NVMUG eNews02/16/2008
Last updated 03/01/2008
Leopard Mac OS X 10.5.2 Demonstration
Hartley Jackson demonstrated Leopard Mac OS X 10.5.2 with help from Geof Gonter, Stephen Farber, and with Neil Raphel's projector.
Midge Lubot announced a new meeting place for NVMUG. Starting in March we will meet at NVRH, The Northeast Vermont Regional Hospital..
1. New Meeting Place
MIdge announced at the meeting that from now on we will be meeting at the Northern Vermont Regional Hospital where we will have WiFi. They will let us meet there at no cost as a public service so NVMUG membership will continue to be free.. I will send you a meeting announcement with directions and, I hope, a map. MIdge and Richard Lubot cannot meet on the second Saturday, so the meeting will be at 10 a.m. on Saturday, March 15 in room 127. The room number and any changes will be posted behind the information desk at the main entrance. If I do not send you directions to the room before then, the people at the information desk will be happy to direct you.Hartley Jackson Demonstrated Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5.2. He said that the 10.5.2 update had taken care of most of the complaints about the original release and seems to run much better. He demonstrated it on his Powerbook G4 with only 768 MB of RAM. He has not used it long enough time to recommend it to everyone. There may still be some problems, mostly with third party programs that you could be using. However, once you do use it you will not want to go back to earlier systems. Here are some reasons why I can say that:
Desktop
The new look of the desktop has been improved in version Mac OS X 10.5.2. The new menu and 3D floor is less transparent making them much more readable, and I believe as attractive. You have the option of turning transparency off if you do not agree with me.
The dock has a new feature called stacks. A stack is a collection of documents that instantly expands when you click on it. There is a new Download stack for file transfers, Safari downloads, and saved attachments so they do not clutter up your screen.
In the original version of Leopard, stacks could fan out for a beautiful display of a small number of items such as recent downloads. For convenience the most recent items were closest to the stack. To open any item in a stack, just click on it once.
Stacks could also be presented in a grid of thumbnail views which was better when there were more items in the stack.
For very large stacks, such as all of your applications, you may want to use the new OS X 10.5.2 list view. You get a fine list where applications open with on click.
Just drag in a folder of documents, movies, or photos into the dock to create your own stack.
Mac OS X 10.5.2 also gives you the option of having a folder in the dock instead of one of the new stacks.
Finder
You now have four ways to view you files in the Finder. You still have the icon, list, and column viewsÑexcept that the icon view thumbnails now show what is in you documents, pictures, and movies.
You also have a new Cover Flow like the one in iTunes showing previews of documents. When you get used to it, you may like it to search for images, PDFs, Keynote presentations, and Word and Excel documents. To see more than the first page of a PDF or Keynote presentation, just pause your cursor over it and click on arrows to scan back and forth. You can even play movies right in Cover Flow.
The Sidebar has also been improved based upon iTunes. The top section called DEVICES shows hard drives, USB storage, and iDisk from .Mac if you have it. You can use Preferences under the Finder menu to hide these to clear your desktop because you have them here. And, you can click on the disclosure triangle to display or hide them in the Sidebar.
Next is the SHARED section which appears if you have shared Macs of PCs on you local network. Use it to quickly share their contents.
The PLACES section is for folders you use frequently so you can access them with a single click. You can drag these items to move them around, or to add or remove them with ease.
The final SEARCH FOR section contains predefined searches. One click lets you see instantly anything you worked on Today, Yesterday, or In the Past Week, view all Images, Movies, or Documents on your Mac. You can create your own searches. Select Find from the File menu, build your search, and press the Save button. Your search will be saved in the SEARCH FOR section so that you instantly see what you are looking for with just one click.
Quick Look
Select an item, then press the Quick Look icon or press the Space bar to see what is in documents instantly without opening a program. It is much quicker. You can resize the view, scroll through multipage documents, even go full screen. It works great in Cover Flow for images, PDF documents, Excel, Pages, and even movies. Once you have seen it, you will just have to have it. A huge time saver.
Spaces
Spaces is a way to organize displays you keep open into working group rather than one big clutter desktop. Enable Spaces in System Preferences > Expose and Spaces. Set the number of rows and columns you want, up to 16 spaces. (The number of applications you can keep open in Spaces may depend upon the amount of RAM you have.) Click on the Spaces icon in the dock to view all your Spaces at once and drag windows from one space to another, and even exchange whole spaces. Navigate among you spaces using Control - space number, Control - arrow keys, or the Spaces icon in the dock.As an example of use, you might want to have your Mail and Safari in the first space, GarageBand, iWeb and other blog programs in your second space, Pages and Numbers in a third space, and iPhoto in the fourth. You might want an application, like the Finder, open in more than one space. You can imagine how much easier this would be to work with than having all these applications open on your desktop.
Mail in Leopard contains Notes, To Dos, Stationery, and Data Detectors.
Many people email notes to themselves to remember things while using the Mail program. So Apple added Notes to Mail.
Click on Note in the Mail toolbar and you get a lined yellow note pad. Key in a note. (The type is bolder and blacker than I like, and I do not yet know if it can be changed.) Drag an image into the Note from a stack in the dock. Drag in a Numbers spreadsheet. Close your Note and it will appear in your INBOX. There is a Reminders section in the Mail sidebar to hold your notes.
If you have written a to do item like "rent a condo in Miami," highlight it and click the To Do icon in the Mail toolbar. Hover your cursor over the To Do item and click the resulting red arrow to check the Due Date box and edit the date, and select your priority. The To Do item will appear in Mail and in iCal, and changing it in either Mail or iCal will change it in both.
Mail also lets you send out messages with stunning templates. Dress up your email by clicking on New Message in the menu bar and Show Stationery in the Mail toolbar to select from multiple categories of templates. The demo used the Postcard template, and the Photo Browser in the toolbar to select photos from the iPhoto library to add to the template. Photos were dragged to exchange places, and zoomed in and moved around to display a part of an image.
Mail's new Data Detectors feature is so smart it will amaze you.
Select a message that has contact information in the signature. Hover your mouse over the signature. Notice how Data Detectors places a dotted outline around the information. Click on the arrow and a menu appears so you can Create a contact or Add to an existing one. Data Detectors picks up the name from the sender of the email and creates or updates the information in your Address Book.
The demo selected a message titled "Dinner on Tuesday." Data Detectors lets you add this as an appointment in iCal, and is even smart enough to know that "This Tuesday" is an actual date.
Time Machine.
Time Machine is a revolutionary new way to easily back up your entire Mac. It backs up everything on your computer that you have not specifically excluded.
To set up Time Machine you connect an external hard drive. Time Machine recognizes it and asks if you want to use it as your Time Machine backup. You click Yes, and Time Machine starts the initial backup. Unless you want to modify it using Time Machine in System Preferences you are done!
After this Time Machine checks every hour and backs up anything that has changed. It is simple and automatic.
If you are like me, the most common problem is not a computer problem, it is when you accidentally delete something. Time Machine was designed to make it easy to either browse for the things you want to restore, or find them with Spotlight.
When you click on Time Machine in the dock a new cosmos opens displaying the contents of whatever was active, a folder or your entire computer, with smaller copies going back behind it. On the right side is a dateline that you can use to go back to the date when you think you made the mistake. Two arrows going forward and back jump you to the most recent change so you can leap to what was changed.
You can use Quick Look to see inside a Keynote presentation to see if it is the version you want. Then click the Restore button in the lower right corner to get it back. If you want to keep both versions, give your current version a new name before restoring the old one.
Time Machine works within applications like Address Book, Mail and iPhoto. "It is like having a spare of everything on your Mac" (As I write this I am very happy that I have both Time Machine. There is a good chance that when my computer comes back repaired the data on my PowerBookÕs hard drive may be lost, but I still have it on my external Time Machine drive.)
iChat
Apple's demonstration included iChat, but it requires WiFi and someone else to chat with. I hope Scott Pelok will probably set up an iChat with us from Michigan at some future meeting now that we will have WiFi available when we meet at the Northern Vermont Regional Hospital.
Instead I included a little bit about Spotlight where there have been tremendous improvements.
Spotlight
Key Command - Spacebar to open Spotlight in Leopard.Key "saf" and hit Return to open up Safari. You cannot launch Spotlight any faster.
Any application can be opened just that fast and easy. Many people will use Spotlight as their application launcher. It works because of the formula Spotlight uses to determine which of the items if finds opens first.
"Tarradiddle" looks like it is misspelled, but I could not find the correct spelling. Paste it into Spotlight and you will see the definition.
To find the area of a circle that is 10 feet across, past pi*10 into Spotlight.
In the new Spotlight
- time machine - looks for files with both time AND machine in them,
- "time machine" - looks only for files with the phrase Òtime machineÓ in them
- time OR machine - looks for files with "time" or "machine" in them
- time NOT machine - looks only for files with "time" that do not have "machine" in them
- name: machine - looks only for files with "machine" in the file name
- date: today - looks for files created today
- machine kind: pdf finds only pdf files with "machine" in them and there are many other kinds
When we looked at the Finder near the start of the demonstration you learned how to define advanced searches and save them in SEARCH FOR in the sidebar to have what you are looking for already found for you.
These are some of the amazing reasons why you will want your operating system to be Leopard. But, we must caution you to first make sure that (1) your Mac meets the requirements for Leopard and you have as much RAM as you can so it will work at its best, and (2) the programs that are most important to you work well with Leopard.
