Dragon notes update

[julesjones]

1) Zeborah noted in comments to my previous entry about the Mouse Grid that you can also control the mouse by saying "move mouse up", etc, and that you can change the speed by saying "faster". I tried it and it works. As she said, this is also incredibly tedious. Poking about in the options, I found that you can actually change the default speed for the mouse to move. They've actually picked a good speed for learning with, and I'm going to leave it on the slow speed for now, although I will probably change it to a faster speed once I'm used to it.

Which way is better depends on how far the mouse is from where you want it to be and how finely you need to control it. For some things I'm finding that the best way is to actually use the mouse grid to get approximately in the right place, and then use the move commands to place the cursor precisely. You use the "cancel" command to clear the mouse grid and leave the cursor where you'd moved it to.

2) I didn't note in my previous post about the Dictation Box that the other big advantage of using it is that you don't have to manually select all, copy and paste in order to copy the text you've just dictated into the target window. There's a single word transfer command, which makes life much easier.

Comments

[green_knight]

How painful is a trackpad for you? I'm thinking of Apple's standalone version- it would still require some arm movement, but as you can use any finger of either hand, that might give you enough variation to get around the 'repetitive' bit.

[julesjones]

I've used the track pad on the Thinkpad before now when travelling (normally it spends its days sitting on a port replicator pretending to be a desktop), and it's not too bad for occasional use under normal circumstances. But tapping it to click might be painful after a while. I suspect its main use at home would be in stopping me from automatically clicking the mouse button and then yelping in pain. :-) It might be a useful option at work, though.

[green_knight]

See if you can get to computer store and try one - if the tap is like the ipad, it might be ok - but using it to sweep across the screen and then say 'click' might also work. I also find two-finger scrolling extremely useful - no idea whether your computer supports that.