Several years ago I was "forced" to go over to the dark side for many reasons. I have not really been a happy camper sience. Lately there has been a development outside of the Bill Gates empire by a company called Mozilla and their newly released Web Browser call Firefox. No more Internet Explorer. I have tested this web browser on my three computers at my home for about the last six weeks and have been very happy. Last week IE crashed again on my computer and that was it. Now my default browser is Foxfire. Try it It's a Free Download and VERY EASY to load and configure (it took me about 5 min).No affiation just a happy user. Yes Tom there is a version for all the Mac users. I wish many times that I still owned one. Rod building .Org runs as good if not better, photo pages and all.

[www.mozilla.org]

Speakable items, text to speech and vice versa and applescripts have been part of the Mac OS for at least 10 years if not more. Also the Mac will imprint itself to your voice if you like so that only you can command it. Or you can leave it un-imprinted so anyone can command it.

I haven't played with that part enough to make good use of it. I know very little about applescripts but know some programmers that rave about it. I would bet that most Mac owners don't even know that their computers have these abilities.

Scott,

Safari is Apple's browser for OSX - it's flawless and probably rules out any need for Mac users to run Firefox. I would suspect they're very similar in many ways, however.

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Gee thanks, guys. I didn't know my computer had such an option. I went and managed to find the "speakable items" preference and tried some of the pre-programmed items. Then my wife played with it and programmed in some of her own.

So this morning while I was in here reading some of yesterday's posts my wife stood in the kitchen and shouted "Open my browser. Go to Dressbarn." and suddenly I'm looking at a page full of women's clothing. She thinks it's funny and will probably get a lot of mileage out of this "technology."

You have three options - One is to set your preferences so the speakable items function "listens" all the time. Next is to set it so that you can toggle it on and off with a hot key. And finally, you can set it so that you have to have a hot key depressed in order for the computer to listen and recognize your spoken commands.

You may already know this, but you can also have the computer read to you. This was originally included so that blind persons could use the Mac.

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