SVMUG December 17, 2007

Introductions

— new Mac commercials played — to not much acclaim.

Welcome to our annual potluck

Karelia software will not be present, but are raffling two copies of their “Sandvox” program to the group. Sandvox: easy, elegant website creation.

Tonight we will focus on our party and group discussion of your computer activity.

Joy Cohn will demonstrate the operation of Canvas X - a long time graphics creation program.

First timers? none tonight.

Please use the question forms to submit questions for the Q&A later tonight.

News and Events

— What about the Mac Geek Cruise - MacMania 7 - Lynda Fudold will discuss.

“150 Mac folk on the Mac Geek section of the cruise. David Pogue, Sal S. on Applescript and Automator, Swartz on podcasting, Robin Williams, … went around middle America … Panama, Costa Rica, Aruba, Puerto Limon… much discussion of iPhone, Leopard.”

The MacMania 7 event was focussed around Leopard and the iPhone from a user standpoint, as compared to other years that focussed on more technical aspects.

Of course, it is tough to give an iPhone lecture when you are out of cellular tower range, in the middle of the Atlantic, with the extremely slow $0.50/minute Internet satellite connection.

The food was great.

MacMania 8 will be Eastern Mediterranean - Italy, Greece, Turkey, Egypt. Book by December 31, cost about $3000 per person, once all costs are accounted.

The new Leopard voice “Alex” is considered good for listening to text-to-speech.

MacWorld Expo - Jan. 14 - 18 - Keynote in Moscone West. Exhibits in Moscone West and South.

User group lounge is discussed at mugcenter.com . The schedule of persons and events may be located there. For some parties, you will need to get tickets from a sponsoring vendor.

A user group wine and cheese session is on Monday evening. The cost is $10 for Mug members. Sign up online.

You should pick up your badges on Monday — Tuesday will be a zoo.

Firewire specification (1394b) has been speed bumped to 4x. The new speed is 3.2 Gbps. The new specification is intended to compete with sATA. Firewire 1600 and 3200, using the same connection and cable as 800.

What about USB 3? It may have 4.8 Gbps but like the existing USB, the speed is dependent on the lowest speed device on the bus.

Amazon Kindle is an electronic book reader, which kicks butt, especially that of the Sony eBook. 80,000 titles are available, at $10 or less each. Using electronic ink technology conserves battery power. Books are downloaded into the device, using the Kindle’s built in wireless access (a cellular-like service at no charge (for now)). International newspapers may be downloaded automatically, every morning. Steve Levy considers this the next fundamental change in computer technology.

A member comments that the display is very good - very readable - it works anywhere that Sprint coverage is available. As a reflective display, you can use ambient light to read.

It is like an iPod for books — when will Apple’s version be out? (What about those Apple Tablet computer rumors?)

The display is 6 inches, diagonal.

cost $399.95

Books once purchased, may be downloaded repeatably if necessary (device crash for example).

Is this the death quell of printed paper books?

The BBC has released an audio player that is Windows only. The British government has mandated that the BBC make the players for Mac and Linux as well.

iPhone ringtones may be made by using Garageband. Yea.

CompUSA is closing — calling it quits — tossing the towel.

The Valley Fair Apple Retail store is open following renovation. All point of sales checkout is done by store clerks carrying handheld registers. There is one cash register just in case.

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Holiday Potluck

Joy Cohn - ACD Canvas X demonstration

Large format graphics for traditional board based war games.

A typical map has seventeen layers, on “D” size photo paper.

Joy worked for Boeing a number of years, and started using Canvas with version 1 from 1990 onward.

Canvas had a compatibility problem for some years as the Mac system evolved, and was sold from Deneba to ACDSee. Canvas was originally like MacDraw and MacPaint put together, with evolution to more complex tools. It is now Adobe Illustrator and PDF compatible. It opens a significant range of document formats.

Joy demonstrated the process of making a “compass rose”, with multiple layers, both vector and pixelmap elements, with scaling, rotations, etc.

Regular price $349.00 member’s discount of 15%, online.

A copy will be raffled tonight!

============ Q & A

1. AOL mailboxes stopped working under Leopard — messages could not be moved to the deleted messages folder.

AOL’s imap has implementation issues, due to its ancient deployment.

In addition, try to not store the deleted messages on the server.

1. Leopard will not connect to my office’s WiFi, on a WEP based connection.

DHCP auto configure gets its DNS information from the far server upstream. You need to code the DNS servers into your settings for the router.

1. How can you identify the boot volume in Leopard?

Use the “About this Mac” menu item.

1. Mac Mini upgrade to Leopard. Can I verify the kernel is now 64 bit?

We do not know.

1. Explain tabs.

Tabs are like windows that are grouped together for convenience.

============ Next month: Filemaker on Bento - personal database

We have open vendor spots for May 2008 and onward, at this time. If you have a vendor, please let the planners know for scheduling.

SMUG - meets Jan. 2,

EBMUG - meets Jan. 10, iLife 08

SVMUG - meets Jan. 21

============ Raffle

— Canvas — MacProVideo certificate — two copies of Sandvox