When you need to get ideas out of your head, typing is not your best option. Your brain can generate ideas at ~500wpm (words per minute) while your fingers struggle along at a lowly 60-75wpm. It's akin to asking a toddler to jot down minutes of a meeting. It can be done, but there's a better way. Dictation can easily give you a 60-100% raw bump in speed compared to typing. But it gets even better.

Dictation makes brainstorming a more fluid process. Your brain gets more time to think without having to watch over what you've typed or spotting typos. It takes away the hesitation before jotting down an idea. It makes it easier to rephrase for clarity. And it's fun. Of course, all that's true only when dictation accuracy is great. On your Mac, your best bet is Dragon Dictate.

What to do with your hands then? Let them play assist. Scroll, pan & position the cursor where the next idea should go. Fire out keyboard shortcuts in your favorite app. Or, when you're ready for a touch of magic, set up a few voice commands to trigger the powerful features in your app. For example, when dictating in Mindjet, Dragon Dictate can be configured to recognize spoken commands such as "Fit Map to Window", "Balance This Map" and "Focus on This Topic" which may be easier to remember than obscure keyboard shortcuts.

With OS X Mavericks, powerful dictation technology is now available on every Mac. Get started with dictation for free, and if it works out for you, step up to Dragon Dictate for higher speed & accuracy with its ability to understand your specialized vocabulary, and learn from its mistakes in speech recognition.

See also:

• How Good is Inbuilt Dictation in OS X Mavericks?
• ebook Dragon Dictate: Fast Track to Prolific Writing on Your Mac
• Configure Commands in Dragon Dictate to trigger powerful features in Mindjet and Scrivener (coming soon)

PDFCombo is an app to combine multiple PDF files. Unlike other apps, PDFCombo preserves the Table of Contents (TOC) in the combined PDF. It can also add a new top-level TOC entry for each contributing PDF. This can be useful to keep a complex TOC neat & tidy, or to add a TOC item to demarcate contributing PDFs.

For example, if you've created PDFs using the File > Print... dialog in Mac OS X or you've got several scanned PDFs, you can combine them into one PDF with PDFCombo with automatic TOC entries to mark the first page of each contributing PDF.

PDFCombo is a free app available on the Mac App Store.
For editing the TOC in any PDF, consider PDFOutliner.

See also notes to PDFCombo 1.0.2 (published 04/21/2014) and PDFCombo 1.0.3 (published 05/15/2014.)

[2017 Update]: PDFSpeech is a new powerful app that can combine multiple PDF files into a PDF Pack. See this short walkthrough on how to print an entire book from safaribooksonline.com to PDFSpeech to create a PDF with a table of contents. PDFSpeech also includes the ability to insert clipboard contents as PDF into the Pack, and multiple pages selected & copied from Preview. The primary use of PDFSpeech is to help you read more by tapping into text-to-speech technology, and it enables easy control over pronunciations so you can listen to the generated speech for extended periods without any glaring mistakes.

The statistics below show speed & accuracy on a range of recent Macs (2010-2012 models) achieved with a brand new voice profile in Dragon Dictate. Even though there is a 3x difference in benchmark scores between the slowest and fastest Mac, the accuracy is nearly identical! The only impact is in the speed of dictation as your Mac tries to keep up with your speech. Compared to a baseline typing speed of 60 wpm - generally considered a competent typing speed - you can immediately get a speed boost of 65% to 100% by using Dragon Dictate on any recent Mac.

Late 2010 MacBook Air (Geekbench: 3,000 and Novabench: 307)
Speed: 100 wpm Accuracy: 91%

Early 2011 MacBook Pro (Geekbench: 10,300 and Novabench: 1,145)
Speed: 124 wpm Accuracy: 92%

Late 2012 27 inch iMac (Geekbench: 9,400 and Novabench: 882)
Speed: 126 wpm Accuracy: 92%


These speed and accuracy figures can be improved significantly by training Dragon Dictate. The above post in an excerpt from the ebook "Dragon Dictate: Fast Track to Prolific Writing on a Mac" published in October 2013.

Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and OS X Mavericks offer an inbuilt dictation feature that is powered by the same underlying technology as Dragon Dictate. As a result, the dictation commands are nearly identical (see Apple Help document “Mac Basics: Dictation” at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5449 for the list of supported dictation commands in OS X). The inbuilt dictation feature is readily accessible using the convenient shortcut “Fn Fn” and is great for short-dictations. In Mac OS X 10.8, the dictation works by communicating with Apple’s speech recognition servers over the Internet which may result in an annoying lag between when you speak and when the dictated text appears. In Mac OS X Mavericks, you have the option to turn on "enhanced dictation" which does not require an Internet connection and allows you to dictate continuously. The graph below presents dictation speed & accuracy in OS X Mavericks against the alternatives: typing fast, dictation in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, and Dragon Dictate, the best-in-class dictation software on a Mac.