On June 18, 2013, at 11:47, jem cabanes wrote:
> I (…) use it (…) as a fine book-reader, though I miss the capability of an assisting dictionary.
I thought the iPad had the same dictionary as the OS X. Is that incorrect?
And what about SIRI? I have got a sort of iPad manual here on my desktop. There they write: "Siri Tip: Try saying, "Siri, what does money mean?" (This works anywhere on the iPad—you don't have to be in iBooks.)"
I find the Mac Dictionary (= New Oxford American Dictionary and Oxford Dictionary of English) excellent. The British part (Oxford Dictionary of English) is slightly better, especially when it comes to labeling regionalism. American English is often not characterized as such in the New Oxford American Dictionary, which I consider a grave negligence. If you switch to the British part (= Oxford Dictionary of English) in such cases, you'll see they have usually marked the word as "N. Amer."
The only gripe I have with the Dictionary, apart from this, is, I wished the user could bookmark entries and then later jump to them randomly, just like in a good vocabulary trainer.
There is a useful and free plug-in available for Apple's Dictionary.app though, that lets you bookmark searched words. It's called BetterDictionary, and it can be found and downloaded here:
https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/42139/betterdictionary
http://pooriaazimi.github.io/BetterDictionary/
I also wish I could search for idiomatic expressions and proverbs exclusively.
I also like the Thesaurus. I find it much better than the Nisus Thesaurus, which I have never been able to do any serious work with. Maybe I don't know how to use it correctly; when I'm there I have the feeling I keep going in circles, around and around, without ever finding any useful information.
> Any small MacBook Pro or Airbook can do as much and more (in fact, wordprocessing on an iPad is rather limited, for instance)
Do you use the built-in dictation feature to enter text by voice?
What about shooting videos and taking pictures, which you can't do with a MacBook Air?
> , but neither is so easy or comfortable to carry along, nor is it a manageable book-reader.
If the book contains mainly text, then I personally prefer using Nisus, because searching, bookmarking, styles and comments in NWP cannot be topped.
> It took me years to make my mind up, as I doubted the real advantage of such a device, but now I couldn't possibly do without it.
I can understand you very well. I found iPod uninteresting until I realized one day when I was sitting in my local City library, that I can use it to listen to all the classics I always wanted to read, but never found time to do. :-)
I was also instantly impressed by the superb sound quality.
I was considering giving an iPad to a friend in the Philippines. She is working in the educational sector in a remote area. She needs to write educational reports, and needs Internet for surfing and email. I thought iPad would be ideal for her, until I found out that she needs a computer with iTunes installed in order to be able to make backups. Her old PC is dead, which means, she would have to buy another computer just for the purpose of backing up her iPad. That doesn't seem very practical. I told her to get a MacBook Air 11-inch instead.
iCloud gives you only 5GB free backup space, so that’s not an option for making full backups.
While searching for some infos about the MacBook Air I came across this amazing YouTube video yesterday. Don't know if it is faked, or whether it is really true. What do you, boys and gals, think?
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_0CN-12npY>
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