I am starting an FAQ about dragon for users who would like to keep their current version of Dragon going for as long as they can. (Dragon have closed down all their technical support, including their old forums.) Read on for details.
Continue reading ⟩Before you upgrade to OS X Catalina you may need to stop and assess the applications that will stop working. Catalina is what is called 64 bit. They are not at all compatible. Previous OSX version (e.g. Mojave) would have given you a warning about 32 bit applications that you are running. So I knew that Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and some other apps would stop working when I upgraded to Catalina. But I was not prepared for how many applications would stop working!
Here are just some of the apps that stopped working wth my upgrade to Catalina:
Bento
I used it a lot to edit my Apple Address book contacts. It’s the only program thatI know of that can interface directly with Apple address book and export your contacts into a CSV file. A shame that there is no alternative.
I had the pro version which allowed me to do some nice video editing and compression. The newer versions of quicktime do not have a pro version.
Requires $150 to upgrade to the newer version.
These products now only come as a subscription so I purchased Affinity Designer to replace them.
These still worked on OS X Catalina until I purchased a new laptop. The Serial number validators don’t run in Catalina. That means Dragon and Sibelius will continue to run as long as you keep the same computer. I just upgraded my laptop and both Sebelius and Dragon asked me to re-verify my serial number. There is no way to enter a valid serial number under Catalina. So Catalina killed those two apps even though the apps them selves are 64 bit.
I have a Fujitsu Scansnap S1500 scanner that I used to import all my documents into Devon think pro. The Fujitsu scanner drivers that work in Catalina do not work with older Fujitsu scanners so now my $800 scanner is rendered useless even though it was working perfectly.
The bottom line is when you install Catalina a lot of your existing apps may stop working and you may need to buy new ones or upgrade them. For some applications that just means forking out some money but there are other discontinued applications that there is no alternative for Catalina. (e.g. iDVD, Bento, Quicktime Player 7 Pro, CSSEdit.)
I’d suggest waiting till you have a fair bit of free time before upgrading to Catalina, and after you upgrade give all your Apps a test to make sure they still work.
SUMMARY: Dragon Version 6 is problematic with High Sierra. This article describes somewhat of a fix – ‘reset’ the Dragon preferences and dictate into Text Edit.
Dragon 6.0.7 was the most usable and bug free update of version 6 yet, but with the release of High Sierra, some issues have arisen.
It’s been a little over 12 months since version 6 was released and if Nuance’s previous release schedule is anything to go by we should be due for Dragon version 7 very soon. If you are thinking of buying Dragon, you really want to buy at the end of a cycle, not the beginning of a new version. It tends to take about a year for all the bugs to be ironed out and I know of soem people who are still waiting to purchase version 6. Given that Nuance have released a new version in September 2015 and 2016, we might have expected an update by now. It might be advisable to buy soon before version 7 is released.
That said – there have been some issues with High Sierra. If and when those are resolved, that could be a good time to purchase version 6.
Buying guide: Wait a little bit longer for the High Sierra problems to be resolved then purchase version 6 before Nuance release a version 7.
The new purchase price is US$225 (or AU$475), but you can get it on special if you search.
Read More:
Reviews of Dragon 6.0, Dragon 6.0.1 and Dragon 6.0.2.
According to Nuance Dragon 6.0.8 is compatible with High Sierra. But in High Sierra the ‘scratch that’ command doesn’t work. The correction window doesn’t work either. These are pretty crucial to an everyday user of Dragon. So unless you absolutely need to be running High Sierra, I’d suggest you stick with Sierra and run Dragon 6.0.7 until those issues are resolved.
According to Nuance Dragon version 6.0.8 is compatible with High Sierra 10.13. Unfortunately High Sierra (10.13) still has some unresolved issues with Dragon so I suggest you stay with Dragon 6.0.7 and OS X 10.12
UPDATE 2/2/2018: See this post for a fix to this bug.
Today Nuance released Dragon version 6.02. I’d love to be able to review Dragon version 6.02 right now but because the major problem with Dragon is stability it is something that I can’t just review in 24 hours. I will be giving Dragon 6.02 a good workout over the coming few days and I will give you a report as soon as I can. Hopefully it’s the version that we have been waiting for. But in the meantime, I have been playing around with version 6.01 for about four weeks and I can give you some thoughts about it.
It’s been over 2 years since Dragon 6 was released but it still has bugs. As with previous Dragon releases the speech recognition is excellent but the stability is problematic.
My suggestion is to stay with Dragon version 5 if you own it. It strikes the best balance between accuracy and stability. However, if you are running the latest version of Dragon for Mac 6, here are some tips on how to get it working with the least amount of spinning beach balls.
UPDATE 15/10/2016: I have now been using Dragon 6.0.1 for a couple of weeks, you can read my thoughts here.
UPDATE 28/9/2016: I received a personal phone call from Jeff Lieman, the manager of Engineering at Nuance, encouraging me to try out and review the new version, Dragon 6.01, which was released today. I will try it out over the next few weeks and give you an update.
I’m so disappointed with the latest version of Dragon for Mac 6 released yesterday that I’m not even going to write a review. I will make some comments though for those who might be thinking of upgrading.
Dragon for Mac 6 (renamed Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, v6) crashes every few minutes. It does crazy mistakes like “againnâ€, “consistsnt†and “won’tt”. There have been a couple of times it has taken complete control of my computer and spat out endless garbage like ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ
I cannot even force quit it because it is an invisible application. I cannot go into activity monitor to quit because I have lost control of my keyboard. I’ve installed it on my Macbook Air but it’s too unstable to put on my main Mac.
Here are some comments from actual users:
“profound disappointment.” Kevin
“this version of Dragon is so much garbage that I thought I might be able to warn others” Zach
“Upgrading to dragon 6 is the worse decision I have made in a long time.” Max
“shouldn’t Nuance be beta-testing new releases with users so these bugs get squashed before a general release?” Jon
“I find it surprising that this version has been released when it clearly contains so many errors.” Peter
“I am also frustrated with version 6, and like Zach, I’ve been a user since the MacSpeech iListen days.” Stephen
“Now instead of just messing up and quitting, the 6.0 version just stops working and gives you a spinning beach ball.” Mary
“getting a little tiresome” adsub
“very disappointed that Nuance would put out such an unstable version.” Mark
“it is not a positive experience.” David
“Getting Dragon version 6 for the Macintosh to work for me was a huge pain.” Fletch
“What good is improved UI when the guts don’t work.” Andrew
“Big promises for Dragon 6, but a complete failure on delivery. Don’t buy it!” Tersh
“It has crashed more than 10 times in 6 days in the course of doing very ordinary dictation tasks.” Steve
“by far the worst release I’ve seen as far as bugs and erratic behavior in a program version that’s virtually useless” Mark
“I feel like Charlie Brown, each time they come out with a new version I think that it will be different but then they pull the football away.”
And my favourite:
“The only “Deep Learning” taking place here is that I must not allow myself to be ripped off yet again!” Arnold
We know we are desperate if people are suggesting solutions like this:
“why don’t you try Dragon for Windows (using a Windows bootcamp partition or a virtual machine)?” Marius
I am very disappointed because previously this was one of my favourite pieces of software.
You can read more on the Nuance customer forums here.
A final note, be wary of reviews like this one that are overly positive – they are selling the software!
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