Fun Chat for ASL people who use Apple Technologies — Mac, iPhone, iPod, Newton, etc…

We’ll discuss stuff such as:

• Wish List for iPad
• New Deaf rep
• No CC on Apples website
• New services for Deaf Apple users
• One more thing…
• Door Prizes

Please RSVP: http://dmo-riverside.eventbrite.com

*Coffee Depot is located in the old Union Pacific Train Depot in downtown Riverside, across the street from “The Old Spaghetti Factory”. Built in 1904, Coffee Depot happens to be Riverside’s Historic Landmark #9 and is also one of only two buildings in Riverside to be on the National Registry of Historical Places.

To find out more about Coffee Depot, go to http://www.coffeedepot.tv/

For most of us who use Mac, iChat is definitely our daily communication tool via text or video. My favorite thing about iChat is that I am able to connect to another iChat user from almost anywhere: Starbucks. Airport. Office. The firewall worries does not exist in my head when using the service.

The most common question people ask me: “What is the big difference between Leopard and Snow Leopard?” My first answer is often regarding iChat because of difference in resolution and bandwidth requirement which is essential to my daily video communication.

While on the subject of iChat, I wanted to point out one thing that most people do not know about, which has surprised me, is the ability to access iChat Theater or easy file transferring.

iChat Theater is really awesome. Without transferring any files, you can share your Keynote presentation or show a movie clip through iChat Theater. For instance with a Quicktime Movie file, just drag-and-drop over the face of the person you’re chatting with and you’ll get two options: Send to… and iChat Theater.

Put the file over “iChat Theater” and play the movie. You can watch the reaction of the person viewing the film. Or if you’re a salesperson, you definitely can use Keynote to deliver your sales pitch.

There’s a lot more to iChat and I encourage you to visit everything in Preferences and all menu items to discover its power.

UPDATE: Watch iChat Theater in action.

In this video, I explain why I think iPad is both mind-blowing and disappointing.

Dragon Dictation, by Nuance Communications, released a voice recognition iPhone app. In other words, it’s a speech-to-text application and is available on iTunes (temporarily for free).

Get Dragon Dication.

I have yet to use it but am definitely curious how I can use it.

If you have used it, let us how how it worked for you and what situation you used it for.

Folks,

Let’s help each other out and send feedback to Apple to improve the Universal Access, specifically the Screen Flashes. You should submit feedback at the following link:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Attached is a screen shot of my feedback to Apple:

Feel free to use my feedback snippet or create your own.

The more we send feedback to Apple, the chances they’ll hear us (no pun intended) and prioritize the Universal Access features in the upcoming builds.

I loved how Tiger was able to make my screen flash every time I receive new incoming mail. Leopard and Snow Leopard doesn’t work although they have the screen flash available in Universal Access but it seems futile as default.

Until Kenneth Brown (thank you) sent me a link via Facebook on some ideas and I came up with a custom-built AppleScript that triggers visual beep for new incoming mails.

BEEP.

It worked!

I’ll walk you step-by-step on how to get it working.

1) Download the AppleScript file I created (it’s in a ZIP format).

2) If beep.zip doesn’t extract automatically after downloading, unzip the zip file.

3) Move the AppleScript file, beep, to the following folder location:
/Library/Scripts/Mail Scripts/

4) Open Mail’s Preference and select the Rules tab.

5) Click the “Add Rule” button.

6) Follow the screenshot below to give the new rule its appropriate description and settings:

7) You’re all set. Your mail should start to beep for any new arriving messages.

Next, I hope Apple will add colorized flashes. That would rock.

There are few (not all) Apple tutorial video clips added with CC.