Welcome To WAMUG

Monthly Meeting – February 2011

DATE: 1 February, 2011
LOCATION: FutureSphere, Level 1 Building L; Christ Church Grammar School, Queenslea Drive, Claremont.
DURATION: 7.30 – 9.00pm
Meeting Programme: Running Windows within Apple   &   The new App store for Mac.

Meeting Notes

The meeting started with the usual questions and answers and a look at Peter H’s screen saver when it clicked on. Cute bunny rabbits hopping all over the screen and leaving gorgeous little feet marks everywhere! Anyway, there were only a few questions this month but one notable one was about the ability to manually sort photos in iPhoto. It was interesting that amongst the group present with their

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New Monthly Meetings Page

G’day all.

The WAMUG website is finally undergoing some renovations. We’re learning as we go (and probably forgetting and having to re-learn too! – weeelll, me anyway!!!) so it will be bit-by-bit.

The ‘Meeting’ page is the first to be modified. It has the latest details of the next meeting and will be updated regularly.

Keep an eye out on the site and see if you can spot the changes. Some will be minor and others somewhat more involved. We’ll let you you know about some but not all!

Regards,

Pete Smith

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Monthly Meeting 0909

G’day again all WAMUGGERS

Well, August has nearly past us by. Have you set your iCal for next Tuesday 1 September 2009 for the next WAMUG meeting?

In no particular order:

Denice Williams is going to talk to us about Digital Photography;
Daniel Kerr will tell us about iWeb; and
Hopefully, Craig Bruce will be able to give us an Apple TV demo (although this is still to be confirmed).
(Unfortunately, both Daniel and Craig were crook and unable to make it last time. Rumour has it they left their Windows open and caught a virus?!?!
Good to hear they are both well again.)

Plus, anything else which comes to mind on the night.

Of course, don’t forget the question and answer session at the beginning of every meeting and a cuppa and biscuits at the end.

(Details are subject to change without notice)

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Mailing List Problems

We are having some issues with the mailing list at the moment. Please bear with us, while we get it sorted out.

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Travels with the MacBook Air

Hi, I thought people might be interested in how the MacBook Air (MBA) fares as a sole computer for a WAMUG member.

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Leaking memories, fixed in minutes!

Everyone can remember bad experiences with software, or software developers. I think its generally accepted that, biologically speaking, we remember bad stuff more often than good stuff so we don’t get our left arm eaten by a saber-tooth tiger (having already lost our right-arm at the last cross-species pub crawl).

The great thing about the printed (or electronically recorded) word is that we can store away the good stuff we’d otherwise hurriedly leave by the side of the forest path as we made room for important concepts like ‘don’t poke big cats in the eye.’

My contribution then to this world-wide phenomenon, is a paragraph (or three) about a cool developer:

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June Meeting Notes

The meeting notes for the May 6 WAMUG General Meeting are now up on the Meetings page, again courtesy of Ian Conaghan. Click on the Meetings Page and click the link 3rd June – Monthly Meeting at the bottom of the page.

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May Meeting Notes

The meeting notes for the May 6 WAMUG General Meeting are now up on the Meetings page, courtesy of Ian Conaghan. You can check them out here, or swing over to the Meetings Page and click the link 6th May – Monthly Meeting at the bottom of the page.

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Monthly Meeting 0608

Date – June 3rd 2008Time – 7:30pmDuration – 1 hour, 30 minutesLocation – Room 2.22, Building 312 (Geology), Curtin University Bentley

Although a presentation of new Mac Point of Sale software by Matt Healey had been promoted on our website, Matt, due to a last minute work commitment couldn’t make it.  He hopes to do it in the near future.      

The evening was launched by Peter Hinchliffe introducing a new member, Jane.   This was followed by the usual Q & A, which unlike the previous month only resulted in one question, a colour sync problem with a plasma TV.

Peter then demonstrated Sandvox, a template based website authoring application.   It is easy to use and creates very clean and well constructed HTML but there is no requirement for the user to know HTML. It interacts with DreamWeaver and supports drag and drop media files.   Sandvox retails for US$49 for the standard version and US$79 for the pro model.   See Version Tracker.

This bought us to the highlight of the evening, a presentation on GarageBand by Ron Kerr.   As most Mac users would be aware, GarageBand is the music creation module in the iLife suite. Although plagued by a couple of minor technical glitches beyond his control, Ron gave a very entertaining and informative demonstration of this very powerful application in action, tossing around terms such as tempo, beat, rhythm, modulation and pitch.   The demo included use of the keyboard in addition to other software instruments and showed the visual interpretation of the music and tracks.   It was a sad coincidence that we had music as a theme on the date that Bo Diddley, one of the great fathers of rock and roll, passed away. We look forward to Ron’s return to take us further down the GarageBand journey.

The evening was rounded off with Colyn Healey’s presentation of coffee, tea and biccies.   We tend to forget that folks such as Colyn working in the background help make these evenings a success.

And “now a word from our sponsor” – keep the first Tuesday night in September free for what promises to be a rather special WAMUG night.   

A live recording can be seen at http://dbs.ilectures.curtin.edu.au/ilectures/ilectures.lasso?ut=692 

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Monthly Meeting 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)

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