Dorchester — Dec 13th 2011

John opened the meeting and welcomed the 16 members present.

Michael presented 'Some elements of Pages'.
Pages is easy to use for basic functions, but is capable of more advanced jobs too.
He demonstrated inserting graphics into text, and showed how one can move the graphic around, and the text wraps automatically, as set by the Inspector. The Inspector can also be used to adjust the size and shape of graphics, and to insert shadows around it. Can also draw basic shapes. One can also create templates; these are saved in 'My Templates'.
Essentially, Michael proved his point, that Pages can be used to create different effects much more easily than other text editing programmes.

Steve then gave a presentation on ' Lion and Snow Leopard: How to arrange your files'. This envisaged a dual boot system, with each OS using the same home folder to store documents etc. This, he achieved by using aliases, and he also showed how, by using the same user ID, users having an account under each OS can access their documents when using either. This is of use for computers with a number of different user accounts.

This was followed by mince pies and coffee.

Mark then spoke of 'Cute Clips' from Briksoftware. This records the recent history of the clipboard. It is used to save 12 clips or more, of which some can be selected to be more permanently stored, but otherwise they fall off the bottom of the list when displaced by new selections.

John gave the final presentation on Screenshots. There are several ways of making these. Cmd shift 3 or 4 is one option. Grab is an alternative choice. John demonstrated the Voila app, which includes some very flexible editing and store options. One can select a portion of screen, annotate images with a number of graphical editing tools, and effects. The results can then be saved as Voila, or PNG, TIFF, JPG etc. It is also possible to record sound and actions on screen, and produce a realplayer / quicktime movie, which can be emailed from within the application.

We then moved on to the Q&A
In Lion the equivalent of 'Save as...' is done by 'Duplicate', and then 'Save as…'.
This also gives save options e.g.Quartz Filter for pdf files, to reduce file size.

Problems with scanners and printers on Lion - Drivers are being updated for Epson and Canon, where bugs have been encountered.

To cure revolving beach ball…
Safe boot, press shift before beep and hold until progress bar appears. This produces Apple only environment, but also does mysterious apple disk utility types of activity, restart then can produce improvements.
bad fonts can also cause problems
Onyx is also valuable as a tonic to the system.

SR

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