I’m one of those people who installs the game/application and starts using it right away. Only if I absolutely cannot figure out what I’m doing will I consider reading the instructions. Yeah, I know, not real smart. But anyway…
Since I started this blog, I’ve been trying to become more conscious of ergonomics, not just knowing what the word means, but actually applying it to my work habits. Also, I’m trying to learn to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking better. I have a tendency to get… just a tad frustrated with it from time to time. Now, it’s not all my fault… just mostly. Here’s an example:
I’ve had Dragon NaturallySpeaking installed since Christmas. It’s June now. For the most part, I just use it for my writing, predominantly MS Word stuff. Occasionally, I’ll surf the Internet with it. What I’m saying is I haven’t really needed to learn how to use it well. I know it can do macros and all sorts of stuff, but I just want to be able to dictate my text for the most part.
However, it’s been annoying the heck out of me since day one that there’s no command for ALt-Tab. Ditto with Escape. Today I dug out and dusted off my instruction book to look up something else and accidentally opened the page that talks about the “press” command.
That’s right folks. If you say press in front of Escape (or any keyboard key/combination of keys), voilà, it magically works. Imagine if I’d read the instruction book earlier… (In my defense, the instruction booklet is about 200 pages long–yeah, that’s my excuse. Sure.)
Anyway, this has inspired me to make learning the ins and outs of Dragon NaturallySpeaking my summer project. I may even learn how to do that macro thingy. If I find out anything extremely fascinating, I’ll share.