Northern Vermont Macintosh User Group
November 27, 2000 Scott and Gerry Pelok and Mac OS X
NVMUG Meeting
12 Noon - 2 PM
Saturday, November 25, 2000
Community Bank Building, St. Johnsbury
We had a good crowd to welcome Scott and Gerry Pelok back to lead our meeting. Anticipation was high at the start of the meeting, and enthusiasm was even higher at the end. Read all about it.
There will be no meeting in December. Midge has a copy of Quicken and will see if she can prepare a presentation for the January meeting. There will be door prizes at the January meeting.
In this NVMUG eNews
1. Scott Pelok Presents Mac OS X
2. January Meeting
3. Selecting a Long Distance Carrier
4. Apple FAX and AppleWorks 6
5. Stephen Farber message
6. Anniversary Issue 1. Scott Pelok Presents Mac OS X
Scott and Gerry brought their PowerBooks and a projector to the meeting. Gail brought a PowerBook and her Macs In The Park iMovie.
Scot said there are a lot of things built into OS X, and it takes a different mind set to work with it. It is in beta form now, and it is definitely not recommended that you install it in the machine you use for production. Scott has his OX X in a separate partition to help protect the rest of his hard drive. The big name developers like Adobe, Microsoft, and Cassidy & Green will have applications ready when OS X is released.
The Dock replaces the Launcher. It holds the trash can, system and desktop preferences, applications, documents, and anything else you are working with. It can be modified to expand as the cursor passes over it or not; to disappear until the cursor passes over it, and to change it’s size. You may have seen pictures of the Dock in magazines, but it is much more dramatic on screen.
Only one window shows at a time, unless you Option Click to create another one. Gerry says this is not difficult to get used to. The window has three optional views, the icon and list views that we are used to, and a columns view. The columns view has the top folders or items listed in the left column, and when you click on a folder it opens another column to the right to display its folders and items. As you repeat this process creating more columns and getting deeper into the folders the path you took to get there is highlighted in the earlier columns on the left.
Apple people are saying that you will need Mac OS 9 within two years because anything below OS 9 will not work with the new programs that will be coming out. Mac OS 8.6 with CarbonLib installed runs the Carbon version of AppleWorks 6.04, but OS 8.6 may or may not work when OS X is installed.
The beta version of Mac OS X slows it down sometimes as when using Internet Explorer.
His dental school requires that people use the latest browsers with the latest versions of Java, etc. Internet Explorer must be 4.0 or later, and Netscape 4.5 or later. Scott says don’t bother with Netscape 6, at least not now. He uses web objects to draw the web page and put the data up on it.
Scott showed Gail’s iMovie, Macs In The Park. It ran better when he loaded it on his hard drive instead of running from the CD. He ran it filling a QuickTiime window, then within a column. When it was pulled down into the Dock, the sound continued to run but the picture no longer changed. Gail had made a cute movie of the event. She even came over to Church Street to photograph us directing people to the park. She also included us saying something like “I want one,” and herself with the ending. She said it was fun to edit with iMovie.
Mac OS X forces you to organize your work. You have to work to get around it. I saw major folders for Applications, Docks, Users, Favorites, Home, and Computer (if I have that right). In OS 9 you may use a password to protect your files. In OS X you must use a password when you start to use your computer. Mac OS X is designed for multiple users.
Scott and Gerry work with a very good Apple representative who gives them useful advice. He says he would not recommend that people go out and buy OS X for production use for another 18 to 24 months. Scott estimates that the finished version of OS X may become available by the middle of 2001. But many of the new and converted software programs to use it may have bugs. The exception would be if it comes with your new computer.
When OS X is running, OS 9 runs on top of it, so if you crash OS 9, Mac OS X still keeps running.
Mac OS X beta works with OS 9.0 and up. The Mac OS X Server worked with OS 8.6 with CarbonLib added, but Apple is withdrawing OS X Server from the market because the Apache Web Server is built into OS X itself.
Mac OS X is a graphics system layered over a BSP (Berkeley School of Design) Unix System. Scott with three clicks brought up the Terminal folder and the base UNIX system. He says the Linux System used by the dental school at the University of Michigan where he works is not very different, so it helped him to learn Unix. But, Scott does not recommend going there if you do not know what you are doing because it gives you unlimited ways to screw it up. At the same time, its open source code gives programmers unlimited room for development.
Mac OS X has a built in mailer capable of handling multiple users with separate mail boxes. Scott is using Microsoft Office 2001’s Entourage now, and while he checks his e-mail, he doesn’t download it until he is on his home system. It is too easy to lose mail otherwise.
Sherlock works about the same in OS X as in OS 9.
Scott demonstrated the built in OS X MP3 player. It appears to use QuickTime, and sounded fine. Scott and Gerry have been staying with Midge and Richard, and they have been having fun copying Midge’s MP3 files.
Every window in OS X has its own internal finder. So, when you leave a window to work on something else you do not have to respond to a “do you want to save now” dialogue. But, of course, you have to respond before you turn your computer off.
Every application has its own preferences. Preferences in the Dock and Desktop determine where the application appears on the desktop, where it is stored, etc.
Carbon programs are Macintosh programs converted to work with OS X with multitasking and memory protection. Cocoa programs are brand new programs written to run under OS X. Classic programs run in OS 9 and cannot take advantage of OS X features such as multitasking and memory protection.
Mac Word 2001 is a Carbon program. It crashed, but OS 9 was protected and continued to run.
Mac OS X has its advantages. IT is like their Linux server’s graphic interface. Using the column view has its advantages because you never lose track of where you are. Gerry says it is easy to get used to Option Clicking to open another window.
Apple has promised that they will not put out the new version until it is done, unlike Windows. Right now it has bugs, and it does not have drivers for USB devices, printers, etc.
With Mac OS X graphics software you will move between programs with drag and drop, or point and click Graphics users, particularly movie makers, cannot wait.
Scott ended that part of the program by holding the option key down to reboot into OS 9. It is difficult to believe that even Scott could put together such a good program when he has only had Mac OS X since last Tuesday.
Scott said the graphics tablet, pen, and wireless mouse was a Christmas Present. It lists for $99, but may be available for as little as $69 at Comp USA or Circuit City.
The Wacom Graphire mouse has three buttons: the left one to click the mouse, the middle one to click instead of double click, and the right one opens a contextual menu like a Control Click. It works with the mouse pad size graphics tablet. The pen is pressure sensitive. The harder you press the stronger the color becomes. The other end of the pen is an eraser.
The Wacom graphics tablet comes with programs like Photoshop Light, and Painter Classic. Scott set up a demonstration with Painter 5.5.
Gerry said that PhotoShop with the graphics tablet is a wonderful tool to use once you get past the learning curve. Photoshop is used with a photograph to start with. Painter and Illustrator are used to create an image from scratch.
Berry Hayes used the pen to fill the screen with different Painter images including flowers, leaves, and Mediterranean villas. The pen can be set to use one image or to use random variations of the image. Barry knew to look for the images in the Image House, but it took awhile to find the Image House among the huge palette of tools.
Then Scott had Phyllis use the pen to draw. The pen set to a brush that drew random grass plants. Phyllis could not believe she had done that. Then Scott set it to a normal pen, and Phyllis drew her own grass plants.
Scott and Gerry both work at the University of Michigan. Scott works as a dentist just one day a week. The rest of the time he creates interactive QuickTime movies using QuickTime, Flash, and Go Live for the dental college. He creates them with slides synced with videos, with a menu which students can use to select what they need to watch. He demonstrated one which had five windows showing different things including movie clips and a menu for the user. Their online presentation might have a live movie, an instructor talking, and a chat room asking questions and discussing what is happening.
With Airport they can run their own QuickTime Server and take their camera into the classroom with a PowerBook.
A broad band connection such as cable, DSL or WAN is required with in the school for this kind of stuff. (Imagine how quickly Midge could download MP3 music with a connection like that!)
Scott also uses AppleScript to convert PowerPoint presentations into JPEG and to a server to webcast. The service is far ahead of the public, but they try to design tit so that the only thing the user has to do is to turn the browser on. They broadcast up to four channels at a time through their server.
Gerry does similar work, but not for the dental college. Scott did not show her work because it involves operations on the body.
At home Scott and Gerry have made their PowerBooks truly portable. They are not tied down by wires. They use Airport for a wireless hook up to a high speed Internet connection. They can also be on the telephone at the same time. 2. January Meeting
If all goes well, Midge will present Quicken, the most popular check writing, bookkeeping, and financial management program for the home.
She plans bring door prizes: the QuicKeys program and Mac OS 9: The Missing Manual. 3. Selecting a Long Distance Carrier
We are using Sprint for long distance telephone calls intrastate and interstate, but it has become to expensive, in part because we have changed the number of long distance calls we make each month. We used Sherlock to look for information about telephone companies and found a web page that might interest other people
http://www.abelltolls.com
where you can find telephone information for consumers, and comparison of rates by different companies. Once you find companies you are interested in, you can click More Details to learn more about them and their rates. We needed more information about a company than this, and e-mailed questions to ABellTolls. They responded later the same day. As a final check we called the Vermont Public Service Office, and they gave us Consumer Affairs. Consumer Affairs had not heard of the “dial around” company we were interested in, and would welcome a call from us if we have any problems.
Once you find a telephone company you would like to change to, ABellTolls would like you to use their web page to contact the company to make the change over. That is how ABellTolls gets their financing. They tell which are “cooperating companies” and which have not provided information but are not sponsors, but that does not affect the information they provide.
We found a dial around company which will require that we dial the toll free number they send us when we call long distance. Their per minute rates are low, their is no monthly service charge, and their is no minimum monthly bill.
I don’t know if will recommend the new company because we just sent the form to sign up, but if you are thinking about changing companies to save money, ABellTolls is the place to connect to for information. 4. Apple Fax and Appleworks 6
AppleWorks 6 apparently does not work with Apple FAX.
I down Ioaded the order form I found through ABellTolls and printed it. After we filled out the form, I scanned it in at 300 dpi. Then I inserted into an AppleWorks 6 word processing document and printed it. When I tried to send the form as a FAX, a dialog came up saying there was not enough memory for this operation. So I rescanned the form at 150 dpi. l still got the same message. However, when I saved this second form as an AppleWorks 5 document, and tried to fax it from AppleWorks 5 there was no error message.
I can check to see if Apple has produced an update of this old program for AppleWorks 6, but I doubt if they have. 5. Stephen Farber Message
Stephen sent his regrets at not being able to attend the meeting because he would be in Connecticut. He also sent a Happy Thanksgiving in large bold text. It was probably an HTML message which my e-mail program interpreted. But, Stephen, if you have a way to send large bold lettering in a regular e-mail, please tell me how you do it. 6. Anniversary Issue
We have been publishing NVMUG eNews for a year now, so this it the first Anniversary Issue. A year ago we were hoping Scott would be at our meeting. We are glad that he finally made it and had no problems this time.
Thank you for continuing to read this, and if you would like to tell us about things that you find work, or don’t , to make your Mac more fun or more useful, please send us a note.
