Hi All! Here are the meeting notes from tonight's meeting. Enjoy!
Kind Regards Daniel Kerr Meeting started with Q and A. Matt demos XIII (13) from Feral. It's a first person shooter where you run around and blow things up, the difference being they decided to go with the "comic book" feel. It is similar to the 3D games but with the "comic book" feel it plays in 2D. It sells for about $30. Matt showed off the demo movie and introduction to the game. Quite violent, so not so good for the kids,...but lots of fun none the less! Very much a 3D feel but with that good 'ol comic book look. Worth a look if you like shoot-me up's, but with a bit of a story line as well. Basically you get to run round, solve it, and shoot things that move. The story is very good,..and Matt rates it quite highly. (He finished it as well. Matt finished it in about 20 hours all up.). :o) Specs recommended to play are: Mac OS 10.2.3, G3/G4 700Mhz or better, 256MB RAM, 32MB Graphics Card, DVD Drove, 1.6GB Free space, QuickTime6 and Keyboard and mouse. <http://www.feralinteractive.com/?game=xiii&language=english§ion=> We welcomed Mark Griffin from Fusion Films/Jacaranda Photography. <http://www.fusionfilms.com.au> <http://www.mark-griffin.com> Mark's background is from working in the Film Industry in the UK before moving to Perth and starting his own business. He originally used PC's but has moved all his work to Mac based. One of his recent works was at Cocos Island for Parks. Mark created a 40minute demo when he was there, and showed off some of his work in a smaller demo for us. All edited and done with Mac gear!! Most if not all of the work that Mark does is using Apple Software. The editing is done using Final Cut Pro (Some things are even done in iMovie), iDVD and DVD Studio Pro are also used. And Photoshop for some of the "cleaning" up. Recently added to the software collection is Apple's new Motion software. And most of the editing is done on either a 12" or 15" PowerBook! Just goes to show what you can do with "most" Mac machines. For the DVD's that Mark produced for Parks, was all done out of his "home office". They produced 200 copies on DVD all burnt at home, including labels!! How's that! Matt then showed off some of the new software from Delicious Software. It's a little program called "Library". At the moment it's beta software. You start out with a blank shelf, showing movies, books, music and recent imports. When you add in DVD's it will download the info about the DVD. If you had type in all the info for all your books, DVD's and CD's you would be there for a very long time. This is where the this program "comes to life". With your iSight camera you can "scan" the barcode of the item and the program will go away and download all the data about the things that are scanned. So you will be able to load your library in a quarter of the time! So you can load all items quickly and have all the info from Amazon.com on your desktop! You can then look at books and look at things that are similar at Amazon and add it to your "shopping" cart to purchase them. Lots of your own personal features can be added, including where the location of the item is in your house! By lending items out you can drag and drop them onto a person who is borrowing them. It then puts "out" on the picture of the book so you know it's not there. You can even put a time that it is due back! When the item isn't bought back it will change the "icon" to late. It uses a card system so you can track it. You can add shelves and collections of all different items. A very cool little piece of software! Well worth a look!! Sells for approx USD$30(ish) <http://www.delicious-monster.com> (One downside at the moment is that for the DVD's they don't always work with Region 4 DVD's. (what we buy in Australian stores.)) Will be available in about 4 days!! Mac then talked about the Mac Bali idea. Talked about putting in old computers that aren't used here in WA. We would like to see if we as a group can support this, whether via donations or old computers, software and the like. We could use some of the WAMUG funds to help out with this. More information will be discussed via the list to take this further. Peter then showed Expression. A free piece of software from Microsoft. (Watch out as it's a 55MB download!) Expression is a graphical design program. Plenty of toolbars to change design, colours and effects. Using all the strokes and effects you can create images. Looking at the samples gives an idea of what things you can do. The samples have layers so you can see how the layers are used to the overall end design. Quite cool. You can grab it from Versiontracker. (Link provided below). <http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13211> The WAMUG BBQ is Sunday 12th December. Put it in your Calenders. We need a minimum of 20 people to make it worthwhile. RSVP's for this will be called soon. No cost to WAMUG members. Non-member's small gold coin donation. Midday at BBQ section. Off Saw Avenue, of Thomas Avenue. The evening closed with some prizes given away from MacWizardry and then tea, coffee and biscuits to wrap up another meeting! Thanks again to everyone for coming,...we look forward to seeing you again next month!! -Enjoy!- (All errors, omissions and general mistakes are excused due to,..um, I'm blaming the late time this time. Thanks! --- Daniel Kerr MacWizardry Phone: 0414 795 960 Email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Web: <http://www.macwizardry.com.au> **For everything Macintosh** ) :o)
