NVMUG eNews 6/18/2005
Last updated 6/19/2005
Questions and Answers (Mostly Tiger)
Midge lead a discussion of Tiger and other questions and answers. Warren just obtained iView which has something to do with asset management whatever that is. Warren may explain and give us a presentation at a future meeting. We were also treated to a feature program on DVD by Daniel Hollister's elementary school video club.
1. All About the Meeting
Midge opened the meeting asking if there were any questions. Midge said she had one. In AppleWorks when she hits Enter, she often gets the spinning ball. It happened in Panther and now is happening in Tiger. No one knew why, but one person suggested that reinstalling AppleWorks might help
Midge said there was no special topic this month, but since Tiger was new, she thought people might have questions about it. She then demonstrated Tiger's Spotlight which is amazing.
It finds words almost wherever they are. She then started showing some of her favorite Widgets in Dashboard. She really likes the Dictionary/ThesaurusÑit is so fast.
A member said he has System 9 and loves it, but two major applications are no longer being updated in OS 9. He is thinking of partitioning and older Mac which now has OS 8, so he can have both OS 8 and OS 9 on it. Then he could put OS 10 on his G4 Mac.
His comments and MIdge demonstrating more new Widgets like sticky notes, world clock, Yellow Pages, and a unit converter made quite a contrast covering a lot of Apple history. I believe
http://www.apple.com/macosx/dashboard
now has something like 450 Widgets on it.
The upgrade to Tiger costs about $129 unless you work in a school where it is available for about $70. If you shop around you can find some combination deals such as adding iLife and iWorks for about $20 each.
Mac OS X can create pdf documents by printing to pdf, and Tiger does more with pdf than before. (You can even circle important items and add notes to pdf documents in Preview.)
A member said he has a $10 shareware pdf program which works with OD 9, but it has only about 6 fonts. He sends out a newsletter to about a hundred people, and there are always about six who cannot open a pdf document. Geof suggested that they use Adobe Reader to open the pdfs.
There are reasons to use Preview in some cases and Adobe Reader in others. One person said that for some reason they can only print about six pages of a pdf document in Adobe Reader whereas in Preview the whole document prints.
An ink jet printer only uses about 30 watts compared to 50 to 60 watts for a computer. It should be possible to print with battery power and a suitable converter.
Greensboro is getting broad band service which will be available from a number of places including a church steeple and the town hall. A dish receiver costs about $150 to install and it costs about $40 a month. This news lead into a discussion of wireless routers. For home use you do not need the fastest wireless routers because there are other limits to the speed you can get.
You have some firewall protection by default on a Mac against anyone getting into your computer when using a wireless connection. They cannot get into your computer unless you set it up to let them in.
Jane had a problem with a huge photo that she could was too big to forward and she was not able to copy it to her desktop. She showed the picture on her PowerBook. After trying a number of things, Warren Walker and Stephen Farber, with helpful comments for Geof, opened and copy it with Graphic Converter, and then he moved it into AppleWorks and reduced it to 25%.
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Warren and Stephen researching an answer to Jane's problem. Our members are always eager to help.
A member wanted to clean everything off of a hard drive. Geof recommended reformatting the drive with a low level format to change all ones to zeros. (Tiger's Finder menu has a Secure Empty Trash which overwrites any deleted items with meaningless ones and zeros.)
Daniel showed us his 2005 DVD of the projects created by his grade school's video club. It was a real fun show, Attack of the Bad Hair Aliens.
He said the school was on the verge of buying a program that sounded like Kidsperation
for Windows.He asked if he could show them iLife. On the way into his demonstration he saw a kid, and had him film some digital video. Then he asked them to just watch what I am doing as he created Adventures in iLife , a 30 second digital video in about 12 minutes. He edited the film clips, created sound in GarageBand and added it, created a QuickTime movie, and used iDVD to put create a DVD. The he told them, That's what you can do.
He does not know what they will decide, or what the response was by the Kidsperation representatives.
Midge has been having fun changing the icons on her Mac using the program Richard brought her from Macworld.
One person asked about a less expensive program than Quark or InDesign to compose documents. Stephen seriously recommended that she take a close look at iWork Pages which works great for setup and layout. Midge ran part of the iWork demo on her computer. (I used to think AppleWorks was great for document layouts, but I think Pages is so much easier and it produces better results for me.)
