Meeting Schedule:
Our next meeting will be on SATURDAY, February 11, 2012.
The February meeting will be built around the idea of a SMOG Lounge. It will be a morning filled with questions and answers, and one-to-one assistance. You’ll also be able to have extended conversations with our experts about your Mac and Apple device problems, get help with do-it-yourself upgrades, and more!
We encourage members to bring in their Macs or iOS devices if they are looking for that "if only someone could show me" help and troubleshooting. You also can submit questions for an extended question and answer session.
At the February meeting we’ll also be having a Swap Meet where members can buy and sell used Mac and iOS devices. So bring those items you want to sell, and be prepared to buy used Mac and iOS devices you’ve been meaning to get.
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The January meeting speaker was our own Mac expert Rick Thues. Rick spoke on the cloud, and Apple’s new product - iCloud.
What is the cloud? It’s a very, very, large collection of computer servers. It is the Internet by another name. There are an estimated 100 billion interconnected computers that make up the Internet. You upload information to the cloud, and you download information from the cloud.
Apple’s iCloud is a portion of the cloud. It is a 500,000 square-foot North Carolina facility. Apple plans to expand this by creating a second facility. Your iCloud material will be stored in a folder on a hard drive there. You will be allowed access to that folder.
With iCloud, Apple has eliminated the concept of synchronization. But each device still has an Address Book that needs to be synchronized - somehow. Your computer soon uploads a new change to the iCloud. Synchronization to each device then would take time. Synchronization also is not reliable. Apple wants to put the cloud in the center of the hub so that each device then would talk to iCloud.
The net result would be summed up by the quote “The network is the computer” - a comment made by John Gage, who used to be the head of Sun Microsystems.
There then would be one database, and it would be held at Apple’s server farm in North Carolina. When you make a change, every device would see the change instantaneously via the cloud.
iCloud just is mainframe computing come again. There is a big server farm in North Carolina. Everything is stored on the server, and then is downloaded to your devices as needed. iCloud offers you Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Find My Phone, iWork.
With iCloud, you are storing your information in North Carolina. What happens to your documents when the power goes off and your computer crashes? There is a local copy on your computer. Data still is stored up in iCloud. You are running a program on your computer - but your work - your data - is stored on the cloud.
The server document isn’t lost when the power goes out, but you will lose access to it. To prevent this from happening, you should keep a local backup of all of your data. Apple’s server farm is keeping a backup of your data, but you may not have access to it.
Apple maintains an iCloud system status page - www.apple.com/support/icloud/system status/ . It tells you the moment-by-moment status of iCloud.
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At the December meeting, John Thawley, a professional photographer (http://www.thawleyphoto.com) demonstrated Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (http://success.adobe.com/en/na/sem/products/lightroom.html?kw=p&sdid=IBFJY&skwcid=TC|22181|lightroom||S|e|7383316102) is an application that is intended to help you to create, organize, and display your photographs. Adobe describes Lightroom as being great for perfecting one image, searching for ten, processing hundreds, or organizing thousands of images. From that description, it is clear that Lightroom is intended to be a high-end replacement for iPhoto.
An hour before the December meeting, John Thawley set up a makeshift photo studio outside our meeting room and took portrait pictures of our members. During the meeting, John used Lightroom to show us how to make our members look even better.
At the Lightroom web site (http://success.adobe.com/en/na/sem/products/lightroom.html?kw=p&sdid=IBFJY&skwcid=TC|22181|lightroom||S|e|7383316102), you can download a fully-functional copy of Lightroom and try it out - for a limited period of time. This copy does take up 102.6 MEGABYTES, so it will take some time to download.
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At the November meeting, Devin and Tom covered the new iPhone 4S and iOS 5. Apple’s new iPhone 4S isn’t very advanced in most areas, but has a voice-response feature - Siri - which allows you to speak to the iPhone as if it was a human assistant. You can see more about it at: http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/siri.html .
We pointedly noted that APPLE describes Siri as “Beta” software. When you speak to Siri, your voice is uploaded through the cell phone network to a central computer. It is that central computer - not your iPhone - that looks at your voice recording and tries to determine what on earth you wanted Siri to do. So if your phone loses its connection to the cellular phone network, or if that central Siri computer goes down (as happened this week), then the magic that is Siri quietly dies - and all of your previous memos quietly die.
Devin and Tom also explained iCloud, which now replaces MobileMe and is free for all Mac and iDevice users, as well as Windows users. ICloud is free - least for the first 5 gigs of storage/syncing. For additional storage costs, see Apple’s iCloud: Purchasing iCloud Storage and Billing <http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4874?viewlocale=en_US>.
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Our October presentation was on Evernote (http://www.evernote.com/). Evernote is a personal digital assistant that you can use to record all of your thoughts, or to capture interesting information you see. It can store information from web sites you visit, record portions of web sites you visit, capture images from web sites, or capture other scanned images. Evernote also will recognize text from within the images you import!
The world-famous Evernote expert Brett Kelly agreed to give our Evernote presentation! Brett is the author of the finest guide to Evernote: the Evernote Essentials. This eBook is so good that the Evernote Corporation hired Brett as its Technical Communications Manager. Brett was a blogger at The Unofficial Apple Weblog. He also contributes to several Mac-centric podcasts. His work also can be found at BrettKelly.org, Nerdgap.com, and readandtrust.com.
You can install Evernote onto all of your digital devices - your Mac, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPac, or Android 3-based devices. If you have to work on the dark side, you could install Evernote onto Windows computers.
After you install Evernote onto your digital devices, you create an Evernote account, and then can synchronize ALL of the information you collect on any one device to ALL of your devices. Information that you enter onto one device will be uploaded to the web, and then downloaded to all of your devices with that account!
You can watch a quick introduction to Evernote at: http://www.evernote.com/about/video/#OlOLXWvaIy0|1|1 .
As an incentive to attend the October meeting, Brett offered all attendees a free copy of Evernote! (Although to be correct, Evernote is free to non-attendees as well.)
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Our September presentation was entitled “Keeping Your Head In The Clouds”. The presentation was given by Mac celebrity and SMOG member, David Sparks of MacSparky - Blog .
David’s presentation will cover cloud-based services - such as iCloud, and Dropbox. These are ways to back up your files via Internet-based services. You also can use these same services to synchronize your files so that the same file or files will AUTOMATICALLY appear on ALL OF YOUR Macs, your iPhone, and your iPad. So rather than having to think about how you can make those key files appear on all of your Apple devices, you can just put it in a special folder on your Mac/iPhone/iPad - and services like Dropbox will do everything else automatically.
David’s talk also dealt with what your current- and future-use strategies should be towards cloud-based services.
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Our August presentation was on the differences and similarities of Lion - Apple’s new Macintosh operating system. The presentation was put on by our two of our resident experts - Tom Borusky and Devin King.
Lion is the first modern Macintosh operating system that Apple did not distribute on a CD. Instead, you will have to go to an Apple web site, purchase a license for Lion, and download a copy through the Internet. Clearly, this is a first look at the future.
Lion uses a number of unusual multi-finger gestures to speed your navigation through the system. Speaking as one of the early-adopters, remembering all the gestures takes a bit of time.
Lion also will not support any Classic-based or Rosetta-based software. If you use such software - and can’t get a newer version, then your upgrade decision is made. You won’t be updating to Lion.
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Our July presentation was by world-renowned photographer Robert Lachman. Robert shared with us his best tips for creating and editing photographs using such Mac technologies as the iPhone, the iPad, and the MacBook. Robert works as a staff photographer for the Los Angeles Times newspaper.
You can see more about Robert’s favorite topic - photography and the Mac - at his web site: http://www.photographyandthemac.com/ . That web site - surprisingly enough - is devoted to photography and the Mac.
Robert also visited us at our July 12, 2008 meeting to talk about photography and the Mac. Since then, Apple has added several new technologies that you can use to take or edit pictures - such as the iPhone and the iPad.
After earning a bachelor's degree in fine arts at the California Institute of the Arts, Robert began his career with the Los Angeles Times in 1974. Working as a staff photographer and photo editor, he has covered the Olympics, World Series, Super Bowls, Stanley Cup championships, presidential elections, natural disasters, the Academy Awards, and other major events.
Robert's award-winning work has appeared in national publications, including Time and Newsweek magazines. He also has lectured at UCLA, USC, Chapman University and UCI.
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The speaker at the June meeting was our own Elaine Stannard. The title of Elaine’s talk was, “At Your Service”.
The talk was about the services features that Apple offers as part of the standard Mac operating system. You can add functionality for a specific user, for every user on a computer, for one application, and for every application on your computer.
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The May meeting presentation was about little-known accessibility features in Mac OSX that we all can use to improve our Mac experience.
Presenter Mark Taylor is a recognized expert on the subject, having worked with Apple, Inc. to improve accessibility for users of all Apple products.
You can see his many endeavors at Welcome to Candle Shore, including CANDLE SHORE PUBLISHING that, “in addition to hardcopy production publishes directly to both the iTunes iBook Store and to the Amazon Kindle Store in eBook format. He also produces THE MARK TAYLOR CANDLESHORE BLOG which he describes as an exciting and dynamic portal bringing together original and shared content that can not only enrich but inspire your life with his podcasts, original poems, essays, short stories, and technical how-to articles.
We sure hope you didn’t miss this presentation that offered you not only new perspectives about your Mac, but perhaps on life as well.
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At the April meeting, Christopher Blue, an Apple representative, explained in detail how iMovie can help you with your video projects.
iMovie is one of several applications that come with iLife ‘11. It can help you turn your home videos into professional-looking films. iMovie takes your home videos and lets you add movie trailers, add or edit an audio track, and add one-step special effects (such as slow motion or speeding up, or instant replays). iMovie even allows you to identify one person’s face and have that face replaced - throughout your film - by anyone else’s face. (What a great way to deal with an unwanted family member!)
You can see more about iMovie and an explanatory video at: http://www.apple.com/ilife/imovie/ .
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There were two interesting topics at the March meeting.
1. The first was “Power Keys,” by our own Rick Thues.
Rick showed us many of the Mac keyboard shortcuts that you can use to make your life easier. Rick also will demonstrate the various ways that you can control your Mac via the keyboard, and how you can set up your own custom keyboard shortcuts.
You can almost completely control your Mac by using these keyboard shortcuts. It can sharply down the amount of time you have to spend moving the mouse up to the top of the screen, and then finding the pull-down menu you want.
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2. The second topic of our meeting was entitled “Cutting Through The Smog” by our own Devin King.
Devin talked about the new Mac-oriented items that were introduced this month. Those naturally included the new laptop MacBook computers Apple introduced, and the new iPad 2 (with it’s front-facing and rear-facing cameras, and the innovative magnetic cover). Devin also talked about Boom, a volume booster that allows you to boost the volume output of your Mac, and Dashkards, a way of organizing your apps on your Dashboard.
Devin spoke of many other interesting developments in the Mac world. You can see a copy of them all by looking at a PDF of Devin’s presentation at: http://www.devinking.com/smog-downloads/.
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Our February meeting speaker was Jon Parshall of Codeweavers. Jon demonstrated CrossOver Mac. Crossover Mac is a software application that allows you to run many Windows applications on your Mac - without having to purchase and install Windows on your Mac.
You can think of Crossover Mac as an operating system emulator, but it's different, because there's no Windows OS license required. Your applications integrate seamlessly into the Mac OS X. You just click on a Windows application, and it runs. There is no rebooting, and no switching to a virtual machine. Best of all, you don’t have to purchase and install a copy of the Windows Operating System!
Once you have installed CrossOver Mac, it’s easy to add new Windows applications. Just insert a new Windows application CD into your Mac. CrossOver Mac will recognize it as a Windows application, and offer to install it. Once it is installed, CrossOver Mac will configure the application to run on your Mac. That's all there is to it.
There are two versions of Crossover Mac: Standard and Professional. If you only want to run one Windows application, then the Standard version probably is enough for you. If you want to run several Windows applications, then you should look into getting the Professional version.
You can read more about CrossOver Mac at the Codeweavers’ web site: http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/.
Codeweavers allows you to download a trial version of CrossOver Mac and use it for 30 days without cost. You can see more about this option at: http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/download_trial/.
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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: February 11; March 10; April 14.
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.
SMG does not rent, sell, or give member or inquiry information - such as your name or e-mail address - to any outsiders.
