NVMUG eNews 1/13/2007
Last updated 1/16/2007
Macworld Discussion Circle and Other Questions and Answers
>We began with introductions for two new members, and new NVMUG library books. Then we discussed Steve Job's Macworld announcements and other offshoots from that topic. The session ended with questions and answers.
1. New Members and Library Books
Two new members from Danville joined the group: Jane Fuller and Harold Turner. Jane was going to be a bee keeper until she learned that she would have to medicate against the mites. She was in environmental policy and a book editor before she retired. They came to this area to work at Karme-Choling. Their PC motherboard burned out and they bought Jane a black MacBook at Small Dog, and came to the meeting with some questions.
We added three new additions to the NVMUG library:
iPod: The Missing Manual, 5th Edition, November 2006
by J. D. Biersdorf from Pogue Press/O'Reilly
Preventative Photoshop
by Douglas Ford Rea from Peachpit Press.
Reviews of these two books were printed in the meeting announcement eNewsletter and are on our NVMUG Web site.
Exploring with Pages
a revised edition by Hartley Jim Jackson. The library has the only existing printed copy, but the book is available on pdf.
Exploring with Pages
explores what Pages can do as an analytical, writing, and document layout tool by showing how to use if for different projects. It begins with writing a letter and adds using more Pages tools for other projects. It does not have you using templates before you understand how to create and change them.
One quick hint from the book is to create a blank template with the fonts, and other formatting that you want available and drag a copy of the template into your Dock. Then you can quickly bring up your Pages template to work on with just one click in the Dock.
2. Macworld Announcements
The meeting started with a discussion about Macworld. Steve Jobs said they were announcing the three devices people were asking for:
1. An iPod with a larger high definition horizontal video screen
Horizontal Video Screen
2. A hand held wireless Internet communications device with a touch tone screen that would run Safari, Mail with free email on Yahoo, and Google maps by agreement with Google
Google Map on Web Browser
3. An iPhone that would be simpler to use than any existing wireless telephone because it would be smarter based upon its Mac OS X operating system with a toucht screen for smarter programmed input than inflexible keys.
iPhone Displaying Data Entry Keys
And of course a built camera with the lens in the upper left hand corner on the back.
Back of with Camera Lens in upper left corner
And, Apple is delivering all three of these in one device, the Apple iPhone.
These photos were taken through a glass case by Ed Shepard, Small Dog, and downloaded from Flickr. Full size 800 x 600 pixel images of these and more Macworld are available at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smalldog
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2028393,00.asp
Steve Job's keynote speach is available at:
http://www.apple.com/startpage/
It really is awesome to see the screen scroll as Steve moves his finger - it looks almost like he is not quite touching the screen, and the screen slows down as you stop to select what you want. There is an amazing pinch - unpinch two finger technique he used to contract and expand a portion of the screen. And the Steve Jobs anti-reality field was definitely all there.
Gene said that when Steve Jobs introduced the Cingular CEO, it was obvious that he was from a different corporate culture because of his dry, very businesslike, presentation delivered with notes. Steve even remarked about their ability to work with this different culture. For the next two years, Cingular which has since become AT&T, will have exclusive rights to deliver the iPhone system for the next 2 years. By then Apple plans to have 1% of the world wide market by selling over 10 million iPhones.
The Caledonian Record on Saturday reported that a new Cingular store would be opening in Lancaster, NH because that area will have Cingular wireless telephone
Gene also described the AppleTV which Apple hopes to become the hub of your computer entertainment center. This little 7.7Ó square by 1 1Ó high device, which has a 40 gig hard drive to record and play back media. It is a transmitter - receiver which will connect Mac and PC computers wirelessly to your TV and HiFi.
Here is Ed Shepard's photo:
AppleTV.
He said Apple's change from Apple Computer Inc to Apple Inc may be even more significant. Apple intends to compete for the home electronics market; providing the hardware and software for home entertainment systems. Steve Jobs quoted Alan Kay who said, If you want to make good software you have to make your own hardware.
Gene Levine plans to buy the new AppleTV as soon as it comes out. Gene gets his TV from Vermont Public TVs broadcast from it antenna on Burke Mountain. He has a fast Internet connection at his office where he could download TV shows on his MacBook, and then play them at home with an AppleTV connection. Gene uses iTunes to download his favorite TV programs. He will use the AppleTV to wirelessly transmit his programs, slide shows, and anything else to his TV and control it with remote the same as Front Row.
There was a lot of discussion with questions and answers about the iPhone including the suit over its name. Someone said, Say anything you want about me, but say it on the front page.
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Gene sent me information from Pogue posts where David Pogue answered some of the questions that were not answered at the meeting including:
How does the iPhone charge?
-It comes with a white charging/syncing dock, just like an iPod.
Another thing: what is the of OS X version? Is it close to Leopard, a mobile-Leopard?
-No. It's not the entire Mac OS X, either, and of course the interface has been redesigned for phone use.
The CALENDAR program, does it accept input on the phone, or is it just a dumb viewer of synced data from your mac, like the ipod is?
- Calendar program isn't finished yet, but I did see an add new event
icon on the placeholder graphic.
Is there any wireless (Bluetooth or Wifi) syncing at all, for contacts and calendar?
- No.
Is the SETTINGS menu working as of now, and what are some of the settings that you saw in there?
-Yes, it's working! Some of the options I remember were: backlight timer; show touch feedback
(a little dot appears on the screen every time you tap); airplane mode; ringtone. There were many pages of settings, though.
How was call quality? Was this not available for testing?
- Yes, it was working fine. I called home with it. Sounded loud and clear, although this means nothing at this point. Apple doesn't even have FCC approval yet, and have many months of fine-tuning and fiddling left to do. Also, of course, your call quality will depend on how far you are from the cell tower.
Can the pinch gesture be used on Web pages?
- Yes! Also on email! So weird, but cool -I could zoom in and out on an entire email message: embedded photo, text, and all.
Are both text and images both (almost) infinitely resizable with the pinch gesture?
- No. The smallest size is Fit the whole thing on the screen.
The largest seems to be, I don't know, 4X or 8X actual size.
Can you use it with an existing Cingular account, or will Cingular have a special iPhone group of plans with special features like the priority voice mail, etc?
- Cingular hasn't yet determined service pricing.
Was there discussion of the CPU type?
-Mr. Jobs would not say what the processor is.
I think it's a bit backwards and disappointing for Apple to introduce a product that requires MORE visual attention than most phones, and which has no tactile means of operation.
- I agree. At this early date, I think the phone may be the weakest part of the iPhone.
Is the virtual keyboard at least as quick and easy to use as entering text with a regular cellphone's number keys?
- I'd say it's a wash. The virtual
keys make it slower than a BlackBerry, but at least you have the whole alphabet; you don't have to press the 1 key three times to get the letter C, or whatever.
Can I add new programs to it?
- No. Apple wants to control the look and feel and behavior of every aspect of the phone.
Does it connect to iChat?
- No.
Does it have games?
- No.
Voice recognition? Voice dialing? Voice memos?
- No, although this could change by June when the phone ships.
Can I make a call while driving a car?
- Not as easily as on a regular cellphone with programmed speed-dial keys. (Besides - MUST you?)
Does the camera record video?
- Not yet. Apple may add this feature by June.
That scrolling through lists thing is glitzy, but what if I have 3,000 names in my address book?
- There's also an alphabet index tab
down the right side of the screen, so you can jump to another spot in the list.
3. Other Discussions
Around the middle of the meeting I decided I had to try to take pictures of the group, although I was pretty sure I would not get anything good enough to use. I took two pictures, each with part of the circle, and when I looked at it later the composition was terrible and everyone in the picture looked bored. But today Gordon Alexander sent this picture which is far to good not to use.
NVMUG meeting goes to the mat
Look at that composition!!
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Harold Turner said Richard Powers uses speech recognition to write his books on a PC and wondered if it might work on the iPhone. (We all know that David Pogue has dictated into a PC, then used his Mac to edit it, but now he can run the program on his Mac using Windows.) Warren Walker said that Leopard speech sound will be much more human, but there is no news concerning speech interpretation.
Warren said there are currently three speech interpretation programs. A cross platform program is the worst. iListen which is second best and Warren has it on his Mac. iListen might not yet be good enough to dictate a book. Dragon Naturally Speaking on Windows is the best one, and is used by authors.
Speech interpretation programs for dictation like iListen need context to interpret words. You can't just say two (or was the 2 or to or too?).
Gene said that every Mac now has the ability to understand voice command words. This requires that the Mac understand only a limited number of words like Open
and Quit.
It might not be difficult for Apple to move this speech command ability to the iPhone if they decided to do it.
Bruce Shields said that, according to Noam Chomsky's linguistic theory, creating speech discourse verbally uses a different part of the brain than writing it, and that brain scans have proven this to be 100% right. Richard Lubot said that the forms of discourse some people use when talking are quite different than when writing.
Jane Fuller said that the Library of Congress was having difficulty using Optical Character Recognition to preserve their books. I said that I had used it just last night to translate a scanned images of a recipe from a thick King Arthur cookbook last night. It translated the different sizes of type and fonts with no errors except for hyphen and dash symbols, but that the size of some of the type had to changed to make it readable.
This lead to a question about eBooks.
Warren said there is a device that contains flight charts pilots use to read the current chart in their cramped cockpits. Gene said there was a new reader by Sony that received good reviews for what it is, but bad reviews as a replacement for books.
Now, with the subject switched to new technology Gene said one good source of technology news related to social impacts is ITconversations http://www.itconversations.com/
Gene found an item on http://www.slashdot.org which claims that their is a Samsung chip in the iPhone so that it cannot be running a version of OS X. If you are interested in Information Technology News for nerds. Stuff that matters,
and its cultural impact, you might want to check out this Web site. (It also contains news about comet McNaught.)
Gene also said that http://boingboing.net which calls itself A Directory of Wonderful Things
has interesting articles related to technology and social issues. One of the items they have now relates to the controversy of iTunes DRM which requires you to use Apple products, and restricts competition and your choices. Apple says they must have the DRM restrictions to protect the interests of the music industry and for Apple to get music from them. But Apple will not remove the DRM protection on items where the source of the item has asked for it to be removed.
AVS Science Forum http://www.avsforum.com/ is a source of audio visual science discussions and information. The home page news is accessible to all, but I believe ou are asked to register before reading or participating in the forums, but there is no charge.
4. Member Questions and Answers
Gordon Alexander imported images from his Canon computer into iPhoto and burned them to a disk using sharing resulting in a little thumbnail file which was too small to print. Does anyone know why or how this happened? I always drag my imaged from iPhoto into Photoshop and have never experienced this.
When Gordon moved his photos from iPhoto and looks at them in Photoshop, Image Size shows the full size image with a resolution of only 72 dpi which he has to change to make it suitable to print. Why does it show the image at 72 dpi instead of 300 or some other dpi?
Warren Walker showed us Image Capture, an application included with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.
The Image Capture Preferences can select whether to open the image from your digital camera into iPhoto, Image Capture, or Other. If you change it from iPhoto to Image Capture and connect your camera, Image Capture will ask you what file folder you want to open and save the picture to, and you have a choice of all of your pictures or some of your pictures.
Warren uses this to save his pictures and then uses the Photoshop Browser to find and manage his images. He does not use iPhoto at all.
Now Gordon has the information he needs to manage his images the way his way.
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Jane Fuller had a list of questions, only one of which got answered toward at the end of the meeting.
I did not hear the first part of the discussion, but Jane bought a Black MacBook from Small Dog. Harold helped to find the computer to fit her needs. The salesman listened to her needs, and said they could save about $250 by buying the Intel Core Duo which was being replaced by the Intel Core 2 Duo. The new Black MacBook with 500 megs of RAM was not as fast as Jane would like, and it did not have the latest, free, Mac OS X 10.4 update. She wanted input from the members of the user group.
After a long discussion, the general conclusion was that this was not a bad choice, and the salesman was trying to get her what fit her needs considering what Small Dog had to offer, but it would have been nice if the salesman had advised her to upgrade to a gig of RAM, and would have installed the latest upgrade for her.
We suggested that the people at Small Dog would want her to be happy with her purchase. We recommended that, since she did not appear to be totally happy, she should take it back to Small Dog and talk to them about two alternatives - either that they would increase the memory to one gig at about what it would have cost to do at time of purchase, or she would exchange it and pay the difference to buy the Black Intel Core 2 Duo which would come with the gig of RAM.
We also suggested that she ask them to do the software upgrade, but that it is something the customer normally does when new upgrades come out, was not difficult, and it would not hurt if she were to do it.
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Prier to the meeting, we had an email question from Veer-Tess Frost.
Hi, Hartley, happy new year to you and the stjay group! I have been in New Haven CT for a while (I'll be home in late winter) and over the holiday was very fortunate to receive an Airport Extreme card for my ibookG4. We have not been able to figure out why my mac can't stay on the network. It links up within 10 feet then drops to one bar even at that close distance to the base station. I suggested posing this to my crackerjack users group. Here are the tech details:
-----The airport experienced total or nearly total connectivity failure within 30 seconds of connecting with a WPA2 encrypted network run on a Netgear WGT624SC hub. As other (windows) computers could connect to the network at distances of 150 ft and more without experiencing such a drop, it was thought possible that netgear and mac were not fully compatible. We tried creating the same network using a AirPort Express Base Station. Again other computers had no problem connecting, but this iBook G4 does not even detect the network unless absurdly close and even then drops the connection in under 1 minute.
The local WLAN will be restored to run on the Netgear hub since it is cheaper. The real issue seems to be with the Airport Extreme Card. Can you give a detailed reinstallation or configuration guide?
----I don't need to tell you that I didn't write the foregoing : ) ... a LOT of homework has been done on this before contacting you so this is a last try/hope ...
We sent the call for help out to our members, and three responded, all with sensible suggestions
Homer May asked: Have you tried unpluggingÊ ALL other computers from the Wireless Hub just to see if it works ? ? ? ? And asked her to call him for further help.
Gene Levine responded: These questions have probably already been considered and/or resolved, but...
Is there any possibility the Airport card's antenna has a bad connection/loose connection, or is improperly oriented, etc?
Ditto for the connection between the Airport card and the computer (broken, corroded or otherwise faulty electrical connectors on the card side and/or the computer side)?
Barry Hayes who responded first wrote:
Obvious question is whether the card is installed properly. Is the antenna connection tight? Does system profiler see the card properly? if so, then it could be a bad card. Ibooks, with their plastic shell usually have very good range. I have often connected to free spots from my car when parked outside of places like Panara. So it sounds like the card. Especially if it doesn't work with an airport either. I have a spare extreme card we could try in her computer to check things out. Let me know.
Veer wrote to us that the people helping her in I am told by Jeremy that he realized from your comments that he must have not secured the antenna connection sufficiently, so he reinstalled the card with a bit more mojo ... I can see that it could happen that anyone might treat this magical little object with excessive caution ... it sounds simple but as with so many other things, the solution depended on the diagnosis.
.. this New Haven outpost is impressed by this northern NE example of camaraderie and support, see you in the spring!
cheers, Veer
