HowTo: Create an Audio File from a Text File

The new voice for Leopard, Alex, is an extremely comprehensive and realistic voice module, so it is worth looking at how you can use it to help you work. Got a long document to read, or a speech to memorise? This 3-step tip will show you how to get it into an audio file so you can listen to it on an ipod while commuting, or even turn a free online novel into an audiobook.

1) The first thing you need to do is ensure your document is in plain-text format. The easiest way to do this is to copy the contents into "TextEdit.app", go to the Format menu and select "Make Plain Text". For simplicity save this file as "wordstosay.txt" in the root folder of your "Macintosh HD".

2) Now our document is ready, open Terminal.app using spotlight or from the Utilities sub-folder of your Applications folder. When it opens, type "cd /" and hit return. This tells terminal that you are working in the root of Macintosh HD, and makes finding the text file much easier.

3) To get your mac to read out this text file to an audio file, type the following and hit return: 

say -v alex -f wordstosay.txt -o spoken.aiff

Lets have a look at what this command means. The "say" bit is simply the name of the program used to make your mac talk, and "-v alex" sets the voice as Alex. "-f [filename]" tells your mac where the text file to read from is, and "-o [filename]" tells it to output the speech to an audio file instead of reading out loud. If all has gone well, you should now find a file called "spoken.aiff" in the root of your "Macintosh HD" that you can load into iTunes.

Tip: If you want to get Alex to read content out for you regularly, a useful tip is to set a keyboard shortcut like ctrl-s by going to System Preferences > Speech > Text to Speech > Speak selected text when the key is pressed.

Dockulicious

Dockulicous is a great little app which lets you choose your own skin for your leopard dock. Many users have already uploaded dock skins, which you download and then drag the zip file onto the main app. It includes the original settings just in case you decide a bright pink dock isn't your thing. If you've ever fancied your dock looking like a picnic table, piano keys or covered with lasers, this is the app for you.

Developer's site

Applejack

Applejack is your friend if you can't boot up a GUI on your mac. Once installed, if you have a problem, boot into single user mode by hitting cmd-S and typing 'applejack'. You're then presented with a prompt which lets you repair disks, permissions, cashes and remove your swap file. Thankfully, I have never needed to test this in a real situation, but it's a comforting thing to have installed on your system.

Developer's site

Proximity

Proximity is a neat little app which automatically runs Applescript when a bluetooth device approaches or leaves your bluetooth-enabled mac. For example, if you set it to pair with your phone, on approaching your mac you could have it run an applescript to sync your calendar and address book for you. Alternatively you could use it as a proximity security tag, so on leaving your machine the screensaver triggers and becomes password-protected, and on approaching it returns to the desktop. For useful scripts, check out this blogger's code.

Developer's site

WolfQuest

WolfQuest is a free game with an educational slant developed for Minnesota Zoo. You take on the role of a wolf and have to hunt and find a mate. It supports single or multiplayer play, and in the game attempts to be as realistic as possible, down to the body language of the wolves when communicating. A special scent-view mode lets you find food and fellow wolves.

Developer's site

Glims

My major frustration with safari was that it could only support Google as it's search engine, and there was no way to change this without editing Safari's coding, a risky process that crashed safari if your modified version didn't have exactly the same file size as the original.

Enter Glims, a small app with allows you to add about 20 different search engines to safari and put them in order of your preference.

Other long-awaited features include:

• Full screen browsing 
• Undo close tab using Cmd-Z
• Favicons show at the top of tabs
• Thumbnails in Google and Yahoo searches.
• Session saving

If safari supported all the features that Glims provided, a lot fewer mac users would be switching to firefox.

Main Menu

Main Menu is a small app that sits in your menu bar and provides you with easy access to a large number of maintenance tasks for your mac, such as force emptying trash, cleaning cashes and logs, and repairing permissions and indexes. It also lets you create scheduled tasks and execute these every set period of time for you. Everything it does is posted to you via Growl.

Developer's site

Bricksmith

Bricksmith lets you create lego models using your mac. There is a large array of parts available and once you get the knack of assembling these in 3D space you can make very realistic looking models. The highlight is probably the Minifigure generator which builds lego people for you - perfect for creating a forum profile image of you which stands out.

Developer's site

Processing

Processing is an open source Java-based development environment that aims to make it fast and easy to program prototype software (each project is known as a "sketch"). While the basic syntax is of a Java nature, many libraries have already been created to make programming using Processing simple and fast.

It supports serial communication, making it a useful tool to work with electronics boards like the Arduino (a versatile opensource project, which can even be used to send data back to your mac to run applescripts using Applescript Proxy)

For budding programmers, this is a great environment to learn, with a large amount of support from their website.

Developer's site

Portable Apps

After a short break, I've decided to get the ball rolling again with a link to an array of standard mac applications which have been made portable, allowing you to keep them on your USB key-ring and run them directly from flash memory on any mac you visit. The list of apps that have been modified to do this is substantial, containing the core mac apps like Mail and iCal as well as other major opensource programs like Gimp, Audacity, Nvu and Openoffice.

Developer's site

PicLens

While not an app, PicLens is a very cool plugin for Firefox 3 or Safari 3.0 (sadly not 3.1 yet). It installs a button next to your google search box that allows you to browse online photos and videos in a 3D environment, making the process of searching Flikr, Google Images, Amazon and Youtube a lot more fun. The graphics are extremely smooth, and you can navigate using mouse scrolling or arrow keys. Double clicking on a photo makes it fullscreen, and there is an option to launch the photo in your browser for downloading.

Developer's site

Tip: To use this on a local folder of photos, drag that folder into your browser window and then start PicLens.

xBench

Okay, so you've bought your shiny new mac, and you want to see how powerful it really is. xBench is a free app that lets you run a series of tests including CPU, RAM speed, graphics and disk read/write speed tests. 

While the graphics may not be the prettiest of benchmarking software, the app lets you upload your stats to a central server and compare with other mac users. This could be useful for checking if that RAM upgrade really is worth the cash.

Developer's site

MacOSaiX

This app probably won't be used by you every day, but it's worth checking out - I install apps like these in a 'playground' folder of apps I don't use very much, but are cool to have. This program is similar to the mosaic screensaver that comes with leopard except, after giving it an image to work from, it fetches other images from the internet (Flikr, Google as well as iPhoto) and places them in the collage according to brightness for you.

Developer's site

Porticus

Porticus is a front-end for macports which makes it easy to install linux applications on your mac. It takes the terminal-based system of installing packages and turns this into a neat Cocoa app which even lets you search and browse ports and modules with description tags as if they were finder items. Ports can easily be activated/deactivated and updated, allowing for easy managment of your linux ports.

Developer's site

Celestia

Celestia lets you navigate the universe with ease. With over 100,000 stars in its database as well as a few artificial satellites there is an extensive array of objects to travel to, but you can download add-ons to expand it, including optional high resolution textures for planets. The difficult job of navigating through 3 dimensional space is made easy using a 'Go to' feature, but you can still pan, zoom and rotate easily. As well as being beautiful, the software is accurate and you can view the realtime position of planets or satellites, or speed up the simulation to show orbits. A lot of fun to use.

Developer's site

FrameByFrame

FrameByFrame is a free stop-frame animation program that takes images from your webcam or another video source and lets you build Wallace and Gromit movies (though it may take a few years to get the knack). 

The window is split into three parts - the left panel shows your current camera feed, while the right one displays the current feed ghosted over the previous recorded image so you can see exactly what has moved since your last shot. The bottom section contains transport controls and a filmstrip for browsing your frames. Once your movie is created, you can export it into 25 different formats for uploading to the web or doing post-production in iMovie.

Developer's site

Iconic

I was originally going to write a tutorial on how to create custom icons for your folders on Leopard, a lengthy process involving image editing skills and at least 3 applications, but while surfing I stumbled upon Iconic, a fast and easy program that creates icons that look like they came with leopard.

All you need to do is find an image of the logo you want on a white background, drag it onto the program, wait for it to do its magic and then drag the folder you want it applied to onto the other side of the program. The process works best for sharp images with no grey smoothing around the letters, so a soft image will give a dirty look, but drag your company logo onto Iconic and you'll be impressed with the results.

Developer's site

Tunnel

Macbook and macbook pro users, prepare to have a lot of fun with this retro app which lets you play the classic game tunnel with a twist - you tilt your laptop to play. Despite the old-style graphics, the game is extremely smooth to play and you can have very fine control over the player depending on how much/fast you tilt your laptop. Feel free to post your highscore as a comment - I'll start with the moderate highscore of 3343.

Developer's site - also check out NetPong, Fish and LookAtMe.

Gawker

Gawker is a simple program that lets you create time-lapse movies from your iSight, an external webcam, or a website URL. You can set a time interval and just leave it running or schedule a start and stop time, and even share your cameras with other users over the internet.

Developer's site

If you don't have an iSight or want to use an external camera, macam is a project which allows your mac to recognise most brands of webcam and treat them as an iSight.

Q [kju:]

Q is a mac port of QEMU, an opensource emulator. It allows you to get most versions of windows, linux, dos and freeBSD running emulated in mac, certainly worth trying before buying VMware or Parallels. You can also use it to run live CDs.

How it works:

Initially you need to create a partition for the 'Guest OS' to reside on. These can be compressed but if you are having problems (I did with win98) you can use an uncompressed .raw file. You can then configure how much RAM you want to give it, which audio, graphics and video cards you want it to emulate and choose whether a disk image or your real optical drive is used for the virtual CD drive. 

Launch the guest OS with the CD in your drive and follow its installation procedure. The OS can run in fullscreen or window mode, and Q even works with your laptop trackpad, including right click and scrolling.

Developer's site