The title of this post is admittedly a play on David Lemmon's post from today on the Logos Blog--"Let Logos 4 Read the Bible to You."
Obviously, text to speech has been a staple of the Mac since the first Mac in 1984. It's built into just about every program. But then I remembered that Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) brought the ability to send text directly to iTunes as an audio file that can be played on a computer, or iPhone, iPod, iPad, etc.
This is done through the services menu (although it has to be set up first in the Keyboard preference pane under Services). I wrote about this on my blog last October detailing the steps involved (although it's really straightforward), but I'm not going to link directly to that because I mention another Bible program in that post, and I wish to respect the forum guidelines here. If you want to see it badly enough, you can go hunting for it on your own.
Anyway, as I read David's post, I immediately thought to myself, "Yeah, and Mac users can go one better" by sending a text selection directly to iTunes as an audio track. So, I opened up Logos/Mac/A22.1 and tried to do just that. Well, there's no option for it.
Almost all Mac programs that deal with text allow this. MS Word is a notable exception as it doesn't give access to the services menu, but Pages does as well as every brand of internet browser, "other Bible software," and even Apple's mail app.
Some programs give you direct access to the services menu by right-clicking on text and then choosing "Add to iTunes as a spoken track" such as in this picture:
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If the services menu cannot be reached in an application's contextual menu as seen above, most of the time, it can still be accessed through the application menu at the top of the screen. I was very surprised to discover that Logos/Mac offered neither option.
I'm no programmer, but I wonder how difficult it would be to add a fully functioning services menu to Logos/Mac? The services menu is a staple part of the Mac OS, and I'd argue one of the best features of the Mac OS (even though a lot of folks are unaware of it). For what it's worth, the services menu does appear under the Logos/Mac application menu, but evidently, the program has not been set to interact with OS X services.
You know, I've currently got 1750 titles in my Logos library. Realistically, I'm never going to read all of them. But I do believe that I would get around to some of them quicker if I could convert them rather easily to audio form and take them with me on my iPhone since I listen to it on my commute every day.
Believe it or not, if you listen to that mechanized voice long enough, it starts to grow on you. 