more in an interesting article by Kelly Fiveash. What a lovely name. . . .

Just to close, Apple shares dropped even more to drop below $90; while Google fell another $25. What goes down, will go up.

And if you want to have some idea on why the iPhone won't officially be coming to Thailand any time soon, have a look at an article in the Post Database today by Don Sambandaraksa.

Too Good to Miss?

iTunes U now has input from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. This section of the iTunes store -- and you will have to link to the US store to take advantage of this. As with the many other universotoes, colleges and schools providing materials for this Apple initiative, there is a wide ranging selection of fields: science, technology, arts, business, and a load of others. As I can confirm, some of this stuff is handy in the classroom.

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