Leopard’s Text-to-Speech capabilities are great for visually impaired users. Highlight some text, click the designated trigger key, and your Mac will read the text to you in one of it’s many different voices. The default is Alex.

But I prefer Zarvox. Off the record, I believe Zarvox is just a cover name. I suspect it’s really Soundwave, who having been excluded from the Transformers movie was snatched up from the unemployment line by Apple.

While I really like speech capabilities in Mac OSX, I have to say I’m a little disappointed with the speech recognition. I got very excited when I thought about the prospects of eating macaroni and chess on the sofa and yelling chess notation at my Macbook. I know, I know… Who wouldn’t?

Like with any operating system, you likely don’t utilize all the features that you potentially could. Heck, some of the features, you probably didn’t even know they existed. Or maybe you just didn’t bother to enable them.

That’s likely the case with Mac OS X’s Active Corners feature, which is a neat little tool that helps you do many different tasks just a little bit quicker.