By Matt Swain The dictation feature introduced last year in OS X Mountain Lion left a lot to be desired. Just like Siri on iOS, it required you to speak in short bursts, then wait while the data was sent to Apple’s servers and the results were returned. As well as requiring a constant internet connection, it was almost unusable for dictating anything more than a couple of sentences.

Fortunately, with OS X Mavericks, there is now an option to enable “Enhanced Dictation”, which solves a lot of these problems. To do this, open up System Preferences and go to the Dictation and Speech section. Here you will find a checkbox, Use Enhanced Dictation, which “allows offline use and continuous dictation with live feedback”.

As you will probably notice, enabling this feature requires a fairly large download. For me this was 491 MB, but others have reported between 700 and 800 MB, so I suspect it depends on your chosen language.

Once the download has completed, you can dictate text just as before, using the shortcut specified in the Dictation and Speech preferences. Only now you will find the transcription happens locally on your Mac instead of on Apple’s servers. This allows the words to appear “live”, as you speak, resulting in a much more enjoyable and useful dictation process.

There are a number of dictation commands to help with formatting and punctuation. As far as I can tell, these are just the same as in Mountain Lion, however they become much more useful with this new enhanced dictation feature. Apple provides a full list, which contains things like “all caps”, “smiley face”, “new paragraph” and “next line”.

While this is a massive improvement over Mountain Lion’s dictation features, there are still a few further additions needed before the free built in OS X dictation will be a serious competitor to commercial alternatives such as Dragon Dictate. For example, there needs to be a quick and easy way to edit existing text and correct transcription errors, preferably without needing to use the keyboard or mouse. It would also be great if the system automatically learnt from your corrections over time, or allowed manual training through the addition of tricky words such as names and places to the dictionary. Maybe next year…

Source: Mac OSX Tips

Starting with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, your Mac could take dictation. But, just as with the dictation feature on iOS, the OS X incarnation required an Internet connection, couldn’t show its progress while you spoke, and could only listen for about 30 seconds at a time.

That all changes with a single checkbox in Mavericks (OS X 10.9). Fire up System Preferences and click on the Dictation & Speech pane. There, you’ll find a checkbox for Use Enhanced Dictation. The first time you check it, you’ll need to wait out a hefty download (between 700 and 800 megabytes), but once you’re done, you can dictate a lot more freely.

Now, transcription happens on your Mac, not Apple’s servers. And you can see the transcription appear as you speak, in real-time. In fact, the cursor remains active too; if you see a mistake, you can click around (without speaking) to make your edits, put the cursor back where it needs to be, and start talking again. Unfortunately, however, Mavericks doesn’t of …

Source: Mac OSX Hints

New in Mavericks, Notification Center banners for reminders include a Snooze button. But that button, which removes the reminder and brings it up again ten minutes later, offers more customization than is immediately apparently.

Click and hold on the Snooze button to bring up a drop down menu with snooze times ranging from minutes to hours to days to weeks.

Source: Mac OSX Hints

There are many hints here and on the net involving changing user defaults by running defaults write or directly editing the .plist files in Library/Preferences. Until 10.9, restarting the program was enough to apply the new defaults.

Since OS X Mavericks, the defaults system is caching the preferences system-wide (i.e. not in the application’s process!) to improve performance of the user defaults API. If you use the defaults command, you are fine, since it appears to use the normal user defaults API.

On the other hand, if you edit a preference .plist file with a text or plist editor (even the one included with the most recent Xcode 5 preview), the cache will not be flushed and even after restarting the program in question, it will retain the old preferences.

The API documentation states that the cache is synchronized with the on-disk plist file contents periodically, but does not indicate how often, let alone how to flush the cache manually.

Logging out and back in appe …

Source: Mac OSX Hints

Mac OS X has long supported password encrypted zip files, but you have to use command line to do it. So here is a simple Automator based Service to give you a GUI.

OpenAutomator and choose “Service” (the gear). Change “Service receives selected” to Files or folders in “Finder.app”
Add the “Run Applescript” step and then copy the code below and replace all the code in the “Run Applescript” command with this code.

Choose save, naming it something like “Make Protected Zip”, then test it by going to the finder and selecting one or more files/folders. Scroll down to the “Services” Menu and select the service with the name you just saved as.

on run {input, parameters}
set dialogResults to display dialog “Name for zipped file (no extension)” default answer “Archive” buttons {“OK”, “Cancel”} default button “OK”
if button returned of dialogResults is “OK” then
set passwd to …

Source: Mac OSX Hints

iOS 7 uses iCloud to store your passwords for websites you log into. But sometimes, by default, Safari won’t prompt you to save passwords for certain sites—sites that explicitly request that web browsers not save such data.

But they’re your passwords, and Apple clearly thinks you deserve a vote on whether your iOS device saves them. Head over to the Settings app, tap on Safari, and then tap on Passwords & Autofill. Enable the Always Allow setting, and Safari will now be willing to save every single password you enter, even on sites that attempt to disallow that option.

Source: Mac OSX Hints

Want to add a user to a specific group using the command line? dseditgroup is your friend! Add users, or groups, to a group you create or system groups which control access to services.

Make sure to insert your local admin’s short name (localadmin) and the user (username) or group (groupname) you’re trying to add.

Remote Login (SSH)
User: dseditgroup -o edit -n /Local/Default -u localadmin -p -a username -t user com.apple.access_ssh
Group: dseditgroup -o edit -n /Local/Default -u localadmin -p -a groupname -t group com.apple.access_ssh

Screen Sharing
User: dseditgroup -o edit -n /Local/Default -u localadmin -p -a username -t user com.apple.access_screensharing
Group: dseditgroup -o edit -n /Local/Default -u localadmin -p -a groupname -t group com.apple.access_screensharing

Print Administrators
User: dseditgroup -o edit -n /Local/Default -u localadmin -p -a username -t user _lpadmin
Group: dseditgroup -o edit -n /Local/Default -u localadmin -p -a groupname -t …

Source: Mac OSX Hints

The following shell script will delete all printers.
Make sure the file is executable after you create it (chmod ugo+x /path/to/delPrinters.sh).

#!/bin/sh

for printer in `lpstat -p | awk ‘{print $2}’`
do
echo Deleting $printer
lpadmin -x $printer
done

Source: Mac OSX Hints

The following AppleScript will use Remote Desktop to set a non-default NetBoot image as the startup disk. Make sure to insert your server’s IP Address and the image name…

tell application “Remote Desktop”
set theServer to “192.168.1.8”
set theImage to “10.8.5 NetBoot”
set theComputers to the selection
set theTask to make new set network startup disk task with properties {from server:theServer, mount volume:theImage, restarting:true}
execute theTask on theComputers
end tell

Source: Mac OSX Hints

Want to connect with the currently logged in user when using a VNC viewer rather than seeing the Login Window (ARD 3.5/OS X 10.7 and later)?

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.RemoteManagement VNCAlwaysStartOnConsole -bool true

Source: Mac OSX Hints