Hi All! Notes from Tuesday's meeting. Apologies for poor grammar and spelling mistakes. I type faster then my brain can keep up. :o)
Matt opened the meeting with the Tiger demo. He ran through some of the new features of Tiger. One of them was "Dashboard". It uses things called "Widgets", which are little tiny programs (self contained web pages). They can be clocks, weather trackers, stocks, dictionary, conversions, etc. When they aren't on screen they don't use any CPU time until they are "activated". To change any of the settings of most widgets, you click the little "I" and it will spin around to the settings. You can add a lot more Widgets, and when you run out, there is a button for "More Widgets", which will take you off to Apple's website and give you a list of lots of other widgets you can download and install. If you Apple-option click on the weather icons you can see lots of other icons that are used to demo the weather. When you install a widget, it will download, then you double click it (to un-zip it) and it will install itself. (The first time you run a widget, like any other application, will ask if you want to do this. It does this to make sure it's not going to do anything malicious. Matt then showed off iChat. If you have a G5 processor then you can run a video conference with more than one person. To host it you need a Dual 1Ghz G4 or any G5 then you can host a 4 person conference. Safari now works with more websites. It has also has private browsing so when you don't want to save settings, history or traces of where you've been. Spotlight lets you find files anywhere on your system, without knowing where they are. Good for files that you can't remember where they are. It also looks inside files and brings up the listing. (Using the metadata). So if you had a document called 12345_pic_276.pdf but somewhere in that file it had written for MacWorld and you did a search for 'macworld', then it would list that document and you can open it from the search. You can add "plugins" which will add to spotlight for indexing of other documents, programs etc. Obviously more will follow later as people design them. Mail has been updated. It also uses spotlight indexing as well. You can now do searching across the database. Matt shows it searching through about 30-40,000 emails and it was very quick. The search can also be saved as a "smart folder", which will include all the results from that. iCal was also upgraded. Birthdays from the Address Book are also show in iCal, in their own Calender. You can choose to print calendars with a lot of customisation as well. It will also generate a full resolution pdf on the fly as well. Very cool. It also has a new feature called VoiceOver, which will speak anything you click or highlight. I then demo'ed the Roku M1000 Soundbridge. This is a little unit that runs off a wired or wireless network and picks up your iTunes library. You plug it into the mains, run a cable to your stereo and then you can access any of the running iTunes library. It comes with a little remote control and you can access all the songs, view the track names and details and you don't even need to be near the computer. You can also access it via Bonjour (the old Rendezvous) in Safari. From here you can see the iTunes song playing, skip, pause, fast forward etc from the browser. The good thing with these units is that you can have them in different rooms of the house and they can all access the same iTunes library. (Imagine having one machine just running all the iTunes and then sharing to 3 or 4 different units in the kids rooms) :o) Very cool!! :o) They do two units, the M1000 and the M2000. Pricing is $499 for the M1000 ($479 WAMUG Special) and $999 for the M2000 ($909 WAMUG Special) For more information have a look at:- <http://www.playback.com.au/> or drop me an email as well. Peter Botman then showed off Zinio Reader. This is a little application that lets you purchase online magazines, download them and read them offline. It's a good subscription service for some of those magazines that are harder to get hold of, or you want to save a bit of money on the purchase price (and maybe save a tree or two). With the Zinio application which is a free download you then choose which magazines you want. (You can also start with some free preview ones to see what you think of it as well.) Once you've purchased your magazine the program is set up to check each month and tell you when the next issue is out, all ready for you to download and read later on. It will flip pages, just like reading a real magazine (same effect), you can click on chapters to go there straight away. If it's got a web link in an article you can click it and will take you straight away to that site for you to have a look at more info, download a demo, or other things like that. You can "highlight" parts that you want to save for later on to "skim over". And we wouldn't be surprised if too far down the track a "plug in" comes out so you can use Spotlight to search through all the previous editions of the magazine and look for keywords or articles very quickly! This is a cool (and very handy) little application and certainly well worth the download to have a look at it, and some of the free preview copies of magazines. For more information have a look at:- <http://www.zinio.com> The meeting closed with tea and coffee. I hope everyone enjoyed the meeting. Thanks again to everyone for coming along. Also thanks again must go to Susan for videoing the meeting and Martin for using the iLecture system <http://ilectures.curtin.edu.au/ > so everyone can have access to it. To see the meeting, point your browser to:- <http://ilectures.curtin.edu.au/ilectures/ilectures.lasso?ut=692> Hopefully the same will follow for each month's meeting. :o) See you next month! Enjoy! Kind Regards Daniel Kerr
