Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!usc!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!rutgers!mephisto!prism!fsu!gw.scri.fsu.edu!pepke From: pepke@gw.scri.fsu.edu (Eric Pepke) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: No Macintalk in system 7? (was Re: Moose and SE/30) Message-ID: <548@fsu.scri.fsu.edu> Date: 9 Mar 90 16:12:37 GMT Sender: news@fsu.scri.fsu.edu Organization: Florida State University, but I don't speak for them Lines: 71 References: <48744@coherent.coherent.com> <3564@infmx.UUCP> <49013@coherent.coherent.com> <32015@brunix.UUCP> <39340@apple.Apple.COM> In article <39340@apple.Apple.COM> mjohnson@Apple.COM (Mark B. Johnson) writes: > It is important for Apple, for developers, and most of all the users that > we provide a SOLUTION to the problem, not just another problem. Unfortunately, > that solution takes a little longer than we would all like. Maybe, if Apple are serious about this. I remain skeptical. I am not flaming you, Mark (note my first disclaimer), but Macintalk has been in limbo for half a decade. During that time about half a dozen third parties have done speech hacks. Apple could have acquired any of them and had something functional by now. I infer from their not doing so either apathy or a forked-tongue approach to Macintalk support. I hope I am wrong. Perhaps the perception among those who control is that Macintalk is a fun hack for silly talking meese with little serious possibility, another version of the "we don't need no steenkin' user interface" mentality. However, there are people in the world who do not see very well. Macintalk, along with the ability to make just about any application use large fonts, is a great boon to these people. Apple have been nearly unique among computer manufacturers in their awareness of the existence of disabled people. Look at Easy Access. The people who actually need something like Easy Access are only a tiny minority, and such things are usually overlooked by marketing-driven companies in their perpetual navel-gazing. How much revenue does Easy Access generate? Very little by itself. How much revenue does the attitude that people with special needs are worth considering generate? One hell of a lot, I would guess. Apple have done well on this point. On the other hand, perhaps Easy Access, too, may prove to be nothing more than a relic from the old days when Apple's corporate posterior had not achieved diamond hardness. Trying to integrate a speech synthesizer with the already massively hacked Sound Manager is the wrong approach, especially as it increases the amount of time to do the job. Get the Sound Manager working properly, but in the meantime provide a routine that takes some phonemes and parameters and a sampling rate and returns a handle to a sound sample. I have always been able to play sound samples on the Mac, the amount of memory to hold a single sentence is not going to be a problem to allocate, and my fingers are hardly going to be worn to nubbins from the need to type in one extra toolbox call. That way, even if Apple release Comprehensive Sound Manager Controller Package Version 37 that requires an array of 256 interconnected DSP chips numerically to simulate the electronics in an NE-555 timer, the damn thing will still work. Besides, I can *filter* a sample. The other thing is that I am sure that there are hundreds of people with the ability to disassemble Macintalk and produce something useful, and I bet a few of them would do it for free or shareware, but I doubt anybody is going to do it in light of images of phalanxes of grim Apple lawyers armed with Uzi's. Macintalk is free, completely unsupported, and guaranteed to break within a year. So release it into the public domain. That won't happen, of course--it will probably be kept as a trade secret until the collapse of the universe, and even then the lawyers will probably be working overtime to figure out how to keep control over it in the next one. Pardon the cynicism, but I needed the therapy. Again, I am not flaming those in Apple who voluntarily contribute to the world by being on this newsgroup. Contributions like that and like Macintalk made Apple great. Quite the opposite, I criticize the mindset that judges those kinds of contributions to be without value. I hope my fear that said mindset is swarming over Apple in a giant mindless protoplasmic mass turns out to be dead wrong. Eric Pepke INTERNET: pepke@gw.scri.fsu.edu Supercomputer Computations Research Institute MFENET: pepke@fsu Florida State University SPAN: scri::pepke Tallahassee, FL 32306-4052 BITNET: pepke@fsu Disclaimer: My employers seldom even LISTEN to my opinions. Meta-disclaimer: Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers.