NVMUG eNews 4/16/2005
Last updated 4/19/2005
Tiger Is Coming, Internet Connections and Wireless
Hartley Jackson's unpublished report of Tiger as written for the Caledonian, and the meeting discussions on Internet Connections and Wireless. There was no formal presentation.
1. The Meeting Report - Tiger is Coming April 29
DanielHollister shows Dashboard to Richard Lubot and Geof Gonter in mirror
NVMUG Anticipates Tiger
Apple has announced the release of their new operating system on April 29 at 6 p.m. at stores like Small Dog in Waitsfield, so Northern Vermont Macintosh members discussed Tiger and why people would want to buy it at their meeting in St. Johnsbury on Saturday. They also discussed high speed and wireless internet connections.
Two much advertised reasons for upgrading to Tiger are Widgets and Spotlight.
Daniel Hollister showed a movie of Dashboard and Widgets on his 17" PowerBook. The Dashboard displays widgets when activated with a key combination.
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Daniel Hollister points to Widgets.
The widgets are small programs such as a calculator, calendar, stock tracker, weather report and a dictionary and thesaurus with no internet connection required.
Spotlight is a new find-it-anywhere tool that updates indexes whenever files are added or removed from the computer. It is extremely fast because it is a part of the operating system.
As a practical example, a Widget provides instant access to any contact in your address book directly from Dashboard. Then with Spotlight you can find, with a single click, anything related to a contact in your Address Book including e-mail exchanges, iCal appointments, files, attachments or anything else.
In all there are over 200 improvements including printing custom labels and envelopes directly from you Address Book.
From the finder you can use Spotlight Find to search all your documents, images, emails and applications as fast as you can type the search words. You can take the results of a Spotlight search and save them as a Smart Folder that automatically updates as you add or remove documents from your Mac. Then you can drag and drop files into a Burn Folder which you can burn to a CD or DVD.
Tiger adds improvements to almost every part of the operating system. For example, Preview is now used to show images and pdf documents. Using new Core Image power, Tiger adds the ability to adjust colors and exposure to correct an image, to view and create annotations to a pdf document, to complete pdf forms, and much more.
Under Tiger, you will be able to view RSS news feeds from the news sources you select within Safari, and you will be able to save a Web page complete with HTML code and images . You will also be able to check the website security certificate status of a Web site, or to specify exactly which Web sites your children can access.
Some of the new features that look impressive were demonstrated in January at Macworld, such as iChat for audio and video conferencing with up to three friends at a time on video, or up to ten on audio.
Some members will be driving down to Small Dog to buy Tiger as soon as it is available. Some members recommend waiting a month. No one seriously suggested waiting to see if the next Apple operating system is a Catamount.
Members exchanged experiences and information about the growth in high speed internet services and about service providers.
Good service and technical support was reported from two local Vermont providers, SoverNet and Kingdom Connections. One member is fortunate enough to be within reach of DSL service in St. Johnsbury. Another was very happy with the service and technical support from Adelphia cable.
The state law in New Hampshire mandates that if a town approves cable, the cable company must provide access to everyone with electricity and telephone service if they want it.
Vermont has no such law, but Adelphia is providing cable service along the main road in Coventry and Irasburg will be next. There is cable service along the highway in Morgan and Holand near the Canadian border. The city of Montpeliar is putting up a co-op WiFi system which will serve the entire city area.
It is too bad we did not have high speed Internet access at our meeting because we could have reviewed Tiger with its 200 features from the abundance of information including demonstration movies available on Apple's Web site.
2. More About the Meeting
I counted five PowerBooks at the meeting, and yet it was a small meeting - probably due to good weather and no prepared presentation. With all those computers, we could have explored Tiger information on Apple's Web site during the meeting if we had a WiFi Internet connection.
Richard said he learned about a potential NVMUG member while he was exploring a keyboard. After the GarageBand presentation we were not sure if he meant Macintosh or piano.
I mentioned my experience with a Bluetooth wireless mouse. Each time I turned it on I moved it around, but my PowerBook did not recognize it and I had to reset it. Then one day I clicked the mouse and it worked.
Talking about Tiger brought out the old saying, if what you have works, if it does what you want to do, you don't need it. But, that doesn't mean you won' want it.
However Geof said that education is an exception where, if they buy any new computers at all, the operating systems have to be kept up to date. The reason is that teachers have to be on the same page as their students to do a good job of teaching. The more the teachers understand, the better it is for the kids.
Windows people have bragged that when Microsoft's Longhorn comes out it will blow Jaguar away.
F12 toggles Dashboard with Widgets on Tiger.
Geof said that the reason some good companies have such expensive technical support is that they have to have an engineer on staff just to handle what may be a few phone calls. Usually the first phase of technical support consists of listening to someone who is reading to you from a computer screen. Richard said when they called Kingdom Connections about a problem hooking up, someone who appeared not to know Macintosh computers said he would find out and get back to them. Five hours later the Kingdom Connections tech support called them back with the answer. He may not have been spending all that time researching their problem, but it was pretty good service.
Daniel said that he connected somewhere, and downloaded a whole album in what seemed like 30 seconds. That started a whole discussion about broodband service, Wireless routers, and connecting because someone in the area has a Wireless connection.
Sometimes unusual speed or lack thereof depends upon what is happening on the server end. Geof said that all routers work at the lowest speed connected to them. The original Airport was a B able to transfer data at 11 megs per second. Newer ones are a G capable of 54 megs per second. And now there are Super G which can work at 108 megs per second. But, at home Geof finds that his G is no faster than his B because both are faster than the data transfer rate of the source. Eleven megabytes per second is really pretty fast when it is not limited by the Internet connection.
There is a difference between free access like data Capital Grounds in Montpeliar, and public access like Starbucks which is not free. But, Geof said, either way someone has to pay for it. There was a time when food was free in bars, but it was salty and the beer wasn't free which was the source of the phrase, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Geof said that Apple is coming to Boston this year. Adobe has announced that they will be there.
Midge and Richard are using gmail = Google mail for their own mail because Google provides huge amounts of storage, because they can read their mail from anyplace the can get an Internet connection, and because if they should move their server account, their email address will not change.
Barry Hayes reported burning several files to a CD, but when he tried to open one of the files, the icon disappeared from the CD. Geof said that every time he has seen a burned file disappear it is a permissions issue. He said the only way to correct it is to run repair permissions then reburn the file. If in doubt, you could use Get Info to check permissions on a file before burning it.
