SVMUG March 17, 2008

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Introduction - Host: Charles Gousha

St. Patrick’s Day!

New People: — one person, not a Mac user, here just to see what it is about. — another came from Monte Vista High School.

News and Events

— CompUSA branded stuff is at Micro Center, at 50% off. Mostly CDR and DVD-R, cables, and such. A separate room in the far left corner of the store is devoted to Mac gear and books.

— Apple Airport Express with 802.11n is now available.

— HP printers on wireless networks seem to be problematic for some users, though two members spoke up to say it works perfectly.

— Toast 9 is now available.

— new Sony 11 inch OLED television is about 1 mm thick. Just $2400.00.

— iPhone SDK has been released. However, sign-ups for registering software is currently on hold.

— Some members lamented the difficulty of getting CRT monitors repaired - some artists feel that only the CRT displays colors properly.

— Next week is the tenth anniversary of the iMac (the original CRT versions, in the candy colors).

— Apple has 14% of the USA retail computer market, according to EDC.

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Presentation - Jim Heid on iLife ‘08

Jim Heid was an original author for KiloBaud magazine. He covered the first Mac introduction, and knew that was a product to follow. He has specialized in this Millennium on digital photography and movie making. Doing this on a computer with software that comes free with the computer is a dream come true.

He has an iLife book ($20 tonight). He has also helped develop the free video tutorials, to be found on http://apple.com/iLife/tutorials .

He is working on course materials for Apple Camp (weekend workshops).

What is new in iLife? — evolved to reflect how we produce and share digital media — people are shooting more photos and video than ever before — libraries have gotten larger — accordingly, the new iLife handles larger amounts of data — iMovie is radically different - and controversial for some users.

In the case of iMovie, the benefit is the new video library. Projects can share video clips, via the media manager. This is similar to iPhoto, where you can browse your library, without needing to produce a album or slideshow. In iMovie, you can view clips independently, browsing the media library by keywords, titles, dates, etc.

For sharing, iPhoto works with the dot-Mac service, to allow you to share photos in a couple of ways: web galleries and iWeb photo albums. The web galleries provide for other people to upload photos to the gallery (if you wish) so that it becomes a social site. You can have a collaborative gallery.

In iWeb, comments may be added by people to the gallery. There are also better blogging features.

iMovie also allows exporting and uploading to YouTube, with just one click. You can also export to iTouch, iPhone, iPod, Apple TV.

iMovie also invisibly, without you worrying about it, allows mix and matching of formats into the finish product.

“avi” can be compressed in codecs that Quicktime can not handle out of the box. Third party codecs and applications can help with this, e.g. Flip4Mac, and VisualHub.

Concerns about Features from iMovie ‘08 — inability to create DVD chapter markers — no join clips function, or remove the split of a split clip.

Concerns about Features form iPhoto ‘08 — the library is no longer a folder structure — — people were damaging their libraries by manipulating the library outside of the iPhoto application.

From iPhoto’s browser, you may drag thumbnails from the window to a disk icon, including USB drives, to copy the full resolution images to that disk.

When you launch iPhoto while holding down cmd-option keys, the application will rebuild a broken library.

Events in iPhoto — events are the new metaphor taking the place of “rolls”. An event are those photos taken over a day (the event period is adjustable, say using two hour intervals rather than a day). The poster thumbnail is displayed to represent the event. You can select the picture to be used as the poster thumbnail. Skimming over an event will flash through the photos in the event.

Printing in iPhoto — greatly improved - borders are provided - the print modules also have “local” adjustments for the given printer, which are saved with the photo but apply only to printing.

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Break

Next month: “I play music” dot-com will demo their guitar learning system.

The paid version of iPhoto Library Manager will merge libraries.

Member Demonstration by Lynda Fudold

Sandvox web authoring software — On Version Tracker, Sandvox is rated five stars out of five. It costs $40. — The tutorial movie explains everything step-by-by. It only took about two or three hours to come completely up to speed using Sandvox. — very easy to build and publish a site. — see advance2mac.com — Sandvox is much more flexible than iWeb, in that Sandvox allows you to create your own templates. — support is good — highly satisfied

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Q&A

1. new mac pro running 10.5 — will not sleep properly — after reinstalling, it now reboots frequently on waking from sleep.

— try reseating all the memory cards and the drives, and look for cable placement.

— Front Row might be interfering — do not hit ESC to wake up the computer.

— wireless connection polling may be interfering.

— try erasing the energy saver preferences

1. can you run target disk mode on a leopard machine and use the tiger disk utility or other utilities to repair the disk?

Sometimes — you need to verify that the tool can handle leopard. It is risky.

1. How can I hide folders and files?

— There is a program “ShowAndHide”. Note that Leopard does not allow you to prefix a dot on file names (via the Finder) to hide files that way.

— The developer tools can set the invisible file attribute.

— Maybe encryption is a better idea.

1. Apple Blue-White G3 tower with studio monitor (CRT). The horizontal flyback has failed. Can it be repaired? I need it for a specific reason: I find flat panels pixelate too much for my jewelry work.

— likely a LCD will be acceptable, with the right drivers. You should consider switching, and not repairing the CRT monitor.

— bear in mind these old CRT monitors are quite costly in terms of power use, about $15 per month. An LCD will be better and cheaper.

1. looking for an inexpensive DSL service, I have a service at $16/month, and my service is going up to $25/month.

— MetroFi is free

1. I having trouble finding podcasts in my library — for some reason the podcasts are put into different places other than the podcast folder.

— iTunes ought to be handling this properly. We do not a specific reason for the behavior you are seeing. Maybe a wierd tagging problem.

1. My sister, Margaret, is a teacher in Alabama. She uses iMovie to prepare classroom work and event videos. Her computer is an older iMac G5 (first generation flat panel iMac).

During video captures using FCE or during long downloads from the Internet, the iMac will abruptly shutdown. The fan is heard to make a loud whirling, then a mechanical click is heard, upon when the screen goes black. Hitting the space bar will bring the screen back, as if it merely had a screen saver running, but the download or capture will be interrupted and will not automatically resume.

The System Preferences have been checked. For investigating the problem nature, both the screen saver and energy saver were set to “never”, i.e. disabled. This has no effect on the problem.

To investigate the possibility of thermal issues, an external fan was directed at the computer, to provide additional cooling. This had no effect on the problem.

The motherboard has been inspected — nothing was clogging any vents or fans, in fact the motherboard looked pristine.

Upon power up, the machine will occasionally make an odd buzz, prior to the normal startup chime.

— the power supply may be replacing. This sounds a thermal problem. There is history of power supply issues on these machines.

1. What can I use to convert LP vinyl records to CD’s?

— Giffen iMic can digitalize the audio cheaper. Think Geek for software that will adjust the sound equalization.

— there are turntables that have USB outputs.

— look in Heid’s book

— Final Vinyl, Audio Hijack, and other software is available.

1. Recommend a firewire hub

— Belkin

1. G4 Luxor lamp model iMac. One memory slot is max’ed out, the other is not. Can I determine which memory slot is not?

— other than pulling the cards to check, it is not easy to determine.

1. iBook G4 Leopard — wireless connections sometimes will not work.

— some access points may not allow your network card, or it might be MAC filtered.

— Netgear 814 routers seem to be finicky with regards to some applications.

1. Dose Back to My Mac — desktop remote control — work?

User experiences seem to vary. Make sure the destination machine does not go to sleep. Make sure the internet connection will persist.

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