Silicon Valley Macintosh User Group: Nov 2007 meeting

We will be showing Leopard: Nick Brazzi, from the Palo Alto Apple store.

Introducing new members. We have a couple.

We hope to have Jim Heid do a video iCHat here, and in-person at a later meeting.

We are doing regular Q&A. Also vendor Q&A and we will pick the forms and hand it to the vendor.

And we will then finish up and wrap up.

Dave Strom is taking notes.

Introduction of volunteers; talk to us if you want to do so.

NEWS AND RUMORS

Leopard is now out. A guy was 5th in line; the gal bedside him had her MacBook out and the net went out (power was gone), emergency lighting and remote credit card terminals still worked. Another was 200th in line at Emeryville. He left at about 6:45; they still had about 50 t-shirts left. Time machine (as of then) did not work over Airport Extreme. It was a mob; a lot lined up at the checkout counter. He feels he has 6 or 7 clients who should have it. Another at Valley Fair; the line there was pleasant. There is a We Fix Macs at Valley Fair, and they also handed out t-shirts. There seemed to be Mac entrepenuers working the crowds. (Gamers, repairs, etc.) We Fix Macs near Macys at Valley Fair (well, there when one of us saw it). If you want warrenty work, maybe an Apple store would be better.

Some people fell in love right away, others felt it was a bit buggy and might be a little more Windows-like.

First Leopard update is out (10.5.1).

10.4.11 is out. Includes Safair 3. (One guy mentioned that he had trouble with Safari 3. Well, he could try Firefox to get a browser open?)

Final Cut Express 4 is out; now $200. Includes more support for HD.

iPhone released in Europe (France next month). Someone got a court order to stop iPhone slaes in Germany because you cannot bundle with just one service provider in Germany.

The update to the iPhone stopped the hackers, until the hackers said so what and released another hack. And there will be a 3rd software development kit in Feb 2008, so there will be native 3rd party applications in the future.

Apple is getting a lot of complaints about the AT&T and Apple contract (being stuck witht he one vendor). Apple gets a percent of the AT&T contract, so if you hack it into a 3rd party vendor, Apple and AT&T do not get $$$ from it.

Charles and Linda were on a cruise in the Carribean; no wireless of any kind. Although thye had VERY SLOW satellite service.

The Brominaded Flame Retardant group complained about Greanpeace's complaints about toxic materials in the iPhone, since it is locked up inside the iPhone and not very accessible.

You can adjust your iPhone AT&T plan.

Someone's iPhone died during an upgrade (had to be restored), and the backup during the iPhone upgrade does not include address book, calendar book, etc. About every third photo was missing, and some photos on the phone were corrupted. He resetted from scratch and re-synced, and that worked . But he did lose his favorites (music, etc.).When the iPhone backup is happening, it might not be backing up some stuff you like.

MacWorld Expo. Someone feels that a place like iFixit might supply free passes still. Another guy got some form PeachPit. Some MUG centers are offering a discount. An exhibits pass can be half off with this code: 08-D-UG01.
Free passes for MacWorld: 08-G-PC260 until Dec 11.
Registration ends Dec 11. And mailing costs a little extra; there will be longer lines for

Might be a slight problem with the MacBook keyboard (losing keystrokes). The GPU was imporved, but it is not nearly as powerful as the dedicated graphics of the MacBook Pros (gaming is improved over the old MacBook, however).

The MacBook no longer has a separate Enter key. Average user does not use it anyhow. (Command-return still substitutes for Enter.)

MicroSoft 2008 will be here in Feb 2008. Bento (Filemaker) will be here for January 2008.

A presentation on Mac OS X server? They do presentations on that at the Apple Stores. (Might be alittle high-end for this group.)

PRESENTATION

Nick Brazzi from the Palo Alto store! Yay!!! He is a creative at the Palo Alto Apple Store. (They do one-to-one training there.)

Three (four?) sections that Nick divided it into:

1. Finder upgrades
2. Bundled applications (Mail, Time Machine, others).
3. Will not talk about iChat because we hope to have an iChat talk later.
4. Networking tools built into Leopard.
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1: Finder (General Usability)
When we move our windows, we get a reflection effect. There is Core Animation, allows animation to happen very smoothly. Core animation will allow much nicer animated effects (and other animation stuff).
New button for views (we have icon, list, columns). New one: Cover Flow view. Like the one in iTunes where you browse music by looking at album covers. It helps you find what you are looking for a lot faster. If you find a PDF, you can even page through the PDF pages in this view without opening the PDF. You can also watch the video in this cover flow view. The really really cool feature is Quick Look, where you can open a full-size view of the doc without opening the application (hit the space bar); you can more easily see if this if the file you want! You can do full screen video without even opening the video application. You can navigate to other files and use Quick Look on them. You can view a lot pf picutes in a tile view, and can hit a button to easily add to iPhoto. You can add the photo to iPhoto from any of the views.

STACKS

A stack is a folder on your computer. You get a Downloads folder in Leopard (downloads go there by default). You can pop open a window to see the docs in the folder. Can see them in a fan or a grid view. You can click on a single file, drag a file from a grid, drop a file into the stack (into the Documents folder, for example).

What is you have TONS of stuff in your Dock? Well, Nick looked at the 5 iLife apps. He opened his hard drive. Made a new folder, iLife aliases. (An alias is an icon link to another file, often an application.) He went to Garage Band, made an alias for each iLife app. Then dragged that folder into the Dock, and it became a stack. It has to be on the same side of the dividing line as the Trash folder (right side). This can really help to unclutter the Dock.

SPACES

Another feature that speeds up work: Spaces. When you open a lot of applications, the screen gets cluttered. Spaces is a new icon in the Dock. Set Up Spaces first time, enable Spaces. You start with 4 spaces (can make more). Then you get 4 separate screens and if you click on one, that screen fills the screen. And you can drag open apps from Space to Space.

What is you don't remember where your app is? Click it on the Dock, and you jump to that space.

A way to use Spaces a little more efficiently: We used to have Dashboard and Expose in sys prefs, now Spaces and Expose. He started assigning applications to different Spaces. He put iLife apps on one space, Safari on another space, etc. He opened Safari and it opened in that space; opened iLife app and jumps to that space.

2: THE BUNDLED APPLICATIONS

The Mail application. You can also go to gmail, yahoo mail, from your Mail. You can send and receive all your mail from Mail. Click on new message: there is a Show Stationary button. You get preset designs for your email message. Like a cute party announcement (you can drag in your own picture, and put in text into the form's text boxes. You are sending an HTML-rich email. If the person you are sending it to does not have HTML email, they will not see the stationary. Most people are capabile of reading HTML-rich email. Yes, this email looks great on an iPhone.

Notes in Mail: he did a quick grocery list (and I notice it looks a lot like the old Newton notes!). He has Notes in the Mail that he can see easily. It is sending an email to yourself. If you go to your Inbox, you see your Notes. You can view the Notes on the iPhone OK; the Notes on the iPhone do not sync with the Leopard Mail notes.

ToDo in Mail: Hit the ToDo button. He entered a Car Wash ToDo. Well, we had ToDos in Tiger int he Calendar. But if you jump to Calendar, you see the same ToDo list you do in Mail. The coolest part is he could forward an email to himself, and he wants to remember Nov 19, so he highlights the text, hits the ToDo button, and that highlighted text becomes a ToDo item.

If someone emails you and has the address and phone number, andyou want it in your Address Book, there is a data detector. Point your mouse at it (address book, phone number), outline appears, and you get an option to add that to your address book.

iCHat: we are trying a video iChat now.

You now have have a lot of AIM chats open at once. (We had some trouble

Q&A: QuickLook will play most any time of file. Will play anything that QuickTime understands (and with Flip4Mac, plays WMV files also).
Migration Assistant still there. You can migrate data from older Mac, etc. And at startup, you can do option form there. Else run Migration Assistant.
Spaces: In Firefox in several spaces, which will it go to? The space that the front window is in. Is there a problem in the Leopard firewall? Seal all incoming data transmissions, and was not sealing all of them. 10.5.1 addresses this (and another issue was fixed), and fixed the Finder move bug.
Any changes in Fink or MacPorts? Look at the Fink website for that.
What UNIX apps have changed? Nick is not an under-the-hood guy.
QuickLook works with MS Word, Pages, and even stuff in the Trash. (Nick does not know how that works; is Word showing in a Pages view?) Nick thinks a Photoshop doc might also show up.
Apache version in Leopeard?
Perfomance: Nick's Mac Mini G4, 1 gig RAM, works fine. But check the system requirements first!
Can you have 2 spaces open on desktop? Spaces works by having full view open at one time. It is not like two monitors. Well, dual monitors would still be one space. You can see them all, but only work at one at a time. (Different wallpaper on Spaces would be nice, so not have it yet!)

iChat!!! with Jim Heid
He got it working, although Charles video was frozen. Jim Heid, Mac journalist.
Jim became a Mac vendor. Apple contracted Jim to develope video tutorials. He outlines them and wrote a lot of them. (Jim has rather crummy bandwidth, so maybe that hurts Charles side).
The screen sharing, if he had good connectivity, he could beam his screen to your screen.
iChat Theatre: share an iPhoto slideshow over an iChat connection. Share iPhoto with iChat Theatre, select an album with a slideshow, and he is showing us his slideshow. Family members seeing a slideshow from far away.
You can share a file with iChat Theatre. He had a clip of some engineers (the Three Stooges!!!). We got decent frame rate. This lets you beam a movie to someone. An ad agency can use this to show a rough cut of a commercial, would work pretty well on an infranet network.
DRM gets involved when you try to share a video or music file with DRM. You would not be able to view that over iChat. Non-DRM, no problem.
Did effects: B&W, x-ray, andy worhol, mirror. can do a backdrop, and he can add a photo to substitute for the background. OK, now he is in Paris! Now in the Space Station!
You can do multi-person iChats. We think it is a 4 person maximum limit.
You can save viodeo chats. Record chat gives you a little red dot on the screen to show you are recording. Nice for podcast producers.

Book: The Macintosh iLife 08 (on Amazon, and will be at MacWorld).

We think Charles's video froze because of a bug.

Stacks: Can you put a folder in iDisk into Stacks? Not sure if that will work. Try it and see.

One iChat thing: backgrounds.

Photo Booth. You need a static and well-lit background. Lots of background effects. Now Nick is in Paris! A color in the background (what is behind the user) that is same as color on user will not really work well.

iChat Buttons: a single photgraph, 4 photos, and video. Nice to pay with!

TIME MACHINE
Integrated backup. Get a dedicated external hard drive for this. It does an initial backup, then incremental back ups up as you work. If you accidentally delete a file, you can bring that file back with Time Machine. (And of course, you can save your data if your Mac hard drive dies.) A hard drive will die on you sometime. Time Machine: you can tell it to ignore certain folders (like certain secure folders). And you can travel back and save old photos from iPhoto. Warning: a glitch that if your use Aperture, do not use Time Machine.
If you start up a new computer from a fresh install, you have an option to restore from Time Machine.
Get a big hard drive for backup (although you can ignore folders).

BOOT CAMP
Integrated now. Supports Vista and XP.

NETWORKING
Opened his hard drive, option for Shared. All the networked drives are there. He can connect as a guest; if he has the admin password, he can get full access. Screen sharing: you can control the networked computer. He went to his Mac Mini at home; both computers have the same .Mac account. This feature is Back to my Mac under .Mac (system preferences). The computer must be on and not asleep. (Turn on screen and file sharing; no not need remote login because of .Mac).
Then sign out of .Mac, and sign in again, when you move to a different network.
You can choose Connect As or Share Screen. He did Share Screen. Now see Nick's computer at home. You can do anything you can do at home through this.
If you have a camera connected to your home computer, you can check your home and turn your Photo Booth and see what is going on. The video quality does take a bit of a hit. The video quality depends on the bandwidth. In this case, you have adaptive quality (you can turn it off) and the video quality of the conection will run smoothly.
If Nick wanted to watch a show at home, he would Connect As and play from there (do file sharing).
Nick knows a guy who puts different computers using this on different Spaces; let's him multi-task well.

There is an RSS reader built into Mail.
You can put your iDisk Public folder into Stacks!

If the Time Machine hard drive fills up, it will back up hourly, then daily, then weekly, and then monthly, as it fills up. The size of your backup depends upon the size of your backup hard drive. As for hard drive size, at least match the size of your Mac hard drive. Better to double it.

iCal has interesting stuff for managing an office group.

Q&A with Charles Gousah and Peter Adler

Adobe Flash in Firefox? There is still a browser plug-in. Some default installs have Flash already. You should be able to go to Adobe and install it. Try extension sections at Firefox. Can try Camino browser also. Wise idea to have 3 or 4 browsers available at a time, like iCab, Firefox, Safari. If one browser does not work, try another. Dentist Dave has no problem running Safari 3 on an older Mac.

G4 iMac reboots a lot under 10.4.10 and 10.5. Sounds like a heat issue. A tech article from Apple that had power supply issues. Tom did an upgrade install. If it is a software problem, that is likely to stay in an upgrade, but Peter thinks it is likely a hardware problem. AN archive and install might work better if the problem was that problem. ALso might try a clean install on an external hard drive and see if the problem persists; if so, likely a hardware problem.

Kernal panics upon waking from sleep. Peter feels that sleep does not really work (his opinion,he says). Apple has hard drive spin down at sleep, and then needs to spin back up again after waking. Peter sets hard drive to not go to sleep when connected to external power. (But this matters more with a laptop; if you are on battery, I (Dave) feel you should let the drive spin down on sleep.) If you have an external drive, try to do a clean install and see if you get the same problem.

Charles says that wake and sleep is very heavily tested since a lot could go wrong there.

You can be stressing this (with low memory). Peter's dual G4 can hang after a cold start. IF he shuts it down, it will run OK for a week or so. And when he starts, he does notihng stressful for a while to see how the Mac runs.
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Tried to install 10.4 combo. Gets freezes and kernal panics. Try restarting the machine and do the update that right away. Try doing a disk repair, run Disk Utility from the install DVD. ANd maybe running Disk Permissions might work. You can try an archive and install if h=things are really messed up.

SVMUG next meeting Dec 17; it is a potluck, bring a nice food dish; Sandvox is the speaker.

Stanford Mac User Group meets Dec 10 (I think; second Monday instead of first Monday of the month). Nick Brazzi will do more Leopard.

Dec 12 is A32 meeting.

Dec 18: East Bay Mug Group

We have FileMaker coming in January 21, Bento is the focus. Might have Skype.

Feb 18: Office 2008.

iLife 08 for SVMUG March meeting