Meeting Schedule:

Our next meeting will be on SATURDAY, September 11, 2010.

The main topic at our September meeting will be “Security On The Mac”.  It will deal with what you should be doing - but may not be doing - to insure that your Mac and your data remain secure.

Unlike the Windows world, at present there are no viruses that infect Macintosh computers.  That’s the good news.  But there are other ways that you can inadvertently compromise your computer’s security.  Attend our September meeting to learn what you should be doing.

See you there!

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Our August 14 presentation was a revival of our used-to-be Annual Tip-A-Thon with a new format.

As in the past, we asked members to submit their favorite tips or URLs ahead of the meeting and then present them to the audience.   Among the favorite tips were:

1. * Application Switcher.  This is built into the operating system, and allows you to essentially have six (or more) monitors.  You can switch your desktop from one to another - without having the clutter of all of your applications open on one desktop.
   

1. *Quick Look.  This also is built into the operating system, and allows you to have a quick look at a document of picture.
   

1. * Customize Toolbar.  From within the Preferences, you can decide exactly what will appear on the Toolbar.  Customize it so only what you want appears there.
   

1. * Letterbox For Mail.  This is a plugin app for that takes advantage of your wide screen monitor.  It re-arranges your messages into three vertical columns so the message pane is on the right column, rather than below.
   

We had lots more tips and suggestions, but that’s all I’ll add here.

This was a fun and informative meeting with something for everyone in this information grab bag: from software, to hardware, to web sites, to games, to resources.

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Our July presentation was by our own Rick Thues.  He spoke on something you use every day on your Mac - and never think about.  Rick spoke on the Finder - what it is, what it does, what it can do, and how it got to be what we see today. 

It may seem obvious for the Finder to do what the Finder does today.  It certainly wasn’t obvious to the many, many brilliant people who spent the past 30 years developing the Finder into what we see today.

As part of his presentation, Rick gave a very interesting visual history of the Finder through history.  Rick’s history ran from the Apple II days, through the Lisa days, to the current System 10.6.4 Finder.

If you weren’t there, you missed a great journey down the short history of the computer, and the computer operating system.

When you live within the computer world, you forget just how far - and how quickly - computers have changed.

I went to UCLA from 1970 to 1975 to finish my bachelor’s degree and to get my master’s degree.  At that time, all 22,000 students shared very limited access to one computer - an IBM 360/91.  We were glad to be allowed to use such a powerful computer.  It was such a powerful computer that you spoke of it with respect.

The 360/91‘s CPU speed was a maximum of 16.7 million operations per second.  The iPad I purchased a few months ago has a CPU that operates at 1 billion operations per second.  That means my iPad is 60 times as fast as the mainframe computer that all 22,000 UCLA students shared.

No one speaks of an iPad with great respect.  They are interested in it because there aren’t that many of them around - yet, but they aren’t respectful.  No one would dream of having to share it with 22,000 others.  It’s neat, but it’s .................. just a computer.  That shows you how the world has changed.  So something has a powerful computer in it.  So what?  It’s still ............ just a computer.

And that’s how the world has changed in a short 30 years.

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Our June presentation was about LaunchBar 5. The presentation was given by our own David Sparks of MacSparky - About and the Mac Power Users Podcast. David has given us two presentations before.  His most recent presentation was about using Apple’s Numbers application.  (Numbers is Apple’s answer to Microsoft’s Excel application.)  David also presented this at the 2010 MacWorld Expo. He gave an earlier presentation about using your Mac at work at the same Expo.

Here is the summary about LaunchBar from the LaunchBar web site:

LaunchBar is a smart and powerful, keyboard-driven productivity utility that lets you access and control every aspect of your digital life. Whatever you want to get done on your Mac – with LaunchBar it’s only a few keystrokes away.

LaunchBar is an award winning productivity utility that provides instant access to your applications, documents, contacts and calendars, bookmarks and history, to your iTunes and iPhoto library, to search engines and so much more – just by typing short abbreviations.

It’s a file manager, a web and desktop search tool, an app launcher, a clipboard manager, a jukebox, a calculator, an information browser, … or quite simply a tremendous time saver!

Download the free 30-day trial to check it out!

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Our May presenter was Victor Cajiao, Producer-Host of the Typical Mac User Podcast http://typicalmacuser.com/ and Typical Shutterbug Podcast http://typicalshutterbug.com/wordpress/.  Victor put the Spotlight on Spotlight, and demonstrated its awesome power beyond the obvious search functions.

Spotlight is an Apple utility that allows you to search through the files on your computer to find particular words or groups of words.  You can narrow the search down to particular files or particular folders.

Below is the Wikipedia entry on Spotlight (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(software)). 

Spotlight is a system-wide desktop search feature of Apple's Mac OS X operating system. Spotlight is a selection-based search system, which creates a virtual index of all items and files on the system. It is designed to allow the user to quickly locate a wide variety of items on the computer, including documents, pictures, music, applications, and System Preferences. As well, specific words in documents and in web pages in a web browser's history or bookmarks can be searched. It also allows the user to narrow down searches with creation dates, modification dates, sizes, types and other attributes.

The feature is also available on Darwin, but only through a command-line interface. A similar feature for iPhone OS 3.0 with the same name was announced on March 17, 2009.

Spotlight was first announced at the June 2004 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference,[1] and then released with Mac OS X v10.4 in April, 2005.[2]

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The topic of the April meeting was iChat, Skype, and recording Skype with Wiretap Studio.  The presenter was Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast podcast.

iChat and Skype are two applications that allow you to conduct video conferences between two computers.  The two computers don’t have to be Macs.  Both computers do have to have video cameras.  These cameras can be built into the computers like the ones built into all MacBook Pro laptop computers.  Or, the cameras can be purchased and connected to the computers via the USB ports.

The video pictures won’t be of television quality.  But they will be of sufficiently-high quality for everyday use.  Think of it as video conferencing through the web.

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At the March meeting Master Mac teacher Alan Kennard showed us the amazing capabilities that Apple added to Preview, Apple's graphic application that is part of Snow Leopard, OSX 10.6.

With Preview, you can edit digital pictures (think of it as Photoshop Elements light).  You can rotate images, flip images, adjust their color balance, and crop images.  You can adjust the exposure, contrast, color saturation, temperature, tint, and sharpness on each picture.  Preview is not remotely as powerful as Elements, but it is free and quick.

Preview also allows you to read, edit, and bookmark pdf documents.  Let’s say you bookmark a particular page of a particular pdf - say, page 42 of the instruction manual for your digital camera.  You thereafter can open that page just by clicking on that bookmark.  Preview then will find and open that pdf document and show you that particular page.  Note that the document doesn’t have to be open - you just have to click on the bookmark.

You also can use Preview to control your scanner.  After you install Snow Leopard, your old scanner may stop working.  If your scanner is too old, the manufacturer may have decided not to create a new driver or new software.  Rather than throwing out your old scanner, you can use Preview to control the scanner. 

You also can instruct Preview to import pictures directly from your digital camera.  When you connect your camera, your Mac then will start up Preview, and ask whether you want to import some or all of the pictures that are on your camera card.  This would allow you to import your pictures into Preview, edit them in Preview, and then import them into iPhoto.

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Our February presentation was “Alternatives To Photoshop Featuring Pixelmator”.  Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements are the benchmark Macintosh applications for adjusting digital pictures and video.  With these applications, you can make dark pictures light, improve washed out pictures, crop out unwanted portions of a picture, and combine several pictures into a seamless wide panorama - to name just a few possibilities. 

Elements truly does a magnificent job.  A few years ago, I scanned into the computer my 40-year old slides from Vietnam.  I then used Elements to repair the ravages of 40 years of aging.  (Adobe could make a fortune if Elements could remove the ravages of aging from my body.)  The final pictures literally looked like they were taken yesterday.

But although Photoshop’s two utilities are the benchmarks in this area, there are other utilities that can do the same things.  Some of these are freeware, some are shareware, some are free for the first 30 days, some are web-based, and some come on a purchased DVD.  Naturally, you get more features when you pay more. 

If your needs are not too complex, you may be able to get by with a free or an inexpensive utility.  It’s a pity you weren’t at the February meeting so you could have learned what your alternatives are.

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Our January presenter was David Sparks, who spoke on Numbers. Numbers is Apple’s spreadsheet application.  It is intended for people to use when comparing and analyzing numbers.

Excel is Microsoft’s competing spreadsheet application. It deservedly is world-famous. Speaking as a financial expert it is an absolutely wonderful spreadsheet application. Nothing else approaches it. It is the benchmark to which all other spreadsheets are compared.

Numbers is Apple’s competing spreadsheet application. It is nowhere near as sophisticated as Excel. However, for the 90+% of the people who need to use a spreadsheet, Numbers is good enough, is much easier to use, and is much less expensive.

So the choice is between Numbers - a less expensive and less sophisticated application and Excel - a more expensive and more sophisticated application.

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Arrive early for best seating at the next meeting.

We begin our meetings with a Question and Answer session from 9 to 10 a.m., where there are no bad questions and lots of helpful answers. Immediately afterwards, from 10 a.m. to noon, we hold our general meeting and the monthly presentation.

We at SMOG share opinions based on experience and knowledge. We encourage you to use your best judgment about how to apply or ignore these opinions.

Our next three meeting dates are:  September 11; October 9; and November 13.

For more information, or to be added to our SMOG Alert meeting notice list, write to SMOGINFO (at) MAC.COM. In that e-mail address, please replace the “(at)” and the spaces before and after the “(at)” with the “@” symbol. We have typed the e-mail address this way to protect ourselves from spammers.

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