Richard Palmer of the iPlace store in Greer talked about how to use Google to maximum advantage. Unfortunately, someone somewhere cut a Bellsouth cable, so about 10 minutes into his presentation, the building lost all connectivity with the outside world taking our net connection down with it.

Richard soldiered on explaining as well as possible how Google interprets variations and specialized commands in the search field. An excellent presentation that would have only been better if BellSouth hadn't failed us.

For those who are interested, I found this tongue in cheek explanation by Google of how their technology works.

Although Jack couldn't be present at the June OSX meeting, we soldiered on. Unfortunately, conducting the meeting left me no time to take notes. Lots of questions, some answers, but no record.

This meeting was a primer on web technology and what the user needs to know to create web sites on the Mac.

First, a general talk was given on the basics of how to approach this task. This presentation boiled down the internet jargon involved to a beginner's level, and looked at how web sites function and how they are constructed.

Then demos were shown of RapidWeaver and Freeway Express, two excellent programs for creating web sites.

The user group was also introduced to ScreenCasts Online a video tutorial source for Mac users. ScreenCast Online is available in a high rez subscription plan or free low rez podcasts.

A lot of random questions were covered in this meeting. Here are a few notes scribbled down as the meeting raced along...

- Recommendations for OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on the Mac. Omnipage was mentioned.
- Items in the dock vs startup
- Right clicking on a one button laptop
- Why weather shows up incorrectly for Atlanta in the weather widget
- Formatting cards in digital cameras
- Transferring pictures from Picassa to a Mac
- Finding dupes in iPhoto
- Using Gmail as a mail client in Mac Mail
- Controlling Expose
- Resetting prefs in Firefox

Four commercial word processor were compared and contrasted: Microsoft Word as a component of Microsoft Office 2004, Apple's Pages as a component of iWork 06, Nisus Writer Express, and Scrivener.

It is a difficult time to compare Word Processor on the Mac with both Pages and MS Word in a state of transition. After going over the Pros and Cons of these packages, Nisus Writer Express was given the thumbs up as the best of the lot for straight out word processing and Pages got the nod if layout was required as part of the user's need. Nisus Writer Express does excellently with just word processing, but is severely limited in layout. Pages does a great job at layout, but can be lacking in some ways in word processing.

OpenSource software was briefly discussed, but not examined in detail.

We had a strong turn out this morning for an OSX meeting with 17 people in attendance. I must confess that I only had one cup of coffee before I left the house, so it took me a bit to wake up and start taking notes. Because of this slowness on my part and the many questions asked and covered there are a lot of rambling notes...

- We discussed the general dangers of power failures to both computers and peripherals. One member had to reload the OS after a power failure when his Mac shut down improperly. Another pointed out how he had lost one port on a powered USB hub due to a power failure.

- We explored how to temporarily disable Sidenote so that it would not be activated accidentally. It turns out that to exit sidenote, you use the little gear icon in the program. This was hard to find since it is nonstandard and unexpected.

- In iPhoto we discussed printing 4x6 photos properly centered on a page. Photos must be constrained to the proper size within iPhoto, and then within the print dialog, all setttings must be checked to see they are correct (for example paper size) to help get the right print.

- We looked at why the size numbers underneath the Hard Drive icon can be different from the size numbers within a window of the finder. It turns out the number underneath the HD icon (which are activated by selecting the HD and changing settings under view) are only updated when you log in to your computer. The rest of the time it's a static number, so they can get out of sync over time.

- We discussed making slideshows with iPhoto using the "Ken Burns effect" and then exporting them to a DVD. This page by Apple has some notes on how to do this. In particular, read the tips section "Burn a Slideshow to DVD" -- iPhoto Tutorial

- We took a brief look at Tidbits, a highly informative, free newsletter for Mac users. Also on the Tidbits site in the yellow sidebar are Take Control ebooks which more than one member recommended highly.

- Will Arnold shared a tip on how to turn off the dashboard using commands in Terminal. Here's an online article covering this option: Macosxhints.com - How to disable (and enable) Dashboard.

- We covered deleting trash emails in Mail and how that differs from the regular trashcan in the finder.

- We learned about "How Dogs and Cats Came to Be." (Note: this website has music, which isn't my first choice, but not a bad layout. Slide your volume down if you had it turned up before clicking.)

- We reviewed how to force quit programs from the Finder (cmd-opt-esc), and when and why that is sometimes necessary.

- We discussed cleanup tasks the Finder does automatically in the middle of the night, and two programs that you can use to do them manually Macaroni and Onyx

- And finally we discussed how to change the Keyboard setup in MacOSX to match other languages. Here's an article on the net that reviews how to do this: Macintosh OSX Keyboards.

iPhoto

Gerry Holzman went over using iPhoto. Gerry began by demonstrating the subscription site Atomiclearning, which has video tutorials for both Mac and PC. A subscription to Atomiclearning costs $79.99/year and includes full access to all their tutorials on a wide range of subjects.

Then Gerry stepped iPhoto through it's uses demonstrating the major tools within the program. As part of this process, Gerry pointed out a helpful addon for iPhoto called Keyword Assistant. Keyword Assistant makes keyword management easier than iPhoto's builtin tools.

Other iPhoto Resources:

Apple's iPhoto Tutorials
Using iPhoto to print a bound portfolio
iSchool's tutorials

iTunes

Wayne Walker began by demonstrating how the KeyMac web site is elvoving and showed a quick iPhone cartoon.

Wayne covered the basics of using iTunes. He also emphasized the use of Podcasts as a free resource for anyone using iTunes. A wide variety of Podcasts are available for free from the Apple iTunes store. Simply use the builtin search feature to find Podcasts on subjects you are interested in.

There are also many plugins which expand the capabilities of iTunes available on the web. Time did not allow for the demonstrations of these items during the meeting. Below are some iTunes links to explore:

Synergy - Control iTunes from the menu bar
Volume Logic - Audio enhancement for iTunes
Plugin World - A collection of iTunes plugins.
Doug's iTunes Applescripts - If you can script it, Doug probably has. Lots of useful behaviors covered.

There are literally thousands of free podcasts available on the Internet, and it's growing all the time. Here's just a few samples:

MacOS Ken - Daily Mac news
MacTips Daily - Mac...tips...daily.
PodShow - A podcaster network
Podiobooks - Free audiobooks by lesser known but still excellent authors.
Academic Lectures by Podcast - eLearning the easy way.

In connection with a discussion of backing up issues, Mike Wall shared that he uses BounceBack and has found it very useful.

Mike also shared a utility called Sidenote, which is a sort of sticky note competitor that adds notes to the side of the finder and is not a widget living in the Dashboard as the stickynotes included with the Mac does. Sidenote is a free program.

Jack Leitch shared a helpful article from MacWorld on techniques for reclaiming disk drive space.

As a followup from last month's OSX meeting, Wayne Walker pointed out that CNN's videos now work with Mac by using a special upgrade to Flip4Mac. If you click on a CNN video on their site, you now have two choices, the older Microsoft Media Player or the new Flip4Mac install, or you can go directly to the download page here.

In a discussion about Menu usage and modifier keys (keys that modify the way other keys work), we discussed being familiar with the symbols Apple uses to indicate modifier keys on the Mac. Check out this hand guide.

Spotlight on Dr. Ken Marsh, who was able to attend for the first time in months. Here's Ken's websites for the curious:

Kenneth S. Marsh & Associates, ltd.

Woodstock Institute for Science in Service to Humanity