SVMUG — June 18, 2007

Introduction - Cortland

New people

— Kathy - retired teacher — used Mac since 1984

— John - XP refugee

— Craig - Unix and Windows user migrating to Mac

— Susan - stumbled across the web site while looking for photoshop users

We are now providing extension cords, to allow more people to use wall power during the meeting.

Please join the SubEthaEdit internet service to watch or help write the meeting minutes.

News

New Mac Book Pro has an LED backlight display — 15 inch only. However, the 17 inch has a speed increase to 2.4 GHz from 2.14 GHz.

— comment: the LED backlight seems to be very directional, with the anti-glare.

Leopard will be 64 bit. The core animation will really speed up applications. The Time Machine application will feature ease-of-setup for any document storage. The ZFS (Zetta File System) will not be the default, but will be available. You can not yet boot from a ZFS volume.

iPhone will have a scratch resistant glass screen, and much improved battery life. The competitive comparison seems very favorable.

The Apple stock has bumped up on the news of the iPhone improvements.

18 million have expressed strong interest in buying an iPhone.

WWDC

Safari 3 (beta) is released, and is available for Windows as well (doubtless so that web 2.0 programmers can test web applications for use on the iPhone.) It does have about half a dozen security holes, but Apple patched most of these by Friday. Beta is beta — not a finished product.

Safari 3 works with Goggle web applications — a definite plus.

Dyed-in-wool IE users are showing interest in Safari.

All Things Digital Conference featured a Gates & Jobs panel. The event is available as a podcast from iTunes Store. 90 minutes long.

“Cover Art” is being integrated into the Finder.

Woz will be presenting at the Pleaseton User Group.

Opening an Account and Setting Up an SVMUG Link

Charles has prepared a handout sheet that explains how to use our SVMUG bookmarks area on www.bookmarkall.com . We strongly encourage members to use this resource.

Sparky: we are trying something new, which we hope you will use all the time. BookmarkAll is a specialized forum, devoted to bookmarks, on the WWW, where we can share links to resources of interest to our members.

1. Register.
2. Search for SVMUG
3. Open the forum
4. Add it to your favorites.
5. Setup your user profile.

You can send the forum moderator suggestions for links to include. These will be reviewed and added to the appropriate subtopic area.

— Foxcloud — plug-in for FireFox

Presentation - Parallels

Jason Krilich — National Sales Manager

Parallels is a division of SWSoft
700 employees
Seattle based
launched 2005
very highly rated in the media
    -- including MacWorld Best in Show

Parallels supports industry-leading Intel-VT virtualization technology

The goal is to run Windows applications on the Mac, not so much running Windows. The “coherence” mode allows the display of the application windows on the OS X desktop, without displaying the Windows desktop.

Also the virtualization is enabled for a wide operating systems, such as Linux, various flavors of Unix, etc.

New: drag and drop from Windows to OS X. 3D Graphics — hardware accelerated. 3D graphic applications are now well supported (AutoCAD, Studio Max, and so forth.) Smart Select integrates the “guest” Windows machine into the Mac machine. Open any file from either system, to the application of your choice. The appropriate application under the appropriate system is automatically invoked. For example, double clicking an Office document in the Mac Finder can open the file in the Windows environment. This also applies to e-mail attachments.

Transporter: takes everything from a PC and creates the workspace files for Parallels on your Mac. This tool is bundled with Parallels.

Snapshots: protect against mishaps — saves a complete record of the virtual machine, allowing you to “roll” your machine back to a stable state, in the event of a crash or virus attack.

Security Manager: control the interaction between the virtual machine and the Mac OS X, to prevent security weakness of the guest machine from affecting the Mac. The manager can be set in stages, from complete isolation, to little isolation.

$79.00

Break

User Presentation

Excel spreadsheet that will search the San Jose Mercury News RSS feed. — John Ward — retired from Westinghouse, Sunnyvale — from a factory that is one hundred years old! Made 6000 horsepower reduction gears. Also made flash evaporators, slightly longer than a railroad car. — currently volunteers for a senior group. He needs to send condolence letters, but must confirm the obituary first, for obvious reasons. This is done by searching the obituary list from the San Jose Mercury News. This is done with an Excel spreadsheet. One sheet contains the group member names (about four hundred entries). From the web site, the list of obituary names can be pulled. He keeps the appropriate URL as hyperlink function in the Excel spreadsheet. This opens his web browser to the list of current names. A copy and paste operation transfers these to the Excel spreadsheet, at the bottom of the members list. The transferred names are placed into bold font. When the list is freshly sorted, each bold obituary name are easy to find, juxtaposed to the member’s name.

Q&A

1. Need spreadsheet to replace Appleworks 6, with unicode extended fonts.

   Excel handles this. Also, Google online apps may work as well.

   NeoOffice is good as well.

2. iPhoto — I need freeform tags on the photos, more than just fixed keywords.

Bear in mind that iPhoto is intended as a low end system, as compared to Cumulus or other systems. However, you can use the title and comments box.

1. CS3 — running on a G5 tower — any issues?

   No one seems to have any experience.

2. Podcasts — can I join podcasts so that the podcasts flow from one to the next in sequence on on iPod.

   Make a playlist — that should work.

3. G5 iMac, running Tiger. What virus protection makes sense?

There are a lot of anti-virus tools, but none are really necessary or suitable. Keep your software update on and install the updates as such are offered. Note that MS software are an exception — you must setup the Office suite to check for its own updates. Use the MS “check for updates” menu item.

If an Airport base station firmware update is fetched by the Apple Software Update manager, you will need to launch the Apple Airport Utility in order to transfer the new firmware to each base station on your network.

Beware of applications sent via e-mail or chat. Beware of the source of downloads on the web.

1. I can not write to my hard drive in my iBook. I have to reboot to solve this.

Try running “fix permissions” and “repair disk”.

Also try SpinRite v6.0 — but it runs only from a PC!

AppleJack is a useful troubleshooting tool. This is a command line tool.

1. How can I create a desktop icon to open a web page, e.g. an Internet Radio channel?

If it uses Flash, this is difficult. A Safari bookmark is the next best alternative to the desktop icon.

To create a link icon in general, just drag from the Safari address bar to the desktop.

1. Why are the fan, for the three fans in an iMac, at different speeds?

The fans are controlled by separate thermal sensors, for specific regions in the computer.

Also firmware updates affecting fans have been issued — check software updates for the latest version.

1. How can duplicated files be found on the Mac?

There are several applications: Duplicate Image Detector, Dupseek, iSweep, Spring Cleaning…

1. Is there a good tool for video screen capture?

SnapEZ Pro.

1. Defragment-ing applications?

Drive Genius — but usually defragment-ing is NOT necessary.

Wrap-up and Raffle