PowerTalker is a project of mine, motivated in equal parts by a desire to learn Mac programming better and a desire to have my mail read aloud to me. Basically its job in life is to use the Speech Manager to read messages delivered via PowerTalk.
Features:
* Fat Binary.
* Can read selected portions of a PowerTalk letter, including sender, subject, time sent, and text content.
* Letters can be read as they come in, on command, or by drag and dropping particular letters.
* It's AppleScriptable.
* Provides 100% of the USRDA of vitamin C.
* Works cheerfully in the background.
* Only takes 200K of memory. (Possibly more if you use a high quality voice.)
* Full balloon help.
Shortcomings:
* Messages that PowerTalker fools with are marked as read. This stinks, but there's no way around it with the current APIs. When Apple released the super-duper-improved APIs for AOCE, I'll fix this.
Configurations:
You can set up PowerTalker to do a number of different things.
Announce new mail: Set "Read New Mail, then Quit" to off, "Auto Read New Mail" to on, and any combination of content that you like. I prefer Sender and Subject, but hey -- it's on your machine, do what you want.
Read new mail on command: If you've got one o' them speech-recognizing Macs, set "Read New Mail, then Quit" to on and put an alias in your Speakable Items folder. Or put an alias in your Apple menu.
Read only the mail I tell you to read: Turn off "Read New Mail, then Quit" and "Auto Read New Mail". If you want a letter read, drag it on top of the PowerTalker application and drop it.
Read mail when you deactivate your screen saver: Gee, that's a good one. If your screen saver is scriptable, you could probably write a script to see when it was deactivated and then fire off a "Read All Letters" command to PowerTalker. I haven't done this, so no warrantees.
The Cost
If you use the program, all I ask of you is that you send me some e-mail to let me know you find it helpful. I'll then add you to my list of users and will let you know when upgrades and bug fixes are released. Enjoy!
Sean McMains
mcmains@unt.edu
Release History
v1.1
10-10-94
* Bug fixes.
* Can now choose which voice to use. It's preserved in the preferences file between launches. (Thanks, eveyone who asked for it!)
* PowerTalker will now check to see if other applications are talking when it needs to say something. If there are other apps speaking, it will politely wait until they're done, rather than speaking at the same time. (I wish more people had this alogrithm.) :-) Other apps may still talk over it, though.
* If PT can't make sense of a prefs file, it will now reset options to the default, rather than generating random settings. (Thanks, Yves!)
* Added OAPP Apple Event.
* When set for "Read and Quit" and an item was dropped on it, PT would first report on new mail and then read the dropped item. This is now fixed. (Greg again.)
* Changed several alerts & dialogs to take advantage of System 7 auto-positioning.
* Added reporting for Speech Manager errors. Also an alert if there's not enough memory to use a voice.
* PT would not release a letter if you drag and dropped another on it before it was finished reading. Fixed. (Thanks again, Greg.)
* Redesigned the preferences dialog (lots of times, actually). (Thanks, Rob & Simon.) Dimmed non-applicable options.
* Apple Guide help.
* Under certain circumstances, long sentences within a letter were skipped entirely. Fixed. (Thanks, Simon.)
* Custom speech dictionary added, primarily so it would read my and Yves names right. ;-) [Thanks to Simon Fraser for DictionaryEdit.]
* Switched from custom date & time routines to Mac OS international routines. (Thanks, Yves.)
* Letters were marked as read when there wasn't enough memory to use a voice. Fixed. (Yves again.)
* Now filters CompuServe headers, as well as RFC822 headers. (Thanks, Simon.)
v1.0
8-31-94
* First Wide Release.
* PowerTalker would sometimes beep when a read was aborted. This no longer occurs.
* Should provide a more helpful error message on PPCs where AOCE is not available.
* Will now read all of the text content of a letter, rather than just the first block. (Thanks, Greg.)
Here are some things I think might be worth implementing sometime down the road:
* Ability to announce enclosures. "The letter has x enclosures. They are named: <blah, blah, blah>"
* More complete AppleScript support, including recordability and the ability to set preferences via AppleScript.
* Perhaps the incorporation of some rudimentary rules processing.
* A small window that would pop up to display text as its read.
The Beta Bunch
This is the story of some beta testers,
Who perhaps had too much free time on their hands,
All of them decided they would gladly help me
Because they're software fans.
This is the story of a buggy program,
That would crash their machines without a thought,
It was bad code, but they ran it,
For money? No! For naught!
Until the one day when I finally got the bugs out,
And we knew that it was much more than a hunch,
That I never could have done it all without them,
That's the way they all became the Beta Bunch!
The Beta Bunch. <trumpet riff>
The Beta Bunch. <trumpet riff>
That's the way they became the Beta Bunch!
Beta Bunch roll call!
Christian Lallo! Gypsy! Dave Tutton! Cambot! Gregory B James! Tom Servo! Rob Dewhirst! Crooooooow! Robert Hess! Simon Lawson! Yves Piguet!
Legal Frippery
This program could well cause your computer to melt into a puddle of ooze. The radiation it produces may cause your dog to mutate into some kind of deadly carnivorous wolfhound that goes on gruesome killing sprees every full moon. You may go blind from using this software. I make no promises that the software will do anything that I say it will. If you run it, the risk is yours.
