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NeoOffice :: View topic - Support for dictation in Mountain Lion
Support for dictation in Mountain Lion
 
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Lorinda
Captain Mifune


Joined: Jun 20, 2006
Posts: 2051
Location: Midwest, USA

PostPosted: Sun Sep 23, 2012 1:45 pm    Post subject: Support for dictation in Mountain Lion

I just upgraded to Mountain Lion and discovered that Neooffice does not support the dictation feature in Mountain Lion. I would love to see dictation supported in Neo. I was diagnosed with MS this summer, and have the most difficulty with my hands. Dictation is something I really need to deal with those days when my hands don't type properly. I can find other solutions for the moment, but it would be very helpful if this could be incorporated into NeoOffice...assuming it is doable, and that there is enough donor support for it.
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OPENSTEP
The One
The One


Joined: May 25, 2003
Posts: 4752
Location: Santa Barbara, CA

PostPosted: Sun Sep 23, 2012 3:04 pm    Post subject:

First off, very sorry to hear about teh diagnosis. I was unaware that there was a dictation feature in 10.8 myself. While unfortunately a lot of the new features Apple is adding are really tightly linked with Cocoa, perhaps that one is not. Seems really strange that they would have done that. In the past the Dragon Dictate stuff IIRC just mimicked a keyboard for universal access. While it's not built into the OS it may be another avenue of potential tools. Aside from that I don't know of any other voice dictation software on Mac myself.

ed
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Lorinda
Captain Mifune


Joined: Jun 20, 2006
Posts: 2051
Location: Midwest, USA

PostPosted: Mon Sep 24, 2012 8:41 am    Post subject:

Thanks for the support.

I have a sinking feeling that 10.8's baked-in dictation feature may be Cocoa dependent. One of my other often-used applications (Accordance) doesn't support it either, and I don't think they make full use of Cocoa.

FWIW, Firefox, ImageWell4, Chrome, and Adium all support dictation. I don't know if that indicates whether or not dictation is Cocoa dependent or not.

Lorinda
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Mon Sep 24, 2012 8:50 am    Post subject:

Lorinda wrote:
I have a sinking feeling that 10.8's baked-in dictation feature may be Cocoa dependent. One of my other often-used applications (Accordance) doesn't support it either, and I don't think they make full use of Cocoa.


I have not been able to find any Apple documentation on how applications are supposed to implement dictation on Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. NeoOffice 3.3 is now fully Cocoa-based so I will see if I can figure out how the TextEdit application has implemented this feature.

If I can figure out how TextEdit has implemented this feature, then Ed and I can determine if this feature is feasible to implement in NeoOffice.

I will post again when I have more data.

Patrick
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Lorinda
Captain Mifune


Joined: Jun 20, 2006
Posts: 2051
Location: Midwest, USA

PostPosted: Tue Sep 25, 2012 9:13 am    Post subject:

I don't know if this helps you or not, but I discovered today that Apache OpenOffice 3.4.1 does support Mountain Lion's dictation feature.

Would you like me to download LibreOffice and see if dictation works there, too?

The fact that OpenOffice will support dictation gives me a workaround until Neo can do so.

Lorinda


Last edited by Lorinda on Tue Sep 25, 2012 6:32 pm; edited 1 time in total
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Tue Sep 25, 2012 2:48 pm    Post subject:

This is very good news. The path that I was going down was getting to be a dead end. No need to test LibreOffice as I test it and I found that all versions of OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice support this Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion feature.

It appears that OpenOffice.org's native accessibility code - the code that we never implemented because we were using Java-based windows - is what is used by Mac OS X's dictation service.

So, in theory, I just need to find out which native accessibility queries Mac OS X's dictation service is sending to NeoOffice that our code is not replying to and implement reasonable handling of those queries. I doubt that I need to implement all of the accessibility support that OpenOffice.org implemented as I suspect that Mac OS X's dictation service only sends queries like "does this window support text input?".

FYI. Since Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion's dictation feature is a significant "built-in" feature and we now know that Mac OS X's native accessibility functions can be used to enable this in an application, I will treat this topic as a regular NeoOffice bug and so I have moved this bug to the NeoOffice Support forum.

Patrick
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Lorinda
Captain Mifune


Joined: Jun 20, 2006
Posts: 2051
Location: Midwest, USA

PostPosted: Tue Sep 25, 2012 6:35 pm    Post subject:

Cool! Thanks, Patrick. I hope it proves to be an easy fix.

Lorinda
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Wed Sep 26, 2012 8:40 pm    Post subject:

I think that I have fixed this bug. Contrary to what I originally thought, I did not need to implement any accessibility support to fix this bug. Instead, after a lot of debugging, I found that this was a very subtle text event handling bug.

Can you install the following test patch and, in a NeoOffice document, press whatever keys you have set as the shortcut in the System Preference application's Dictation panel? I tested with "press fn key twice" as the shortcut:

Intel:
http://sally.neooffice.org/test/NeoOffice-3.3-Patch-1-Test-8-Intel.dmg

Patrick
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amayze
The Merovingian


Joined: Oct 24, 2005
Posts: 561
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland

PostPosted: Thu Sep 27, 2012 6:00 am    Post subject:

I've installed NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 1 Test 8 on two machines now.

Running under 10.6.8 all is well.

On my 10.7.5 machine NeoOffice will not launch. It bounces once in the dock and then stops. Looking at the Console messages I see this:
Code:
27/09/2012 13:51:47.084 com.apple.launchd.peruser.502: ([0x0-0xbf0bf].8V953UDD5Q.org.neooffice.NeoOffice[5562]) Job appears to have crashed: Illegal instruction: 4

I can't see any other crash logs for NeoOffice.
Re-installing Patch 1 Test 7 fixes the problem.

Yours,

Andy
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Lorinda
Captain Mifune


Joined: Jun 20, 2006
Posts: 2051
Location: Midwest, USA

PostPosted: Thu Sep 27, 2012 7:04 am    Post subject:

I had the same problem amayze did on my 10.8.2 machine: icon bounces once, then stops.

I found the following entries in the console:

Code:
9/27/12 8:50:33.514 AM ReportCrash[5026]: failed looking up LS service ( scCreateSystemService returned MACH_PORT_NULL, called from SetupCoreApplicationServicesCommunicationPort, so using client-side NULL calls.
9/27/12 8:50:33.514 AM ReportCrash[5026]: LaunchServices/5123589: Unable to lookup coreservices session port for session 0x186a0 uid=0 euid=0
9/27/12 8:50:33.514 AM ReportCrash[5026]: failed looking up LS service ( scCreateSystemService returned MACH_PORT_NULL, called from SetupCoreApplicationServicesCommunicationPort, so using client-side NULL calls.
9/27/12 8:50:33.514 AM ReportCrash[5026]: LaunchServices/5123589: Unable to lookup coreservices session port for session 0x186a0 uid=0 euid=0
9/27/12 8:50:33.514 AM ReportCrash[5026]: failed looking up LS service ( scCreateSystemService returned MACH_PORT_NULL, called from SetupCoreApplicationServicesCommunicationPort, so using client-side NULL calls.
9/27/12 8:50:33.515 AM ReportCrash[5026]: LaunchServices/5123589: Unable to lookup coreservices session port for session 0x186a0 uid=0 euid=0
9/27/12 8:50:33.515 AM ReportCrash[5026]: failed looking up LS service ( scCreateSystemService returned MACH_PORT_NULL, called from SetupCoreApplicationServicesCommunicationPort, so using client-side NULL calls.
9/27/12 8:50:33.515 AM ReportCrash[5026]: LaunchServices/5123589: Unable to lookup coreservices session port for session 0x186a0 uid=0 euid=0
9/27/12 8:50:33.515 AM ReportCrash[5026]: failed looking up LS service ( scCreateSystemService returned MACH_PORT_NULL, called from SetupCoreApplicationServicesCommunicationPort, so using client-side NULL calls.
9/27/12 8:50:33.515 AM ReportCrash[5026]: LaunchServices/5123589: Unable to lookup coreservices session port for session 0x186a0 uid=0 euid=0
9/27/12 8:50:33.642 AM ReportCrash[5026]: Saved crash report for soffice.bin[5029] version 3.3 Patch 1 (3.3 Patch 1 Intel [pluby:guibonewmini.local.]) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/soffice.bin_2012-09-27-085033_Majel-Barrett-Prime-2.crash


Crash log is attached. Note that this appears to be a new format that opens in console. If you want a txt version, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

Lorinda
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Thu Sep 27, 2012 7:18 am    Post subject:

The crashing that you both see was because I had signed that test patch with the wrong digital certificate. I was using a different certificate to test Mac App sandboxing and I had forgotten to change my build back to use our Planamesa Inc. certificate.

The following test patch should have the correct certificate like test patch 7. Let us know if you still have problems launching NeoOffice after installing the following test patch:

Intel:
http://sally.neooffice.org/test/NeoOffice-3.3-Patch-1-Test-9-Intel.dmg

Patrick
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Lorinda
Captain Mifune


Joined: Jun 20, 2006
Posts: 2051
Location: Midwest, USA

PostPosted: Thu Sep 27, 2012 7:29 am    Post subject:

That fixed it! Neo opened at the end of the patch installation process, and dictation now works. Thank you so much!!

Lorinda
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amayze
The Merovingian


Joined: Oct 24, 2005
Posts: 561
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland

PostPosted: Thu Sep 27, 2012 8:17 am    Post subject:

pluby wrote:
The crashing that you both see was because I had signed that test patch with the wrong digital certificate. I was using a different certificate to test Mac App sandboxing and I had forgotten to change my build back to use our Planamesa Inc. certificate.

Ah, that explains why it still worked on OS X 10.6.8

Test 9 installed on my OS X 10.7.5 machine and NeoOffice launches correctly once again.

Thanks

Andy
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Thu Sep 27, 2012 8:27 am    Post subject:

amayze wrote:
Test 9 installed on my OS X 10.7.5 machine and NeoOffice launches correctly once again.


My use of the wrong certificate shows one of the security features in Mac OS X 10.7 and higher. If a binary file is digitally signed, Mac OS X will not allow an application to use that binary file if the certificate is not from a valid Apple developer account.

I may be wrong, but IMHO this little security feature strongly suggests that Apple will soon require all applications to be digitally signed and is one more reason why we are focusing all our new development efforts on making NeoOffice runnable in the Mac App sandbox.

Patrick
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gbh
Councilperson


Joined: Jul 28, 2007
Posts: 172

PostPosted: Sat Sep 29, 2012 6:33 am    Post subject:

This responsiveness to a very real need is a perfect example of why NeoOffice and Patrick are so great!
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