Mac OS® X Snow Leopard™ for Dummies®

Chapter 16. Features for the Way You Work

In This Chapter

• Talking to your Mac

• Listening to your Mac

• Enhancing productivity by using automation

• Trying out more useful technologies and techniques

• Running Microsoft Windows on your Mac (really!)

This chapter delves into some Mac OS X Snow Leopard features that might very well improve the ways you interact with your computer. Unlike the more mainstream applications and utilities I discuss in Chapter 3 — Desktop, Screen Saver, Appearance, Keyboard, Mouse, and such — the items in this chapter are a little more esoteric. In other words, you don't have to use any of the technologies I'm about to show you. That said, many of these items can make you more productive and can make using your Mac even better. So I'd like to believe that at least some of you will want to use the cool features I'm about to introduce.

Talking and Listening to Your Mac

Your primary methods for interacting with your Mac are typing and reading text. But there's another way you can commune with your faithful computer — voice.

Whether you know it or not, your Mac has a lot of speech savvy up its sleeve (er . . . up its processor?) and can talk to you as well as listen and obey. In the following sections, you discover how to make your Mac do both.

Talking to your Mac

Speech Recognition enables your Mac to recognize and respond to human speech. The only thing you need to use it is a microphone, and all laptops and iMacs have a built-in mic these days.

Speech Recognition lets you issue ...