Bournemouth — Jul 22nd 2008

At last - a Meeting! But summer has struck and we were, to put it at its best, a very select band that met to see demonstrations by four of the five!

Roy Rainford showed us how he deals with the storage and selling of his very impressive photographs, doing the latter through two linked photo agencies. Having seen the quality of the work he puts on these sites I won't even bother!

Martin Spenceley demonstrated the impressive capabilities of Pages, the iWork word-processor and dtp program. He used it to create his fathers’ autobiography, complete with photographs, and the end result was a very impressive hardback book, printed and published by an online company that made a quite remarkable set of copies first time round, having bound them along the wrong edge, so that the book would have been fine for readers accustomed to Arabic or Hebrew, but less so for us Europeans.

Lionel Ogden demonstrated a workaround which allows Quicktime movies to be viewed full screen - without the need for Quicktime Pro.

And Michael Corgan showed the four small desktop - indeed, menu-bar - applications that he had first done at Lytchett. They were Himmlebar - a swift way of launching applications and utilities, YouControl Desktops, permitting multiple desktops for both users of Leopard, who already have Spaces, and for those still with older versions who could find these to be very useful. Another application suitable for those running older systems was Amnesty, providing widgets - and in a form that permits them to stay on screen for as long as required. Finally Koolclip - multiple clipboards.

The one query answered in the Q & A session was the reason why Windows users on PCs were unable to open PDFs produced on a MAc - it appears that there are many types of PDF, and that the Apple form is not perfect. So be aware!

We look forward to increasing numbers next month!

Comments

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Michael Corgan said…

Forgot to mention - Lionel's workaround was an Applescript. I also have a script that clears the printer spool so that any log documents that are printing in error can be stopped immediately, without the printer running on after you have pressed cancel.Let me know if you would like copies of these

Eleanor Spenceley said…

Re: PDFs, I've never come across a problem of a PC opening a PDF produced on a Mac. It is possible the PDF does not render correctly on a PC especially with some graphics options you can create in Pages. I still believe the main issue is how you embed your PDF file in an email. Many Windows email programs do not manage embedded files correctly which is why you should 'attach' a file and select 'Send Windows-Friendly Attachments'.

If your WIndows users still have issues, make sure they have a recent version of Adobe Acrobat Reader. Still, Fran does get Windows users complaining about her programme, but we've put it down to combination of 'Operator Error/Broken Computer' so we also send them a text version ;-)

As the old saying goes, 'You can lead a horse to water, but if it does not know how to drink, SHOOT IT!' ;-)

Eleanor Spenceley said…

BTW: Jinx'y will not be attending the August meeting, so I expect a large turn out next month ;-)
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