Welcome To WAMUG

Monthly Meeting Notes 0508

Date – May 6th 2008
Time – 7:30pm
Duration – 1 hour, 30 minutes
Location – Room 2.22, Building 312 (Geology), Curtin University Bentley

Meeting Notes

Although the numbers were down on the previous month, the May Meeting was conspicuous by the largest Q & A session we have had for quite some time. The following issues were discussed:

• Playing WAV files,
• MacBook Air won’t talk to an external HDD,
• VM Fusion versus Parallels – pros and cons,
• How to delete an unwanted startup item,
• Slow keyboard response after Sleep on a MacBook Pro,
• Spotlight,
• Safari,
• Text alteration in a PDF, and
• Lack of columns in Numbers.

After welcoming Greg, a new convert from the dark side, Peter Hinchliffe then proceeded to the evening’s main topic, web browsers.

There are about a hundred or so out there with varying pros and cons, both paid versions and freebies so only a limited few were discussed. The most popular for our platform is obviously Safari that seems to go from strength to strength with each update. A little known gem hidden in Preferences – Advanced, is the Develop menu which contains a wealth of information including the construction of web pages. Also interesting is Inquisition, a plug-in that is virtually a ‘Spotlight’ for web site searching. Check out Version Tracker.

The next most popular is probably Firefox. This browser is the child of Netscape and is developed by Motzilla, is free and has more bells and whistles than most others. Flock, which is based on Firefox is designed for social networking.

Others discussed were; iCab, Opera, Sea Monkey, Camino (very popular with very fast page loading) , OmniWeb and Webkit, the engine that powers Safari, Dashboard and many other Mac applications.

Peter’s next presentation was X11 which comes with Leopard and lives in the Utilities folder. This is the technology that enables drawing in Unix and gives access to possibly hundreds of Unix programs and downloads of Unix software to run in OS X. He demonstrated Inkscape, a Unix vector drawing program.

Next cab off the rank was a look at Default Folder X, a shareware utility that attaches a toolbar to to Open or Save dialogue boxes that enables fast access to and management of folders and commands. Check out Version Tracker.

The evening ended with the multitude being able to exit the building without the intervention of Curtin Security. (you had to be there :-o)