Past ClubMac meetings
Get the lowdown on what happened at the meetings of Ireland’s friendliest and longest running Apple Mac user group!
The memos of ClubMac meetings held in the September 2011–May 2012 season are presented below:
Click on the links below to read the memos of meetings held during the:
Memos of meetings prior to September 2009 can be found under the Club News section of the bulletin board.
January 2012 meeting
ClubMac’s first meeting of 2012 took place on Wednesday, January 11, in the offices of CompuB, Grafton Street.
Training session
The training session before the main meeting was provided by Noel Hayes of CompuB, who demonstrated the use, interactive operation and advantages of the iWork suite of applications, namely Pages, Numbers and Keynote.
Main meeting
John Maguire, Committee Member, standing in for the Chairman, who was unavoidably absent from Dublin, welcomed those attending the meeting, thanked CompuB for hosting the present meeting and announced that the next meeting would be held on Wednesday, 1st February, at Old Belvedere.
Technical Q&A
This session hosted by Peter O’Reilly, Club member, provided the following enlightenments:
- To protect sensitive parts of a hard disk from access by the occasional user (e.g. grandchildren) add to the primary administrative (owner’s) account a second (guest) account to allow sharing only, and possibly enable parental controls, via System Preferences -> “Accounts” (OS X 10.6) or “Users and groups” (OS X 10.5);
- A prospective buyer of an iMac, currently a PC user, seeking options for using a new, still boxed, version of MS Office, was assured it would run successfully on a Mac using a Windows emulator — alternatively Microsoft might be contacted for a possible exchange to MS Office for Mac;
- A purchaser of a new Vodafone modem was assured that the password provided was unique to the individual modem;
- If a Mac and Apple TV were operating on the same Wi-Fi location, films stored on the Mac could be displayed on Apple TV.
What’s new in the world of Apple
John Maguire, Committee member, reported:
- the top five Apple events of 2011 were, according to Ted Landers of Mac Observer, the advents of: iPhone 4S and Siri; iCloud and iOS5; the OS-ification of OSX Lion; and the iPad 2. The year was also notable for the passing of Steve Jobs;
- Rumours: iTunes on bookstore/EPUB; possible update to MacPro; advent of Apple-branded television;
- New happenings: MacWorld three-day media event on January 26;
- Netflix now available in Ireland (currently less content than in the US but only 6.99 euro per month);
- Jony Ive, senior Vice-President, Industrial Design, at Apple, received at KBE in the UK New Year’s honours list.
Photography
Tom Mac Mahon, Committee member, took a light-hearted look at the art, starting with a mini quiz on the identities of the authors of a number of iconic and universally familiar photographs published in past years. He went on to illustrate the often sadly unrecognised truth that the art of photography resides in the photographer and not the camera by an impressive display of photographs achieved by relatively simple devices such as a cheap disposable camera, simple fixed lens cameras and the lower end of the more sophisticated cameras. That truth still held despite the advent over the years of digital photography and such aids to the photographically inept as automatic focus, antivibration systems and face recognition. In conclusion, he reviewed an amusing collection of Photoshop disasters perpetrated in glossy magazines where tweakery had resulted in subjects losing, elongating or acquiring extra body parts or facial characteristics. Those interested were directed to the following links:
- Photoshop Disasters
- PSD: Photoshop Disasters
- You are not a photographer
- The New Yorker article on photo retouching
Keynote presentation
Noel Hayes, of CompuB, drew attention to the important fact that every Mac with OSX came with built-in features (see System Preferences -> Universal Access) to assist those with disabilities affecting vision, hearing, or motor or learning skills to access the computer and make the most of what it had to offer. He demonstrated the operation of VoiceOver, which in the case of the visually impaired enabled them, with complete keyboard control of the computer (i.e. no mouse), to browse the web, chat, send and receive emails, edit text documents and much more by providing spoken descriptions of screen displays, and reading out text of documents text and of text as it was being typed in. Sound output for Braille input was provided as well as to a separately available Braille reader accessory for those with hearing as well as visual difficulties. The features provided also assisted collaboration between blind and sighted colleagues. Apple was therefore in the forefront of ensuring universal access to the benefits of computer usage.
Clockwise, from top left hand corner: Peter O’Reilly and John Kelly; slide presentation; Tom Mac Mahon; and Noel Hayes, CompuB.
December 2011 meeting (and Christmas party)
The December meeting of ClubMac was held in Old Belvedere Rugby Club — due to the continuing non-availability of Merrion Cricket Club — on Wednesday, December 7, 2011.
Training session
Noel Davidson took an enthusiastic class through their paces in iPhoto.
Technical Q&A
In Peter O’Reilly’s absence, Henry Leperlier, committee member, took charge of this session and dealt with the following issues:
- Transferring iTunes songs
- Setting the default paper print size to A4
- Problems with hard drives
What’s new in the world of Apple
Tom Martin, Club Chairman, outlined the following:
- Apple’s latest financial results
- Rumours of a 15 inch MacBook Air
- A possible alternative to MobileMe Gallery: Zangzing.com
- Apple’s new store designs in New York
Noel Davidson’s top Christmas presents for Mac fans
Noel Davidson gave us his top 10 favourite things he would like to see under his Christmas tree. So, in reverse order, here they are:
No. 10: Apple TV
No. 9: iPad 2
No. 8: Disney Spotlight Karaoke
No. 7: Parrot AR Drone
No. 6: iTunes: the 12 days of Christmas
No. 5: ION Piano Apprentice
No. 4: Silverlit Toys — Enzo Ferrari
No. 3: Atari game machine
No. 2: iPhone 4S
No. 1: Siri!
Guest presentation: Patrick Mc Namee
Keynote speaker, Emeritus professor Patrick Mc Namee, gave an insightful presentation on how he had converted to the Mac platform three years ago and how it had transformed his life. Patrick demonstrated the ePub, Mobilizing Macs: A Guide to Using Apple for the Liberation of Individuals, which he written (soon to be available on iTunes) and a new course for people new to the Mac.
For more information on Patrick’s book, visit his web site: Mobilizing Macs
To download the ePub best practices document that Patrick recommended for Pages, follow this link: ePub Best Practices sample for Pages
Christmas party
To celebrate the end of our Autumn season we had a draw in which we raffled a biography of Steve Jobs, the digital edition of Patrick Mc Namee’s book, free ClubMac subscription for 2010 and three copies of the new CD produced by St. Bartholomew’s Choir of which Richard Bannister (of this parish) is a member.
Not only that, we had our usual high quality Christmas feast of hot savouries and wine (special thanks to Sylvia and Henry) which were enjoyed by all.
November 2011 meeting
Due to flood damage in Merrion Cricket Club (see picture below), the November meeting of ClubMac was held in Old Belvedere Rugby Club.
Training session
Noel Davidson’s training session also was a victim of the weather. His planned talk on iPhoto has been re-scheduled for the December meeting.
Technical Q&A
Hosted by club member, Peter O’Reilly, this session considered:
- how to rescue a large MS Word text project after an irretrievable crash during an attempt to save it to a USB flash drive; the file concerned had not been saved first to the hard disk of the iMac running Snow Leopard on which it had been created. Suggestions: if the Word version concerned post-dated 2004 its autosave function would have saved text on the fly, but not perhaps with a recognisable name in a recognisable place — a Spotlight search for a specific but uncommon word in the body of the document might find it; otherwise try opening the file in another application, e.g. TextEdit or Pages or seek assistance from MS Word Customer Care;
- how to achieve a sync to an iPhone of a selected portion only of a large music file stored on iCloud;
- pros and cons of upgrading a 3-year-old MacBook Pro to Lion — points to remember: Lion’s use of 64-bit processing might mean older applications would not work; at least 20-30% of free disk space would be needed for the upgrade to succeed; care would be needed to ensure word processing and iPhoto files were transferred successfully; it was advisable to clone the current contents of the hard disk to an external drive to ensure a safe return in case of trouble — in other words, if the current system was working well why change it.
What’s new in the world of Apple
Tom Martin, Club Chairman, outlined the following:
- The death of Steve Jobs which happened on the day of our October meeting;
- iPhone 4S launch weekend: 4 million sales;
- iPod: 10 years old this month;
- Apple Q4 results: $23.8 billion in sales; ¢6.62 billion in profits;
- Rumour 1: Apple HDTV?
- Rumour 2: End of the road for the Mac Pro?
Scanning
John Maguire, Committee member, demonstrated the use of scanners to turn analogue pictures in the form of prints, negatives or slides into digital versions for computer storage and editing. The right choice of scanner, where models ranged from ultra cheap low-end to mind-blowingly expensive high-end, was important because of the need to provide sufficient resolution to ensure no loss of picture detail. A mid-range machine providing 300 dpi would be sufficient for ordinary home use, while 1200 dpi would enable later enlargement and editing of pictures. Pre-cleaning of pictures before scanning generally did more harm than good and was not advised.
Aperture
Stephanie Joy, Committee member, reviewed the advantages of using Aperture as a photograph storage and management system that also operated seamlessly with Photoshop. Aperture’s ability to divide a large picture library into projects focused on particular topics made for ease of handling of separate assignments. Raw pictures could be imported into a given project, displayed in various ways and then graded by appeal and quality for further editing through Photoshop until a final selection of finished items could be made.
Guest presentation: Grant Howie, Grants of Baggot Street
Grant Howie described the work of Grants of Baggot Street, which had been 25 years in the photographic processing business. It had responded to changing technology and the decline in film-based photography by moving into other processing fields such as digital colour printing, poster printing, document printing, archival printing and the scanning and archiving of old photographs from prints and negatives. Professional contract work was carried out for the National Gallery and the RTE collections and an interesting demonstration was given what this involved. He reviewed what might be entailed for the individual customer embarking on the scanning, enhancing and output on CD or DVD on a personal collection of prints, negatives and slides. He concluded with a special photo processing offer to ClubMac members.
Special thanks to John, Stephanie and Tom
We owe a debt of gratitude to John Maguire, Stephanie Joy and Tom Mac Mahon for organising the November meeting.
October 2011 meeting
ClubMac held its October 2011 meeting at Merrion Cricket Club on Wednesday, 5 October.
Training session
Noel Davidson’s regular training session held before the main meeting focussed on Lion.
Appeal results
Tom Mac Mahon, Committee member, reported that, further to the appeal he had made in September, a home for the donated Macs he has been recycling over the years has now been secured. The Macs were now going to needy schools in Haiti; in the first stage of their journey they were to be loaded from their present storage facility to a shipping container on Friday, 7 October. He thanked all those who had contributed Macs in the past, and for the help received with the current shipment.
Technical Q&A
this was hosted by Peter O’Reilly, Club member, and considered:
- ROS operating problems this year with Safari and, at times, with FireFox, could be due to conflict with recent upgrades of ROS and/or existing apps affecting the browser (to prevent the latter remove current FireFox and download a new copy) — remember that accessing ROS involved interaction with an existing database and not simply an ordinary website;
- possible reason for a perfectly scanned file reaching an email recipient incomplete was that Mac OS scanning software had been used instead of the scanning software proper to the printer/scanner;
- non-receipt of an emailed scanned file could be the result of an incompatible format — ensure file was scanned into .jpeg or .pdf format;
- before emailing .docx files ensure the intended recipient had the relevant version of MS Word, many users have not upgraded — the simple solution is to save the document as a .doc file before sending;
- to import a group of photos from iPhone to Mac use the connecting USB cable supplied with the iPhone — photos can be imported to iPhoto or to the iTunes library;
- where a number of mobile.me accounts were shared by a number of Apple products (Macs, iPhone, etc), designating one specific account as the master account would ensure that all other accounts were synced to that one so that all accounts would be correlated;
- some regret was expressed that not all features of mobil.me (e.g. the Gallery) would be carried over when it was replaced by iCloud.
What’s new in the world of Apple
Tom Martin, Club Chairman, was fortunate in that Apple had a major media event the day before, otherwise he would have very little to report:
- Launch of iPhone 4S and the new Siri, voice recognition/artificial intelligence app;
- Updates to the iPod Touch;
- Minor update to the iPod Nano;
- The new iCloud service will be launched on October 12;
- Some interesting data on Apple sales that had been revealed by the company at yesterday’s media event.
Useful utilities
Tom Martin gave a presentation on Dragon Dictate for the Mac 2.5, the major speech recognition software from Nuance. This type of software had always been at the top of his “wish list”, because although he was a fast and reasonably accurate typist (50–60 w.p.m.), repetitive strain injury-related issues were coming to the fore. The prospect of being able to dictate to your computer was very appealing; additionally, information provided by Nuance indicated that talking is three times faster than typing (!) and hence he was keen to try it out.
The current version of Dragon Dictate requires Mac OSX 10.6, 2 GB RAM and 3 GB free hard disc space. A USB headset microphone is provided along with the software. The product retails at €200 in the Apple Ireland online store.
Getting started was fairly straightforward: you have to set up a profile in order that the programme gets used to your voice. You effectively “train” the programme to recognise your voice. The programme can be used in programmes such as Microsoft Word and the iWork suite (Tom used the programme to dictate this Keynote presentation). You can use the programme in a number of modes, including Dictation and Command modes (the latter allows you to speak commands to your computer e.g. Open New Document, Save, etc).
Tom reported slow progress at first but then Nuance sent him a training DVD which greatly speeded up things. The DVD cost €20 and was well produced.
The advantages of Dragon Dictate are that it is easy to set up, the training materials are of a high standard and there are good tools for correcting mistakes. The disadvantages stem from the long learning period and the need to change how you work (when you dictate text to your computer you must remember to voice the punctuation, e.g. COMMA, FULL STOP, etc).
There was a lively exchange of views from the audience, some of whom were familiar with the programme.
For more information on Dragon Dictate for the Mac, visit Nuance web site
Keynote presentation: Lion
John Kelly, Committee member, (see here on the right with co-presenter, Brian Redmond) reviewed the salient aspects of Lion, the eighth version of MacOS X and demonstrated the major items among the 250 new features there. Multitouch provided screen management (scrolling, page turning etc.) by means of trackpad gestures. Provision was made for full-screen viewing of apps with this facility. Mission Control combined the features of Exposé, Space and Dashboard to give overview and navigation of all running apps and open windows; Launchpad provided a view of all apps on the Mac concerned for click and launch. Resume ensured that after quitting an app all windows open before the quit would reopen on relaunching the app. Autosave and Versions provide automatic saving of any file being worked on with the ability to revert to all previous stages of the file’s creation for revision or retrieval of changes. AirDrop provided for WiFi transfer of files between any two Macs in the same locality. Mail had a new wide full-screen layout, an improved search function and a conversation view. Lion was available by download from the App Store at €24. The downside was that this required having Snow Leopard installed for access to the App Store and sufficient download speed and capacity to handle a 4 GB input. The thinking behind that approach was that the economies achieved by sidestepping printing, CD copying and shipping costs made the sale price more accessible.
Brian Redmond, Club member, mentioned some of the downsides he had experienced with his move to Lion on its launch. Not all printer driver upgrades had been included in the overnight download owing to its size; they would have to be sought from the printer manufacturer. He regretted the loss of Spaces and did not find Mission Control a satisfactory replacement as it had difficulty in handling more than six spaces. Before making the decision to download, he would have appreciated a list of the specific features that had been axed from Snow Leopard.
September 2011 meeting
The first meeting of the 2010-2011 season took place on Wednesday, September 7, in Merrion Cricket Club.
ClubMac chairman, Tom Martin, opened the proceedings by welcoming new members and guests, and outlined the club’s exciting line-up of meetings for the Autumn season.
Training session
A training session was provided as usual by Noel Davidson before the main meeting.
Appeal
Tom Mac Mahon, Committee member, who has over the years been recycling donated Macs for dispatch to a school in Tanzania, now finds that the school is currently unable to accept further shipments because of ongoing building work at a time when his storage facility in Dublin is being closed down. He appealed for suggestions for a good destination for these Macs. A couple of proposals were put forward at the meeting; anyone else with ideas please contact Tom at 086-3390301 or tmacmahon@eircom.net.
Technical Q&A
Peter O’Reilly hosted the questions and answers session which featured the following queries:
What to do if shutdown was blocked by Mail or Safari, how to get rid of empty email messages that refused to be deleted from an iPhone, how to use a laptop with a dongle as a WiFi source for an iPhone, obviating problems with access to certain websites by keeping FireFox as a second-string browser, reason for an Irish Times iPhone app shutdown would have to be sought from the third party servicing it, was it better to shutdown Mac or leave to sleep at end or work session (opinion out on this unless moving the Mac), a good way to speed up a Mac was to clear all icons sitting on the desktop, particularly if in large numbers, to a folder elsewhere.
What’s new in the world of Apple
Tom Martin had the relatively easy job of reviewing up all of the many new developments that had taken place over the summer; these included:
- The release of OS X Lion 10.7
- iCloud
- New version of iOS
- Updated MacBook Air range
- Updated Mac Mini range
- New ThunderBolt display
- Steve Jobs resigns as Apple CEO; Tim Cook takes over as CEO
My favourite iPhone apps
A new feature in our monthly meeting is My Favourite iPhone/iPad Apps in which we invite a member to present their top 5 apps.
Unfortunately our scheduled speaker was unable to present. However, we did get a fascinating taster from long-time member, Joe Fletcher, who demonstrated how using an app on his iPhone he could control a recently-purchased quadricopter, the AR.Drone.
For more information on this app, visit AR Drone Parrot
Useful utilities
Tom Martin presented a session on his experience of producing a printed photo book with iPhoto. Apple allow iPhoto users to produce printed versions of their photographs in a variety of formats: hard and soft cover books, cards and calendars. Tom’s photo book was a hard cover with its own dust jacket. It was relatively easy to produce and took 5-6 days to arrive.
ClubMac is planning to produce its own Photo Book of the meetings held during this season.
For more information on photo books, visit this page
Guest presentation
Dean Lochner of the Bondi Group, which specialised in the sale and service of Macs and training in their use, emphasised the need for all Mac users to pay attention to regular data back-up to prevent such not unusual happenings as hard disk failure, accidental deletion, physical damage as well as theft, fire and other outside events from turning a nuisance into a catastrophe. The greater capacity of external disk drives and their lower cost nowadays currently made them the method of choice for ongoing back-up in tandem with Apple”s Time Machine, which had shipped with the last three versions of OS X. For further peace of mind, in case both Mac and Time Machine disk vanished together, the Mac’s hard disk should be backed up regularly to off-site storage — either by uploading to a cloud (although this could be hampered by slow upload and retrieval rates) or by creating a clone (using Carbon Copy Cloner from bombich.com) on a spare hard disk.
For more information on the Bondi Group, click here.