SVMUG Meeting - October 15, 2007

Moderator: Charles Gousha

New People

-- Francis - moved to Silicon Valley in June - joining the group now - found us in the Apple user group listings.

-- Vinny - just checking us out - see what is up.

News and Events

iMac freeze problem - Apple acknowledges the problem and will resolve it before the end of this month. Apparently 10.4.10 is a problem for G5 iMacs. The ATI graphic drivers may be at fault.

Leopard is expected to ship in October. However, no definite word yet. Some rumors said the GM candidate is ready. Other rumors say to expect it on Friday, October 26.

iPhone 1.1.1 update added many nice new features, but killed hacked iPhones. Hacks included setting up a different service provider, or enabling third party applications.

A class action lawsuit has been filed that claims iPhone owners are unfairly disadvantaged on two issues: (1) developing and installing third party applications, and (2) using the iPhone under cell contracts of carriers other than AT&T. The suit is essentially claiming that Apple and AT&T required purchasers to agree to terms that were not typical of the given product market segment, i.e. cell phones. Accordingly purchasers expectations were unfairly interfered by this contract, which many purchasers may not have understood. A counter argument is that six months prior to the iPhone release, the terms were clearly and repeatably spelled out during various product presentations.

This kind of lawsuit is typical of many product related lawsuits in that the goal is to get an out-of-court settlement regardless of the actual merit of the case. The merit may in fact be obviously non-existant, but to avoid the costs of even the preliminary response to such a filing, many respondents will simply cough up some cash.

Similar actions are also done for patents and copyrights -- the law office is the motivated party for the suit, hoping to gain considerable settlement fees, while the complaint is under the name of some one who is essentially a professional complainer. For example, some law offices keep a person on staff who owns a single share of stock in many different companies, just so this person can be a complaining shareholder in the event that the corporation seemingly does something that might be actionable in a court of law.

Some members do in fact feel that the iPhone restrictions are unfair. Other members noted that Apple did not at any time deceive the customers. Others moan and groaned that once again the dialog headed toward the conflict of two opposing yet fully righteous points of view.

[Late post meeting development: Steve Jobs announces the availability of a software development kit, for third party developers to use to make applications for the iPhone. Persons who have examined the software on existing iPhones note that there in fact has always been a utility in there for the installation of such third party applications. Finally, in France as required by French law, iPhones are to be sold for use with carrier.]

Will the Google phone have an impact? The Google phone is required to be open source. Nokia is also promoting open source.

Al Gore - Apple Board Member - has received the Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental efforts - Steve Jobs is very pleased.

The fake Steve Jobs blog purports to say what Steve Jobs might say if but he could. The author is one of the financial analysts for Forbes Magazine. Even though his real name is now known, the blog continues - and the real Steve Jobs is said to be a big fan. A book has just been released, "Options". The author will be appearing at Books, Inc. in Mountain View, in November.

Music companies are starting to build thier own online stores, hoping to pull control away from Apple. Most of these tend to be subscription services in one form or another. Hidden surcharges seem to be the norm.

Microsoft has announced Zune, version 2. Yawn. They have maybe 2% of the market.

MacWorld Expo - second week of January - free exhibit badges are no longer available. The user group discount code is 08-D-UG01

Presentation

Philip Goward - Smile on My Mac - PDFpen - PDF editor

Philip is a co-founder.

Productivity tools

PDFpen $49.95 allows the editing of PDF files. Allows you to keep working with PDF forms an all-electronic process. A pro version, $99.95, allows creation of PDF forms.

PDF is usually thought of as a fixed layout document format. Adobe Acrobat allows authoring and editing PDF, but at $299.00, this is too expensive for casual users.

Misconception: you can not add anything to a PDF.
-- With PDFpen, you can add new text boxes "on top" of an existing PDF layout. Images can be placed and resized.Two PDF files can be joined. You can also add comments and proofreading marks, and use a highlighting pen in various colors.

A drawing tool allows the addition of hand signatures.

Misconception: You can not change stuff in a PDF.
-- PDFpen allows the selection and changing of text, e.g. corrections to the text. This feature is intended for small changes, and does not reflow the document. Also, it can not use the embedded fonts - so font matching can be a problem.

Misconception: you can not merge or split a PDF
-- PDFpen allows you to drag pages from one document to another, merging the documents. By dragging to a new document, you can split out the desired pages. You may also re-order pages in a document by dragging pages within a document. However, the page numbers will not be updated.

Misconception: you can not fill out and save a PDF form (from a reader).
-- PDFpen does save form data.

Other Smile On My Mac products:
-- DiscLabel - make CD labels
-- browseback - stores a PDF of every web page you go to.
-- pagesender - Fax or e-mail from the print menu
-- textexpander - program your own keystroke entry of text snippets and images.

Special discount for SVMUG - 20% discount on any product. Use this link:

http://www.smileonmymac.com/svmug/

This expires on October 31, 2007!

System requirements are OS X 10.4, universal binary.

Break

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Member Presentation - Mike Ellard

Time Management Spreadsheet

Allocate time to different tasks, and then use the spreadsheet to log time on each task, which might be broken into different segments throughout the day. For example, laundry might involve fifteen minutes now, another twenty minutes later, etc.

Mike used a lot of interesting Excel features, which he will relate.

Excel has a function called "paste special". This provides for transposition, and mapped actions.

The format painter allows the changing of formats in a drag-selection to match another cell's format.

Custom number formats allow, for example, the creation of symbols that appear or change based on the numerical value of the cell.

Many of these features are not yet available in Numbers.

Q&A

Geek Cruises - the Mac Mania Cruise is in November and Charles will be attending. We will wait for his return for a report.

1. Hard drive on Airport Extreme has become unaccessible -- it can be found by the basestation.

Try disk utility, try unplugging and replugging the drive.

2. Acrobat Reader prints all the images red - even though on the screen the images look fine.

We do not know.

3. Can my iPhone be used to take home synched music and play this music on a work Mac, i.e. from the iPhone playlist?

No, there is no disk mode for the iPhone. You could take the headphone output from the iPhone, and digitize it using the a digitizer such as Griffen iMic.

4. Apple model numbers end with LL/A or ML/A, etc. What do these codes mean?

These codes indicate a nation or country for localization of the product, and a revision.

5. My weekly backup has recently swollen to 17 GB, using Retrospect. Can this be returned to a small size?

Retrospect is supposed to be incremental. It may be doing full backups, or it might be confused about the change dates on the files.

6. Is hotmail being phased out for Mac users? I get alot of error messages when using hotmail.com. The site seems to reference Windows for the "new" hotmail.

Maybe the ISP is blocking some ports?

7. iPhoto - when I open an image in iPhoto and edit it in Photoshop, and "save as" under a new name to make a new version, the iPhoto image seems to disappear.

The iPhoto database has lost the file, because of the "save as" operation. You should not do that. Duplicate the image first, inside of iPhoto, then edit with Photoshop, doing a regular save.

8. Wireless basestations in a relayed setup need to use the same password scheme. What is a good policy?

Use the strongest scheme (WPA vs. WEP) that is possible for your installation.

Raffle & Closing Remarks