NVMUG eNews 9/21//2002
Last updated 10/20/2002
Warren Walker's Nikon Coolpix 4500
and Stephen Farber's Jaguar Report
Stepen Farber received Jaguar from Apple, and he managed to install it on an earlier Macintosh. He sent us his impression so far.
Warren Walker has a new Nikon Coolpix 4500 digitall camera, and showed it to us.
O'Reilly publishing donated five Macintosh books. We distributed two, loaned out one, and have three that we can distribute at another meeting. All this and more.
1. Warren Walker's Nikon Coolpix 4500 and more
There was already a lively discussion going when I got to the meeting. Tom Cudihy and Phyllis Hammond were asking questions, and almost everyone else was competing to provide or add to the answers.
Adobe's PhotoShop is overkill for most people. Adobe Elements II
is designed to be easier to learn. Warren said that red eye removal is much simpler in Elements II, and he was not sure that he really needed PhotoShop. We agreed that Phyllis might be better off having Adobe Elements II,
maybe she should downgrade to upgrade. We suggested that she telephone her order into Adobe, and tell them that she already has an Adobe product. They will look it up on their computer and tell her what products she has. Then they will give her $30 off of the listed $100 price.
Warren said there are more photo editing programs with OS X, including one Unix program that used menus for the tools instead of a toolbox.
Warren takes and sells digital pictures of Vermont wild flowers. He described the reasons why he selected the Nikon Coolpix 4500.
First, when you zoom in or out on this Nikon, the movement of the lens is all within the camera. This is important when you want to attach an auxiliary lens. It also is important in extreme close ups when you want to keep the lens the same distance from the object while you change the focal length. The camera's lens will focus as close as two centimeters.
Second, the camera lens swivels so that it can point in a different direction than the viewing screen. He can hold the camera near the ground pointed horizontally at a small flower, and can look down at the display to compose the picture instead of trying to get his eye down to ground level. He can see the flower from different directions by looking at the viewing screen while moving the camera and lens instead of moving himself and stepping on flowers. With the Nikon Coolpix 4500 you can turn the lens 180 degrees to look at your self in the LCD display while taking a picture of your face. I hope you would't do that too often.
Third, you can control the way the camera takes the picture. You can select the shutter speed and the aperture. You can select the shutter speed for an action picture, and let the camera select the aperture. Or, you can select the aperture to get more depth of field and let the camera determine the shutter speed. There are 16 preset settings that you can dial to take different kinds of pictures from fireworks to portraits to sunsets. There is even a setting for museum pictures without flash. You can also set up and save up to three preset settings of your own.
When you rotate the mode button, these preset settings are displayed on the LCD, liquid crystal display, screen. They can be very difficult to read in some light. Warren says he may have to get a monitor hood for the camera.
The automatic focus on most cameras uses the center of the picture. You point your camera so it will focus on a flower in the middle of the screen, and then hold the focus while you move the camera so that the flower will not be in the middle of the picture. With the Nikon 4500 you have a miniature joystick to use to move the focal point from the center of the screen to focus on a flower wherever you want it to be for your picture.
Fourth, the reason why Warren was thinking of changing cameras in the first place was to have a camera with a higher number of pixels so that he could crop his pictures after he takes them and still be able to get quality prints large enough for calendars or to hang on the wall. With a pixel total of 4 MB, the Nikon 4500 fits his needs. That is large enough for a high quality 11 x 14 inch print.
The Coolpix 4500 is noticeably smaller and lighter than earllier high end digital Nikons. It saves to a Compact Flash card, and uses a proprietory battery. The list price is $700.
One question was what do you need to do to make a quality print. Warren said that first you have to start with a quality picture. You cannot produce a quality print if you do not start with a quality picture. JPEG pictures use 8 x 8 pixel blocks to compress images which can affect the quality of the print. Adding a slight blur when editing can sometimes improve a print from a JPEG photo. In some cases it may look like it is printed on canvas.
High quality photo paper makes a big difference. Low cost printers can produce quality pictures, but that does not mean that some higher cost printers cannot produce higher quality prints. Warren uses a six color printer which gives better flesh tones than four color printers can.
Warren said that books recommend 300 dpi for printing, but 150 dpi, dots per inch, still looks very good. The smallest the human eye can see is about a 0.004 inch black dot on a white background. 300 dpi is about a 0.003 inch.
2. Thanks to O'Reilly
I bought iPhoto: The Missing Manual,
$24.95 list, and wrote a review. I sent the review into a listing that other newsletters use for content. Then I wrote to O'Reilly Associates and ask if they would send me a copy of iPhoto: The Missing Manual
for distribution to NVMUG. They sent me five Macintosh books for NVMUG at no cost.
Tom Cuddihy was asking questions about iPhoto. I answered some, and showed him the book. He was enthused enough about the book that we decided he should have it.
I showed Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual,
$29.95 list. Geof Gonter became very excited, he really wanted it. So Geof got Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual.
This book covers the four programs in Office X: Word, Excel, Power Point, and Entourage.
Phyllis wanted to know if she needed Office X. We assured her that she did not. She has AppleWorks which can do all most users ever need to do. But, that said, Office X is right for some people first because Office is used so many people, and some things such as Power Point presentations do not convert to AppleWorks like Word and Excel programs do.
Geof told about people where he works who use computers with Intel processors. He asks him to give them the data because he can so easily accomplish what they want, but they won't believe him and give him a chance. But back to the books from O'Reilly.
Geof thought he probably also wanted Learning Unix for Mac OS X,
$19.95 list. But, it is possible the Stephen Farber would also be interested in it. So we loaned the book to Geof until the next meeting. I tried reading this book. It looked like a great way for Mac folks to begin to learn Unix, but it was not something I wanted to get into.
We thought that Moc OS X Pocket Reference
, $12.95 list, might also be something Stephen would be interested in. I will bring it back to our next meeting to see if anyone is really enthused about a pocket reference that goes well with Mac OS X: The Missing Manual.
iMovie 2: The Missing Manual,
$19.95 list, is for movies what iPhoto is for photographs, maybe even more so. I am pretty sure someone, possibly connected with education, asked whether we have people interested in iMovies. Anyway, I will bring it to the next meeting to see who needs or wants it the most.
To learn more about these books, go to
http://www.mac.oreilly.com
or
http://www.oreilly.com
As an NVMUG member, you are elegable for a 20% discount on O'Reilly books.
3. Sephen Farber's Jag Wire Report and More
Stephen wrote:
Initial report for the Jag Trial:
Install procedure is very long; With my aged equipment it took longer that one and a half hours to digest the two install CDs. Even though I specified a Minimal Install (no extra language support-- I can't read Farsi or Mandrian anyway) on a separate partition, it still took more than 2 Gigs of space to hold it all. I can pare it down more now, but just as previous MOS installers, it politely asks what features you wish. The Applications, all new and beautiful have a plus/minus variation; we're just getting to know the old way and things change.
Several hardware and software items
broke(My SCSI CD burner is just catching dust and all the little systemtweaksthat we've collected over the year seem to be useless.) We'll have to try the 10.2.1 update and hope the third parties want to race out updates for a system that is sodynamic(rhymes withdamnit?) How dospell Jag Wire? I hope you have a lively discussion on the ins and outs of upgrades, but bear in mind: most people are using these machines to get some work done and would rather not spend the next month getting rearranged?
Unless you have a recent G4 and/or lots of time let this update
maturea lot more before you attempt to smoothly integrate it into your working environment. I don't mean to express such a negative opinion of MacOS X 10.2 when Apple has so much effort and hope it will work out well. It is very powerful, feature rich and beautiful, ready to manage yourdigital hub--I would ask
How will this benefit you?
After the pizza and a bit of music will give it a try again.
Thanks
And more
We have debated between the eMac and iMac. Dona decided on the iMac because 50 pounds with no handles on the eMac was just to heavy. The adjustable screen on the iMac, and low radiation were also factors.
Investigatiing options, including a an education discount of $50 because I am on a school board, we decided upon an iMac from Small Dog with the free extra RAM. Besides, Vermont needs the money. We asked Art Henrickson at Small Dog:
Does the Jaguar software base station mean that I could connect to Macs within 5 or 10 feet of each other using the airport cards without an Airport base station?
Can two Macs with Jaguar connect to or share the same USB inkjet printer or USB scanner?
I saw a reference to using CUPS with Jaguar for printer sharing, but do not know what it is except that it is in Jaguar.
He answered:
OS X version 10.1 - Dive in, the Aqua's fine.
From the AppleWorks User Group:
We are writing to tell you about a problem you might encounter using AppleWorks running under Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar). The following note describes the problem and suggests two work-arounds you can use to resolve this issue:
Jaguar/AppleWorks 6 users cannot double-click to open a file created with an earlier version of AppleWorks. This problem only occurs if the file is on a locked medium such as a CD-R. Instead of opening the file, your system will display a message indicating that you do not have the necessary privileges to open the file.
Here are two ways to open a file that generates a you do not have
privileges
error message:
1. Launch AppleWorks 6 and use the Open Command (on AppleWorks 6's File Menu) to open the file.
2. Drag the file onto the AppleWorks 6 icon on the dock.
You can also copy the file onto your hard drive (or any other re-writeable media) and then double-click to open the file. However, AWUG does not recommend this procedure because Jaguar first creates a copy of the file and then opens that copy with AppleWorks. You must then delete the original file and change the name of the copy to make it easy to keep track of your document.
4. And More
Midge asked a question about a database field which she could not edit a datas entry on some records. I told her it the field on that particular record might be locked. Wrong. That answer only applies to spreadsheet cells. AppleWorks does have Record info fields for such items as Date Created, but you cannot edit that field in any record.
Ron Lay-Sleeper wrote:
Thanks for the reminder about the meeting. I regret Iwill not be able to make it. I will be in tech rehearsal for the play I am doing with the Stowe Theater Guild: The Foreigner, by Larry Shue. We open at the Stowe Town Hall next Wednesday, Sept. 25. The show runs the next three weeks, Wednesdays through Saturdays, Sept 25-28, and October 2-5 and 9-12. Curtains is at 8. I hope some of the NVMUGS can make it to this intriguing comedy.
My best to you all,
Ron Lay-Sleeper
