NVMUG eNews 10/20/2001
Last updated 10/22/2001
Macintosh Basics
The planned presentation by Bill Amos has been postponed until Spring. So we organized a discussion on MacIntosh Basics. The next time we try this we will have to give more notice, and make sure our less experienced users can be there so that there will be more people to ask questions.
2. Other Basics from Mac OS 9: The Missing Manual
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1. Meeting Notes, Some Basics
Before the discussion of Macintosh basics, Warren showed us the beautiful calendar he is creating. It will have twelve of his digital photographs of wildflowers in Vermont, a brief narrative about each wildflower, and the calendar for the month, all very nicely done. The raw materials for the calendar will cost about $11.50, not counting Warren's time. But for about $20 it would be an inexpensive way for a person to obtain the pictures suitable for framing. Warren says that this year he expects them to be mostly for gifts.
Warren has experimented with selling his Vermont wildflower pictures at a few craft fairs. He has sold some framed, and some only with mats. With each picture he prints the name of the wildflower and where the picture was taken. He has learned that most people have limited display space, so that when they buy a picture it has to be good enough to replace something else.
We had had a request for a meeting on the basics, and I had just finished readingMac OS 9: The Missing Manual
by David Pogue. This is a book that I have been recommending for new Macintosh users because David Pogue is may favorite Macintosh book writer. I believe it may be the best book for anyone interested in mastering Mac OS 9, but I doubt if it is the best first book for a new Macintosh user. It is probably a bit much for a beginner to absorb, making it more difficult than necessary. It may be better to get a simpler iMac book to start.
At The Village Book Store in Littleton, I saw three books about iBooks that looked pretty good.
One is The Little iMac Book
by Robin Williams, Peachpit Press, $18. Robin Williams became famous years ago when she wrote The Mac Is Not A Typewriter.
I am pretty sure that the book will be easy to read and understand. She uses AppleWorks in her demonstrations of how most word processing, painting, drawing, and database programs work on an iMac.
Another book is The iMac for Dummies, 2nd Edition,
by David Pogue. I do not like the concept of buying a book for dummies, but David Pogue is my favorite computer book writer, so I am sure this one is also good. It is $20, and is a little larger than The Little Imac Book.
David also uses AppleWorks as a place to start when understanding iMac applications.
The third book is the largest of the three, How To Do Everything With Your iBook
by Todd Stauffer from Osborne for $25. This one gives you the most pages, and possibly the most information, for our money. Again, it recommends AppleWorks as the place to start learning to use applications, and then going on to something else if you have a should reason to do so.
I cannot guarantee how long all three books will be on their shelves, but right now you have a chance to look at all of them and decide which one or ones you want.
So, when our planned program did not materialize, I suggested the meeting on Macintosh basics and Midge agreed. Midge brought Mac OS 9: The Missing Manual
and one of the Macintosh for Dummies books to the meeting.
Sidney, said that iMac for Dummies
was very helpful, and that Internet for Dummies
was also helpful. He also has
AppleWorks 6: The Missing Manual
which he uses.
I brought The Mac Is Not a Typewriter,
which Warren called an early book on typography, and The Little System 7.1
book to remind experienced people that there was probably less to learn when we started. I also brought MacWorld's Macintosh Secrets
which Scott Pelok has recommended some years ago as the almost indispensable Macintosh reference.
It is amazing how we all have out Macs set up, customized, differently. No one way to do things on a Macintosh is the One Right Way. For example, I mentioned a woman who almost always used Recent Applications and Recent Documents under the Apple Menu to find and select the programs or documents she wants to work with.
Warren said that he did the same thing until the number of documents became to large. Someone said that Stephen told him that using the Recent Documents and Applications slows down the computer, but Warren said that many Macs are so fast that doesn't make any difference.
Warren now uses a folder with aliases which he has dragged to the bottom of his screen making it into a pop-up window. Warren keeps an alias of Photoshop in this pop-up window. His camera loads images into a Nikon image viewer folder. Warren drags an image from this folder onto his Photoshop alias in the pop-up folder to open Photoshop and load this image.
I also have a pop-up folder with aliases that I drag documents onto such as MacLinkPlus to translate, GraphicConverter, and Stuffit Expander. I also have an alias for Apple Menu Items to make it easy to put things in the Apple Menu or to take them out.
Midge has a Help folder that she uses for tools such as CanOpener.
I use the Launcher which I have set up into different partitions to organize my applications that I use the most. Now that I have more memory, I also drag down the Applications (upper right corner of the screen) which becomes an Applications Pallet making it easy to drag an item to open it in AppleWorks or Photoshop Lite, and to switch between programs with one click.
Warren has an Archive folder where he puts stuff that he does not want to trash yet. He only puts things in the trash that he wants to get rid of, and he empties it before he shuts down. I have an Active folder for documents that I am using, a folder for documents to be archived, and an archived documents folder for documents that have been indexed and backed up. Midge has her computer set up to archive documents times days a week.
Warren brought up one advantage of film. An original slide or negative can be admitted as evidence. A digital image is to easy to alter.
Midge said she keeps getting Type 2 error messages. I think that the most common remedy is to allocate more memory to the program. There is a useful keyboard short cut, OpenApple-I, for Get Info under the File menu.
Another useful short-cut from Mac OS 9: The Missing Manual
is OpenApple-W which closes the front window on your screen. Warren said, the more I use Mac, the more I like keyboard short-cut. I the Windows environment you can set up almost any keyboard shortcuts you want, so many programs use different shortcuts for the same action. In the Macintosh, the shortcuts are generally the same from one program to another.
If you have a problem that you think could possibly be a conflict, use Extensions Manager to set your computer to the Base setting and restart. If the problem goes away, you have a conflict in one of the extensions that is not in the base, and if it does not go away, your problem is not an extension conflict. You can then use Conflict Catcher of Extension Manager to set applications active until you find the conflict.
We also discussed contextual menus, control-click. Control-click also works within some programs, such a AppleWorks where it brings up a menu to select such things as spell checking.
And we discussed Sherlock. You click the Edit button on Sherlock window to get More Search Options. Then you can drag an icon on top of the More Search Options window, and Sherlock fills in all of the blanks describing the the file, size, kind, label, type code, etc. The creator code for a program and the documents it creates are identical. Then you can turn on the check boxes for the criteria you want to search for.
When we left, Richard was going to write a letter to Small Dog about a brand name rebuilt CD-RW burner that did not workk..
Other Basics From Mac OS 9: The Missing Manual
Mac OS 9: The Missing Manual
has many ways to use your Macintosh that you might otherwise overlook.
Control-click to get contextual menus to help you do many different things. For example:
Control click a document icon then select Find similar files then Sherlock searches indexed files
Control click a folder and choose Index selection and Sherlock indexes the folder
Control click the desktop and select Change desktop background.
One of the most useful and inexpensive backup schemes: When you have finished work on a document you want backed up, control-click it and apply a label called, for example, Backup. At the end of each day, use Sherlock to round up all the files with the Backup label and drag them as a group onto your backup disk. Then unlabel them by choosing File -> Label -> None.
Mac OS 9: The Missing Manual
contains a wealth of keyboard commands for a variety of actions. For example:
Select the folder next to the title on top of a window, the click OpenApple to display a hierarchy menu, and chose a name of a displayed folder to go to it.
Press OpenApple drag a partially covered folder to move it without bringing it forward.
Highlight an icon, then press OpenApple and Delete to toss it into the trash without having to drag it. OpenApple - Shift - Delete empties the trash.
And, of course highlighting an icon and pressing OpenApple - m makes an alias. You can also make alias by OpenApple-Option dragging it out of its window or by OpenApple-dragging it out of the Sherlock window.
Check in Mac OS 9: The Missing Manual,
or click on your Finder application and look in your Help Menu - Mac Help to see all of the amazing things you can do with Sherlock and Sherlock II.
For example: double-click on any found folder to open it, drag a found item to move or delete the file or use any of the commands in the file menu.
Control click a found file for Find Similar Files using fuzzy logic.
That is just a sample of what you will find in Mac OS 9: The Missing Manual.
Right now the book is available through Amazon.com for 30% off the regular price of $19.95.
Hodge Podge
According to Garr Reynolds, Program Manager for Worldwide User Group Relations at Apple the following operating system CD's are available through the Apple Store:
9.1 CD8.1 CD
7.6.1 CD
7.5.3 Disk Set
They can only be order by calling the Apple Store at 800- MYAPPLE (800-692-7753).
I joined my first on-line chat on World Without Borders featuring Scott Pelok and Geri Durka-Pelok.
Scott says they are getting away from show and tell, and a prize. They are going to focus groups dealing with topics such as web design, basics, graphics. Scott leads the MacTechnics in Michigan which has 75 members. That is enough so they can have special interest groups.
http://www.mactechnics.org/funstuff.htm
Gail Murphy Glore asked most of the questions. Scott and Geri answered. It was all very slow.
Most new members are nubies with iMacs.
I received a noticed from Amazon.com that I could save 30% by ordering Mac OS X: The Missing Manual
which would be available October 1. I checked on David Pogue's web page and he said, I'm hard at work on Mac OS X: The Missing Manual,
but it won't be available until late November, with full coverage of Mac OS X 10.1.
