NVMUG eNews September Meeting Announcement
REMINDER:
Create a Web Page with Steve Farber
NVMUG Meeting
12 Noon - 2 PM
Saturday, September 16, 2000
Community Bank Building, St. Johnsbury
Steve Farber will guide us as we create a web page. It should be fun, and we will learn a lot. The meeting will be in the St. Johnsbury Community Bank Building conference room, on Route 5 next to Price Chopper. This is your chance to see how a Web site is created and to participate in deciding what will be on the NVMUG Internet site.
Phyllis wrote: Thought you might like to know I am just back from Newfoundland
where I was a speaker at Chapters book store and the St. John's Botanical Gardens besides touring the Avalon Peninsula. Should you ever listen to the CBC You might hear my little voice. Hope to make the Sept meeting. Phyllis hammond In this NVMUG eNews
1. Coming NVMUG Events From Midge
2. Macs in the Park and Raffle
3. Book Review: Mac OS In A Nutshell
4. A Good Experience at Ormsby’s
5. Jobs Announces New iBooks and OS X Public Beta
6. Clean-Install Assistant 1.5
7. Other Items
1. Coming NVMUG Events From Midge
Hi nvmugers Happy September,
The summer is over, the leaves are beginning to change and it's time to get inside and start playing with your computer again. So, we
have persuaded Stephen Farber to help begin to build our website. We have gone long enough without one and it should be fun. Please bring
any ideas you have about things you would like to see on it. In addition to the newsletter, we should have a place where you can advertise computers and software for sale, reviews of software if we get demo software from various companies. And so on, so bring ideas and bring yourselves, noon at the Community National Bank in St.Johnsbury.
I have just spoken to Scott Pelok, former President, and he will be here in St. Johnsbury for the Thanksgiving holiday. He would be happy to give a talk on Saturday, November 25th. That will mean postponing the meeting for one week, but it will definitely be worth it. He is talking about bringing a surprise item to demonstrate and is excited to see everyone again.
He is also the proud owner of a cable modem and an Airport or two so he and Geri can use their laptops anywhere in the house. Okay everyone stop drooling, I'm sure that Charter Communications will be installing them in this area very soon.
Hope to see you all on Saturday.
Midge Lubot
President NVMUG 2. Macs in the Park and Raffle
We are holding a raffle as part of Macs in the Park. The raffle will include the following software from Adobe (1 each):
Adobe Photoshop 5.5
Adobe GoLive 5.0
Adobe LiveMotion 1.0
Adobe Acrobat 4.0
Adobe Illustrator 9.0
and five books from O’Reilly:
AppleWorks 6: The Missing Manual LIst Price $19.95
Imovie: The Missing Manual List Price $19.95
Mac OS 9: The Missing Manual List Price $19.95
Mac OS in a Nutshell List Price $24.95
Crossing Platforms: A Macintosh / Windows $29.95
You can buy tickets by mail. The tickets are $1.00 each. Order them from our treasurer,
Richard Lubot, 53 Mooney Rd., St. Johnsbury, VT 05819
Be sure to include a stamped addressed return envelope and make the check out to NVMUG. Or you can buy them from Midge, at our meeting on Saturday, or at Macs in the Park.
Macs in the Park is a lawn sale sponsored by three Vermont Macintosh user groups, MacChamp in Burlington, Wired Women in Burlington, and NVMUG are sponsoring the Macintosh garage/lawn sale Saturday, September 30, City Hall Park, Burlington. (The Stowe Macintosh users decided not to participate.) Reserve the date. Plan to bring Macintosh related goods to the sale, and to look for bargains. A part of the proceeds from each sale will go to support the member Macintosh clubs. There will be a table on Church Street selling raffle tickets and guiding people to the park. I will be there and I hope you will too.
3. Book Review: Mac OS In A Nutshell
Mac OS in a Nutshell: A Power User’s Quick Reference
by Rita Lewis with Bill Fiishman, O’Reilly publishers, June 2000
This program is intended for power users, but written in language for beginners.
For example this wording on page 1 should be clear to the beginner: “The Mac design is based upon the concept of ‘select and then do.’ You point to an object on the screen and then command the computer to do something with it.” and, “Macintosh programs share many features. This is the reason starting to work on the Mac is easy: if you learn something in one program, you’ll probably be able to use what you learned in other programs.”
And, this information on page 5 may be news to power users: “The Command key has the effect of contradicting the grid setting in the View Options window. In other words, if the grid is set, Command-dragging lets you place an icon anywhere on a window. If the grid is not set, Command-dragging snaps the icon to a grid point.” Also, a tip on page 6, “Click an item in a window to select it, or use the Tab key or the arrow keys to move between items. For faster access, start typing a filename and the Finder will select the item whose name most closely matches what you typed.”
There are many references to Internet resources such as on page 20: “You can download custom icons from such sites as the
And, page 24: Packages of contextual menus are available as shareware and freeware for example from the Control-Click! web site.
It contains informative explanations, for example on page 57 there is one of the reasons for periodically rebuilding your desktop: “The Finder does not automatically clean out dead entries form the Desktop file. Over time, the database can get cluttered with invalid and retired file location information. All this data tends to slow down the performance of the Finder (since it takes longer to search the database every time a call is made to find a file).”
There are reference tables of information such as Table 3-1 Macintosh Operating System History from System/Finder 1 in January 1984 through Mac OS 9, October 1999, and Table 3-2 System Enablers by Mac Model from the Mac Plus to the iMac which includes most Macintosh models, but not the Performa 6400.
There is an interesting summary of Getting to Mac OS X and the steps Apple mapped out for the transition on pages 63-65.
This sampling should give you an idea of what is in the 396 pages of Mac OS in a Nutshell. The chapters are:
1. Using their Macintosh Interface
2. The Menu Bar
3. The System Finder, Mac OS, and Memory
4. Control Panels and Extensions
5. Files and Disks
6. Utilities
7. Accessories
8. AppleScript
9. Macintosh Runtime Java
10. Sherlock
11. Color Management
12. Fonts and Printing
13. Multimedia
14. Networking
15. The Internet
16. Inside the Mac OS
17. Plaintalk
18. The iMac
19. What’s New in Mac OS 9
Appendix A - Error Codes
Appendix B - Keyboard Shortcuts
Index
List Price $24.95. As an NVMUG member, you are eligible for a 20% discount. You can find more about these books and order them at http://www.oreilly.com
4. A Good Experience at Ormsby’s
I was going to get a lot done on Dona’s garden project, but the computer clock was off again. That usually means it needs a new battery. I opened up the computer, and could not tell how the battery was held down, and thought it looked like the battery connection was soldered. I called Ormsby’s, and Mark said to bring it down and he would put it the battery for me.
Dona and I went to Montpelier for a roll and coffee at La Brioche, then over to Ormsby’s. Mark was out for a sandwich. Mark was not gone long, and came back carrying his lunch. Before he ate, he let me watch as he installed the new battery. It just plugs in and is held in place with velcro! He tested the 4.5 volt RayOVac 840 computer clock battery, and it showed at 3.6 volts. Mark said he had seen worse. He checked to be sure my computer worked and reset the time. He charged $22.34 for the battery, and nothing for labor. 5. Jobs Announces New iBooks and OS X Public Beta
New iBooks
Before an overflow crowd at the Palais des Congrès hall, Jobs announced two New iBooks. One will only be available through the Apple Store on the Internet.
The new iBooks come in two standard configurations:
1. iBook, available in Indigo, and featuring a 366 MHz PowerPC G3 processor, with 64MB of SDRAM, 256K level 2 cache, a 10GB IDE hard drive, 24x-speed CD-ROM drive, USB and FireWire ports, a built-in 56K modem, 10/100BASE-T Ethernet and iMovie 2 for an estimated retail price of US$1,499;
2. iBook Special Edition, available in Graphite, features a 466 MHz PowerPC G3 processor, with 64MB of SDRAM, 256K level 2 cache, a 10GB IDE hard drive, 6x-speed DVD-ROM drive, USB and FireWire ports, a built-in 56K modem, 10/100BASE-T Ethernet and iMovie 2 for an estimated retail price of US$1,799.
OS X Public Beta
Saying it is the "future of the Mac," Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs announced at Apple Expo in Paris that Mac OS X public beta will be available immediately for $29.95 US through the Apple Online Store but that there will be no online download of the product.
"The point of OS X is to be simplified and be more powerful," Jobs said in his almost one hour keynote address. "Mac OS X now has the underpinnings of a super, robust product that is now super modern."
The new OS X public beta requires that you first have OS 9.04 and the recommended RAM is 128 megs. You might want to check the Apple site for other requirements. Support for the new beta will end when the full release is made “early in 2001.”
You might as well wait a few days to order. The site is now rather busy. 6. Clean-Install Assistant 1.5
or from Version Tracker. It is free for personal use. Version 1.5 is up to date for use with OS 9.04.
I have read that is a good idea to do a clean install of your operating system every six months to a year clean out any corruption that might have occurred, but it is a lot of work. In my case, I need to do it more often because of damage caused by a software conflict . Using Clean Install Assistant makes it easier.
What Clean Install Assistant does is to move everything out of your system folder that was not put in by Apple when you installed your operating system. After you do a clean install of your operating system you can then use Clean-Install Assistant to move all of this software into the new clean system folder.
Some people recommend that you take the time to reinstall all of this other software from original sources to clear out any problems it may have. This is more of a chore when you have programs that you have upgraded. You may still want to edit Clean-Install Assistant files to reinstall part of your old software that you do not want to reinstall form original sources. I am planning on using it because some of my software (not by Apple) is on my original Performa CD and installs when I install the original operating system and reinstalling the original system and then updating is a horrible job. 7. Other Items
Free Software
I saw this announcement in some e-mail newsletter:
MacDirectory has a nifty site for finding and downloading FREE software.
Search by category (graphics, fonts, business, etc.) or by name. The
site's uncluttered interface makes finding software fast and easy.
Bookmark this one.
Mac Champ had a preview of Office 2001 at their August meeting. It will be available about October 13. It contains new components and a host of new features available only on the Mac. The familiar staples of the office suite--Word, Excel, and
PowerPoint--have all been significantly improved; many Mac-only features have been added, and Microsoft has improved cross-functionality among them. Entourage, a promising new member of the Office family, has been added to the mix, offering email and personal information management.
Even if you don't have a new G4 Cube, you can still read the G4 Cube manual. Apple TIL article #50016 provides the link. Or you can go here for a complete selection of Apple manuals. MacFixIt 9/11/2000
