I’m here to make things easy for you – They all have praises to sing.

Here are the cream of the crop.

Andy Ihnatko – Chicago Sun-Times

iPad is Pure Innovation

David Pogue – NY Times

Looking at the iPad from Two Angles

Walt Mossberg – Wall Street Journal

Laptop Killer? Pretty close

Edward Baig – USA Today

Verdict on the iPad: It’s a winner

As bonus material, here is Andy Ihnatko’s unboxing video on YouTube:

You may now lust away.

Regardless, I’m looking forward to the iPad as a tool to write more blog posts. To that end, I’m testing a program for the iPhone OS called BlogWriter.

In fact, this entire post has been written with the free version of the program on my iPhone. (The free version only allows you to connect to one blog, but if you don’t mind entering the login information each time, arguably you could use it to post to other blogs.)

The program is not terrible. Of course, it can’t drop in photos or other media. Surprised to learn that it doesn’t support landscape mode – at least not in the free flavor.

Categories get imported with the blog setup, but there is no chance to set the tags for SEO purposes.

You also don’t get the option to set the post date or save as a draft for later editing on a more robust blog post editor, like MarsEdit or Blogo. Speaking of draft status, you better like what you’ve written because there is no way to save a draft on the program itself.

Otherwise it’s a decent and clean interface for writing a quick post. I’m notbsure, though, that I’d want to use this as my primary blog post creator on mobile platform. Let it be known that i’ve been saving my iTunes credits for iPad programs, so developers…get cracking.

The AppStore is nearly unnavigable. Anyone have a suggestion for another iPhone OS program to try?

This is a post about a web browser I caught Jack using, called Stainless. I did some digging and Stainless is a rather unique offering in the web browser world in that it permits you to run multiple independent sessions. It’s a solution for people who are running Firefox and Safari so that they can be logged into the same site as different people.

Now, to be fair, independent sessions is not a feature unique to Stainless. Google’s Chrome browser does the same thing. But, Stainless actually lets you run parallel sessions. As I stated above, that will let you have multiple “credentialed” sessions of a website running. That’s a feature that Chrome doesn’t have (I would probably add, yet – there are a lot of folks at Google).

I tested the feature with Facebook accounts for me and my wife. It appears that Stainless is doing something funky with the cookie storage and aligning the cookie to the session that created it. Seems to fool Facebook, which remembers when you’ve logged into the site on a different browser and asks for the password again (a la Firefox & Safari – uber annoying).

In addition, it has a feature that I think is essential in a web browser. It’s there with Firefox (kinda) and not there with Safari (far as I’ve been able to see). The ability to save the open windows and quit the program. Oh my, is this useful.

Sometimes I just want to look at the open webpages again without adding them to my bookmarks. Bookmarks are a pain because I have to delete them afterwards (I don’t want to keep these sites forever, just until the next time I open the program or restart the computer). The solution used to be leaving the program running – which is annoying too. Now, I just use Stainless and select the “Save Windows and Quit Stainless” option under the File menu and I’m ready to go.

I’m also just partial to the way Stainless looks and feels. It’s a clean, if boxy, interface. It lacks the rounded edges of most Cocoa-developed programs, but when I’m surfing the web, I’m looking at the page – not at the program edges. I think that it would be a decent browser to add to your arsenal if the feature set is attractive. (Kinda like Flock for those social media mavens of the world.)

Now, I haven’t done any speed tests. That’s mostly because I wouldn’t know how to measure those things. Look, it’s fast enough for me. I’m probably limited more by my cable modem speed than by my browser speed. The pages load pretty fast, even ones with heavy graphics, like MSNBC.com.

It has many of the features currently available in web browsers. You can move and re-order tabs. You can pull out one tab and have it open its own page. I even like the unobtrusive grey bar that appears automatically at the bottom to let you know where a link will take you – but then stays hidden otherwise. This is a piece of real estate that is usually wasted on other web browsers.

Stainless is free, which is nice. But it also has a “Donate” button, so if you’re using it frequently, I urge you to support the developers. It’s also in beta format, but they’re working towards a stable 1.0 release in the near future. In my brief experience with the program, I find it stable enough for daily use.

Check out Stainless here .

I have been a fan of dictation software ever since my hands got bad. After years of typing and playing the piano, my hands got so bad that prolonged typing produced cramping in my hands and wrists. After a year or two of dealing with the pain, I turned to dictation software (some version of Dragon Naturally Speaking) in my legal work. Dragon had a version of legal dictation software that went nicely with my job, but it lagged behind the newest engine for reasons unknown to me.

When I switched over to a Mac, I searched for comparable dictation software and found the landscape a little barren. Not only was it barren, but what attempted to grow there was weak and sickly. Enter MacSpeech’s Dictate speech recognition software last year. I was a big fan of what MacSpeech was doing and followed the release of that software very closely. The review I wrote was very widely-read and repeated. I have been waiting for an update to the original release. I played with Dictate 1.5 briefly before seeing the Legal version release last week.

I got my hands on a copy and what follows is my review of MacSpeech Dictate:Legal after just a few minutes of playing with it.

Out of the box, it’s already an improvement over both Dictate 1.3 and 1.5 and if included microphones is any indication of value, you can see that MacSpeech isn’t just juicing the legal market for more money with this software. (The Legal version retails at $595 compared with $199 for the “regular” flavor). The included microphone is a much slicker VXI TalkPro Xpress, as compared with a lower, but serviceable, mic from Platronics with vanilla Dictate 1.5.

Setting up Dictate:Legal was a breeze. It imported my settings from Dictate 1.5 (which I had to upgrade from 1.3) and had all of my old profiles. I created a new profile for use with the VXI mic and noticed some new options in setting accents. You can now choose from 9 “American” accents, such as Southern, Latino and Indian. I wanted to play with speaking in accents, but figured that would just annoy my staff and it would be no scientific test on how effective MacSpeech’s accent profiles are.

I went through the training process where I read the same text I’ve read at least 10 times already (uploading different profiles and changing microphones). Already I can tell that something is different under the hood as everything just has a smoother feel to it.

Unlike the plain vanilla version of Dictate (in which everything is blue), Dictate:Legal version is a soft yellow color. I’m not sure what it says about the legal profession to be colored yellow, but it’s a nice change as a way to distinguish the different versions.

Part of the reason why you spend more money on the Legal version of Dictate is so that you can speak in legal terms without causing the speech recognition software engine to go into convulsions. And so, here comes the requisite test of all the legal terms that come to mind at this moment:

First, the Latin terms, de facto corporation, “restitutional liquid or” (res ipsa loquitur), In re, ad hoc, pendente lite, trial de novo, de jure, “pro hockey chain” (pro hac vice)and ex parte motion.

Next, the plain English legal terms: pretrial motions, Joinder of parties, Miranda rights, malfeasance, insolvency, goods and chattels, decedent, deponent, cognizable, arrogation, and remaindermen.

As you can see, the program did very, very well with the English legal terms. It had a harder time with some of the Latin phrases (but who uses ‘res ispa loquitur’ anyways?).

What is also very good about this version of MacSpeech Dictate is the lengthy user manual that’s included as a PDF with the documentation. Learning to use speech recognition software effectively necessarily means learning a different way of speaking. You absolutely have to get comfortable using your voice to control the entire document window, as well as application commands. As MacSpeech says, “the Golden Rule of speech recognition is: when working with text, do not mix your voice with your hands.” The User Manual is an excellent guide and really helps you understand how this program is thinking about speech recognition and dictation in general.

As you can probably guess, I have dictated nearly this entire review. I can report that I have had to do the very, very little post-editing on account of errors caused by the Dictate software. More often than not, the problem is behind the microphone, as I mumble my speech, slur my words, or otherwise change direction in my sentence mid-dictation.

MacSpeech Dictate Legal is available today for $595 as a new purchase, or $345 for current owners of MacSpeech Dictate 1.5, or $395 for current owners of MacSpeech Dictate 1.3.

Is it worth the upgrade? Well, if you were in early adopter of MacSpeech Dictate, it’s probably well worth the additional $400 to get both the upgrade to Dictate 1.5 as well as the benefits of a specialized legal version of the software. I haven’t been working with the software very long, but already I can see the added benefit of having those 30,000 words included in my speech recognition software. The time that I have saved by not having to spell out, or even more detrimental to productivity, typed out legal-specific words is substantial.

I’m going to give the software a few more months worth of use and report back whether it’s all worth the investment. However, in the meantime, if you have been holding off purchasing speech recognition software for the Mac because it did not include a “legal” version, your wait is over. MacSpeech Dictate Legal is here and it is very, very good.

Posted by Victor J. Medina
www.MacLovinJD.com