SVMUG - January 21, 2008

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Martin Luther King Day

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Introduction

Charles Gousha is the moderator

— New people — — Kevin of Filemaker — — Stephen Keys, former Apple employee — — Gary, former A32 member from 15 years ago, now retired and back to Mac — — Randy, policeman, former Apple employee, replacing PC with Macs at the PD — — Justen — — Dale, here with Tropical Software — — Jim, from Tropical Software, here to give the presentation

News and Events

— MacWorld Expo news and comments

CES at Las Vegas - bit of a letdown, except maybe for the big screen TVs. The Apple press release (of the new 8 core towers) during CES was the highlight.

MacWorld Expo - the MacBook Air was announced and shown as the thinnest laptop to date. It is quite strong, light. One USB connector. One external video connection. Headphone jack. New gestures for displaying previews, such as pinch/spread zooming, three finger page or photo flipping. A $99 external superdrive is available. The screen brightest is very good. The screen backlight is LED, rather than fluorescent. The hard drive is a little slow. An optional is a flash drive. Five hour battery time. Not swap-able, but easily replaceable. The new batteries BTW have no memory effect. The battery is a Lithium Polymer. $1799, which most users consider to a bit high in price. A comparable Sony ultra thin laptop is $2100. The new laptop will run Windows. The USB port provides for more power than the USB standard requires, so that the matching USB superdrive can be powered from this port.

But it is not a tablet. Is Apple working on a tablet? Axiotron Modbook will convert a MacBook into a tablet.

Elgato offers it new version, for displaying broadcast or cable TV (SD or HD) on your computer.

MS Office - 2008 - GUI improvements - as a universal binary, it works a little faster, but it is mostly an look an feel change.

New network drive - for wireless use — mainly intended as a disk for Time Machine to use for backups, but usable as a network drive.

iPhone — new utility uses cell phone triangulation and WiFi nodes to provide a locator.

Filemaker Bento Presentation

Bento - new product briefing — Bento is very different from Filemaker Pro, and is intended as an entry level database. Trades off custom functions for ease of use.

Bento automatically connects with Address book and iCal, so this information is immediately available from within Bento.

The search tool is similar to that used in the iTunes browser. When records are found, the records can be placed (by reference) into a new relation, just like dragging songs to a new playlist.

The schema in a database can automatically configured for many data types. For example, creating an “address” field will automatically create the street, city, zip, etc., fields.

fields can be either data fields or calculated fields. The functions are such as “sum row”, designed for easy application.

Field relations between data collections can be created via drag and drop.

Layouts (data views) are constructed using themes and drag and drop.

Bento files can be exported to Filemaker Pro by simply opening the file under Filemaker Pro (except for layouts).

Databases can be as big as your hard drive can support.

Tutorial videos are available online at the web site.

$49 for single license, $99 for family license.

Break

TopXnotes Presentation

Tropical Software - James Lee, President - note organizing software - TopXnotes

$40 (tonight discounted to $30) “Just notes, don’t write”

Create a note - style the text with fonts, font color, font styles, background color.

Save the notes into groups and categories. All notes are actually kept in just one file, with the notes internally organized by groups and categories. A group is like a folder for notes. Groups can be nested. Each note is saved into a group. Categories are labels for notes. Each category is defined by the end-user, and each category can be assigned a color and an icon. Each note can be assigned to one or more categories.

Notes are automatically time stamped and numbered. Notes can be sorted by date, name, and note number.

To view notes, more than one note may be viewed by using side-by-side note columns.

Encryption is provided, to protect sensitive information, e.g. passwords.

Ten templates are provided for note setup.

The entire notepad or individual notes can be printed. Notes can be selectively exported to an iPod.

Questions and Answers

1. You can put tiger and leopard on separate startup disks.

2. Safari is crashing on Leopard. Any suggestions?

Some issues have been fixed. Emptying the caches seems to help. Resetting Safari also seems to help.

1. Does Leopard run faster or slower than tiger on a G4 iBook?

We do not know.

1. I can not add or edit the Address book in Leopard. The edit and add buttons are grayed out.

Perhaps there is a permissions problem. Also try resetting the syncing.

1. iChat indicates that the camera is in use by another application. Why?

We do not know - no one else has seen this.

1. Can you upgrade from panther to leopard, i.e. not having tiger?

Yes. Note however, leopard can not be installed on a G3.

1. iMovie seems to be unable to import AVI with MPEG-4 movies.

Quicktime Pro can convert this to a format that iMovie can use.

Remember that both Quicktime and AVI are “wrappers” around many different codecs for video and audio.

1. How big of a hard drive can I have on a Mac Book Pro (17”)?

You can use any SATA 2.5 inch hard drive. The largest is 250 GB. The installation should be done by an accomplished technician.

1. A lot of my e-mail shows a red bar behind the item line in the browser.

This is applied by the mail rules. You can change the rules in the Mail preferences.

Wrap-up and Raffle