NVMUG eNews 12/29/2001
Last updated 1/02/2002
Scott Pelok demonstrated the new iPod
Scott Pelok and Geri Durka-Pelok came back here from Michigan to visit, and Scott demonstrated his new iPod. Gail (Murphy) Glore attended, and wrote an Apple User Group report complete with pictures which you can see at:
NVMUG Summit Report by by Gail (Murphy) Glore.
GEER Sound and Communications, Barry L. Waldner, Sales Manager, loaned us the projector for used in Scott's presentation. Their home office is at 42 Pinewood Drive, St. Johnsbury. Their phone number is 802/748-0110. His email is:
bwaldner@geersound.com.
Their web page is:
http://www.geersound.com
1. Scott Pelok Presents iPod, and answers questions
For those of you who do not know, Scott used to be our famous NVMUG leader and a dentist in St. Johnsbury. Since then Scott has moved up, and his fame has grown.
Scott, Director of Instructional Computing at the University of Michigan dental school says students need access to their computer information and training material which includes very confidential information. The Dental School has some sophisticated programs and database information to meet these needs.
The school would like every student to have access to this information through their own computer or terminal. The students also need computers for their other studies. One solution would be for the students to each buy a terminal and a computer, or two different computers so they could never get the confidential information mixed in with their own information.
Scott and his programmer have a found a better answer. Of course it will only run on a Macintosh PowerBook or iBook. Apple education is interested because there are five other dental schools currently using this system and another 24 looking at purchasing the system. For Apple this potential could mean 3000 powerbook sales annually in the dental health field alone.
The University of Michigan Dental School has not converted to Macintosh OS X yet. They would like to convert because of the Mac OS X security and regulatory features, but they are waiting for other software they use, like PhotoShop, to catch up.
They won a Smithsonian award for their multimedia support of education, in addition, Scott won the Apple Distinguished Educator award which was accompanied by a developer's discount from Apple.
For 17 years, Geri has been trying to surprise Scott for Christmas with a gift that he did not know about. Somehow Scott has always found out what it was before Christmas. This year Geri bought Scott an iPod. Just after she bought it, Scott received an offer from Apple for an iPod for $199. He told Geri, and she had to send the one she bought back to get the savings of $200. Scott's record remains unbroken.
Scott brought his iPod to demonstrate. It is well designed, little, flat, would fit in just about any pocket. The little ear phones with it give good sound. Apple sells an upgrade set of earphones for $20. They also sell a cable to hook up to play music through your stereo system.
Scott was prepared to demonstrate the iPod connected to his Titanium Power Book under OS 9.2 because he did not have the latest iTunes update for Mac OS X. Gail had her Power Book along with the latest iTunes update. So, Scott demonstrated by connecting his iPod to Gail's computer. The iPod updated itself before Scott had a chance to show us. So he loaded about 32 minutes of music in about three seconds.
The iPod is a cute little miniature hard drive that will play MP3 music. Plug it in and it works. It has a rechargeable battery. A new neat little Power Book charger comes with it. It is supposed to play for ten hours. Scott listened to it all the way on the drive here by car from Michigan.
Scott demonstrated creating three play lists for different kinds of music. He showed how you can move files in or out of the playlist on your computer, and when you connect the iPod it quickly updates itself.
An iPod can be set to automatically launch iTunes. There are about a half dozen such options that can be set, including using the iPod as a fast miniature hard drive. When used as a hard drive, the iTunes that are on the iPod are in invisible files.
Tunes can be selected from a menu by playlist, artist, song, or about. You turn a wheel to roll through the list of songs to select, and click a play button. There is a pause or stop, fast forward, fast rewind or back, and a button to go back to the beginning of a song. A dial turns the volume up or down.
Scott passed his iPod around so people could try it. I had forgotten the instructions by the time it got to me, but I was still able to play a tune and adjust the sound.
When you press the start button, the iPod hard drive runs for a few seconds until it has stored 20 minutes of sound in its RAM cache. There is about 256 megs of RAM just for music. Most of the time the iPod plays music from the cache and the hard drive is not running. That is why the battery lasts for 10 hours, and why you never hear skips in the music when the iPod is jiggled.
Whether you need an iPod or not, it is difficult not to want one when you see a demonstration.
Gail brought the new Microsoft Office for OS X. It opened with the Project Gallery which looked very good on the screen. Most of the menus appear to be about the same as in OS 9, but the graphics are better.
The topic quickly changed when Gail said she is more into FileMaker Pro 5.5 because databases are her job. She bought a plug in so that she can send direct e-mail from within her database. She says you never have to leave FileMaker because you can do anything within FileMaker Pro.
Scott uses FileMaker Pro 5.5 for online databases, such as an oral pathology database. They use it to put 150,000 slides on the web.
They used to have the database on the same computer as the web server. He said NT crashed at least every 60 days if they did not reboot it. But, when you have your web server doing a great many things at once, it crashes often.
They changed to using a machine only as a web server in August 1999, and added a second machine used only as a server after that. They have only gone down twice since having the web servers only doing web serving. (Scott said that Mac OS X Server is actually Linux Appache.)
Scott has FileMaker Pro 5.5 and his databases in a different room on another computer. It is BSD Unix compliant for true multithread tasking. (I just take notes, I do not necessarily understand it.) From Scott- BSD Unix allows the computer to actually perform more that one function at a time. In the current system you can have another program running in the background, but the computer waits until you are not using the program in the front to run the program in the background. With true multitasking, all programs will run simultaneously.
Lasso software, Blue World Technology, is a programmer interface which goes between FileMaker on its database server and the web on its web server. Using Lasso you can create a web page that enables you to input data, and put that data into a FileMaker database. The web approach codes the page in XML, using the Lasso interface to put the data into FileMaker, get data from FileMaker, and put it into the output web page. Lasso would cost a school about $499.
TeraMedia will be at Macworld with synchronous bidirectional video conferencing with full screen display at 30 frames a second, and only a 30 microsecond delay between speech and lips (small enough to be difficult to discern). It will run over a TI cable connection. Students can react and talk back and forth at the same time, and click on the same white board from remote locations. Amazing communications technology is coming.
Two Macintosh computers can be connected with a simple Firewire cable. Scott attempted to connect two PowerBooks using OS 9, and the OS X, and then a PowerBook with OS X and an iBook with OS X. Either the command he was using, a restart holding down the F key, or maybe the Firewire cable from his iPod may have been the problem. He will send me e-mail when he knows what was wrong. Scott has his the 20 gig hard drive in his TI PowerBook partitioned into three drives so he can boot in OS X or OS 9, in Unix, or in Virtual PC for Windows. Scott has been beta testing Virtual PC.
Gail never leaves Mac OS X now, except that no browser gets World Without Borders in Mac OS X. She is studying Terminal basics, and has UNIX for Dummies, but doesn't want to get into root (where you can really get into trouble), on into admin (which is more like applications or utilities)
2. Sources of Mac OS X Information
There are a number of sources of Mac OS X information on the Internet. One good one that I recommended last month is:
Among other things you will find there is The Max OS X Solutions Guidebook,
$10 shareware by rob griff. He is asking for shareware income because the guidebook is now 75 pages long, (it has grown) and to help him keep the macosxhints web page going.
Gail (Murphy) Glore said her scanner does not work in Mac OS X. For this problem, MaC OS X Solutions Guidebook
recommends VueScan, a $40 shareware package from Hamrick Software
http://www.hamrick.com/vsm.html
I downloaded the demo of this software and it works fine, but it puts cross lines over the image until you register it and pay the shareware fee. $40 is cheaper than buying a new scanner. However, may Epson scanner works in Classic mode, so I can wait until Epson creates the promised Mac OS X version.
Mac OS X: The Missing Manual
by David Pogue is now for sale. I have requested a copy, but while waiting for it there is a chapter on Organizing Your Stuff, the Mac OS X Folder structure. This chapter is available free at
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/macosxmm/chapter/index.html
And information about
http://www.reillynet.com/put/a/mac/2001/12/14/terminal_one.htm
3. RagTime Solo for OS 8.6 - OS 9
If you did not see this on MacCentral, Rag Time Solo now available free for non-commercial use. The main difference from the commercial version is a startup window that asks the user to acknowledge that RagTime Solo may not be employed for commercial use. The company says there are over 250,000 worldwide users of the the only business publishing application that allows users to create spreadsheets; annual reports; generate catalogues and price lists; perform calculations; and display them in graphical form using one program.
To download it, go to
http://www.ragtime-online.com/
