One of the urban space and time gathering points for Mac users, the MacWorld Conference is this week in San Francisco, California. I went yesterday, my radar filters set to “what can simplify the office? what technology can simplify an independent professional’s business?” And, of course, ever on the hunt for the ultimate laptop bag that is highly functional and unique and interesting in the aesthetics department, the Cool Bag Alert Radar was on. First things first, I’m sad to report that no bags had to come home with me. (more on the ideal later)

The most interesting new technology for me was the iListen speech recognition tool by MacSpeech, Inc. Speech recognition technology has been around for a while, and this one seemed like a great contender for: someone who doesn’t type quickly, can’t type as fast as they think (up to 100 words a minute), or does A Lot on the computer and wants to give their hands and wrists a break. Some of the features that caught my eye were:

• CorrectAnywhere (TM) lets you “train” the program when it makes mistakes for future accuracy
• work directly in any application OR record into a special recorder that you can then hook up to the computer and it will write out your words for you. Basically, you don’t have to be at your computer to dictate notes, ideas, a speech, an article, whatever! (They had this at the show and I don’t see it on their website.)
• using it for screen navigation

Note that while the demos worked great, I didn’t buy it (I resisted impluse shopping urges at the conference) and thus haven’t used it in my actual office setting. The show special was $149, down from $218 and the recorder was extra.

I did get samples of other software to check out and will report back when I find ones that I think you Mac users might be interested in. I’m glad I went. It’s especially great to see the innovators bringing their inventions to market, like Gideon King of NovaMind who created a software that makes MindMaps. I’ve been using his program for almost a year now and Love it. It’s an awesome tool for inviting the creative juices of the right-brain to join the left-brain organizing skills.