This is a simple little tutorial that shows how to use the Playback function with Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 Preferred.

The process is simple enough, in Microsoft Word or in Dragonpad (a Dragon branded version of Wordpad, I think) you can dictate to your computer and then listen to the words you actually spoke (recorded in your own voice, not a text to speech engine like those used by Dragon 10 years ago).

This becomes a very useful tool for editing your documents in Dragon and confirming the words that you said, thought you said, or even identifying the words you spoke incorrectly.

The sound on this one is a little week.  I worked to get the sound output from my computer captured in Camtasia, but running Camtasia on the same computer I was using DNS9 proved to be a bit of a problem.  I will probably try some alternate sound recording methods in the future to get these bugs out.  Plus, towards the end there is a segment where my typing sounds pretty loud.  That’s partly because my microphone stand sits on my desk (bare) and so does my keyboard.  The sound travels through the desk.  I think I’m going to try and pad both with mouse pads next time around, until I can get to guitar center and pick up a microphone stand that rests directly on the floor.  I normally don’t think of buying mouse pads for sound proofing my desk, but it should work well enough. 

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About 8 months ago, I was dabbling around with MindManager org charts and took a Snagit snap of one and then started rapidly adding hot spots.  Before you know it I had a pretty complex image and when I went to save or export it, I realized that I had to save it to Flash.  I’ve taken intro level classes in Macromedia Flash, but working in Snagit was a great deal easier for what I needed to accomplish.

I wasn’t trying to make a South Park cartoon episode nor make a radical flash animated website, just a functional, clickable org chart.

Several months later, and I got around to experimenting more with this functionality, and I think it is extremely useful in making a mindmap very rich in content for sharing either on the web, or for sharing directly with people that do not own MindManager.

Sorry Mindjet, this one may not help sales, but as soon as you find some more ways to get rich media into MindManager, I’ll be a very loud evangelist again.  Until then its work around city!

So I put together a couple maps (one political trying to make sense out of the news and probably failing, and one about a new Google advertising ad system).  Neither make much for reading, but I treated the topics as an opportunity to play with MindManager, Snagit and learn something new.

Plus, it was a good excuse to procrastinate on hunting down some cheap flights to Austin for SXSW.  I hate booking flights.  I have no reason for this, just always feel like I’m getting ripped off.  I’d almost rather drive.

After creating those, I received a email or call from someone in the MindManager Yahoo Group asking me to walk through the creation process and did that.  During that session, I learned and realized that these files do not have to be published on the internet, but that they can be viewable from a hard drive as well, the video shows this in practice and shows how it works.

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