NVMUG eNews 1/18/2003
Last updated 2/21/2003
Field Trip to Small Dog Grand Opening
Instead of our usual meeting, we went on a field trip to the Small Dog Grand Opening in Waitsfield. Read all about it.
1. Small Dog Grand Opening
We postponed our scheduled January meeting in St. Johnsbury in order to go on a field trip to the Grand Opening of a new Macintosh retail store Saturday. Don Mayer opened the Small Dog Electronics store in Waitsfield. It is a Vermont version of the new Apple company stores but with an entrance specially for dogs.
Don Mayer, owner of Small Dog; Midge Lubot President of NVMUG, Gail Murphy Glore President of WiredWomen, and Richard Lubot Treasurer of NVMUG
Don has had great success with Small Dog selling Macintosh Computers and related electronics world wide over the Internet. Small Dog is known for their reconditioned Macintoshes with new computer warranties. They could sell new computers only to established customers who had bought something from them at their office. Through his Internet business and his friendly e-mail newsletters Don built such a following that he decided it was time to open a new Macintosh retail store. And he did it right.
When we arrived at the store, Midge and Richard Lubot, the President and Treasurer of NVMUG met Don Mayer the proud owner of the new store. They were joined by Gail Murphy Glore, the President of WiredWomen in Burlington and an Apple User Group Advisor who was making an iMovie and distributing MacAddict CD holders.
The store was packed with people all afternoon. Their was just enough room to get around with an occasional excuse me.
There were many Macintosh computers to try out, some big LCD monitors to yearn for, and all kinds of books, software, peripherals, digital cameras, and items for your dog. I was surprised at how small iPods and some of the digital cameras are.
There were six Paws-On Seminars
with no empty chairs at any of them. I attended one on digital images. It was a well prepared demonstration of things you can do with PhotoShop. A Small Dog employee combined a picture of a lake, with a picture of a dog, and a picture of a ranger's hat. He put the dog by the lake, fitted the hat on the dog, edited it, and used a filter to soften the image all in a half an hour.
Midge made a PC to Mac Switcher
ad. It was an opportunity to pretend you were making an Apple ad for national TV while recording why you love your Mac and why you are a Small Dog fan.
There was an Internet Cafe with apples, cookies, soft drinks and coffee. There were chairs in the cafe for those who wanted to rest and talk, and another bank of computers.
It was a great opportunity to meet and talk with other Macintosh users. Gail Murphy Glore showed me how easy it is to take her picture using her digital movie camera. I talked with a woman from Burlington did not know there are two Macintosh users groups there, MacChamp and WiredWomen.
About ten NVMUG members attended the grand opening. Most of us got there before the official opening at noon. Most stayed until close to the official closing at 4 p.m. Some bought a few things, including an eMac, while others just had fun.
2. Bill Amos Photo Comments
We had a request from SterlingTEK to add their URL to our references for sources of digital photography information. I asked Bill Amos what he thought, and he responded with information that I believe will interest you.
For members thinking of investing in a digicam, check out the following two sites for comparison shopping (also good for other different, non-photo items):
Deal Time:
http://www.dealtime.com/
NexTag:
http://www.nextag.com
Enter the specific camera you are interested in, then see the listing of stores, prices, etc.
A valuable feature is the rating of each store and customer satisfaction.
I haven't checked to see if WWW.SterlingTEK.com is listed and rated.
Not only do they list a wide range of new camera prices, but often show sources and prices for GOOD discontinued models. For example, a Coolpix 990 is a great camera and superior (in my judgement and that of others) to the subsequent CP 995. By many digicam specialists the CP 990 is regarded as a classic, possessing everything necessary up to 11 x 14 prints, and is the most desirable of all swivel-body models to date. (I know Richard & Midge have a CP 990--don't give it up!!!)
The current CP 4500 is good too, but by departing from the original body size and configuration of all previous swivel-body Coolpix cameras, removes itself from a number of excellent third party accessories (some from England) that greatly expand the usefulness of previous models. It also has lost several extremely valuable features of the CP 990 and, to a lesser degree, the CP 995.
As long as I'm ranting--for those with general and more modest digital photography needs, but want something considerably better than a point-and-shoot, look to classic (in design) digicams. For example, the Coolpix 885 is an excellent, versatile choice. For thorough evaluations on any given model, any make, check the following two review sites:
Digital Photography Review:
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/
(this is the most complete and detailed, by far)
Steve's Digicams:
http://www.steves-digicams.com/2002(a popular and widely-visited site, not as complete as the other)
Bill
3. Putting a Photo Gallery on our NVMUG Web Page
I took a few pictures at the Small Dog Grand Opening, and I decided it might be interesting to put a gallery of them on our web site. You may be interested in what I learned in the process.
First, there are a lot of easy ways to put pictures up in a gallery on a web page. However, there is a bit more to it if you want to integrate your picture gallery into an existing web site. Second, I am new at this, so I do not know very much about what I am talking about.
The two ways I looked at both create a home page HTML document, a folder full of your JPEG images, a folder full of HTML pages, and a Thumbnail folder with smaller JPEG images of your images. The home page loads the thumbnail images, and clicking on a thumbnaill image loads an HTML page which loads a larger photo from your JPEG images. There can be a lot of variation from this basic concept.
Adobe PhotoShop Elements 2 has several layout options for Save as Web gallery. There are further options available for each layout, but the result looks very nice using the standard choices they provide. The instructions in the Adobe Photoshop elements 2 User Guide offer more details than you need, but are otherwise not difficult to follow.
The home page loads a larger picture, and the thumbnail pictures either vertically or horizotally on the page. Each page has this same layout, so that clickin on any thumbnail in any page takes you to that picture. To do this it uses frames and frame sets, and only the larger image which is in its own frame changes. It looks good, and works well. It is in HTML so it is editable. But, frames and framesets are a bit advanced for me. I may write more about this option when I learn more.
iPhoto also has a simple Export Which brings up a window with a Web Page tab. This tab shows simple options for the number of rows and columns you want to use for your thumbnails, and for the sizes of the pictures and thumbnails you want. The instructions in iPhoto: The Missing Manual are easy to follow.
The resulting web page shows your thumbnail images. Clicking on any thumbnail brings up the larger picture by itself. Click Back to go to the gallelry page and choose another picture. Not as elegant a solution, but it is done using HTML tables which I can understand and edit. So, I used this for our web page, at least until I have time to learn more about frames.
Changing the name of the home page so that it was not another index.html page was simple. Learning to navigate to the HTML pages within a Pages folder was not difficult. But, how do you navigate back out from within a folder? The answer was in Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Jaguar Edition under Navigating in Unix. You can type a double period in a pathname to go to the directory that contains where you are. So if you are in HTML document within Pages folder and need to navigate to back out of the Pages folder to your home page, index.html, which is at the same level as the Pages folder, the address is "../index.html" So far, it works on my Macintosh, and I hope it will work on the Internet and using your browser.
