Bournemouth — Sep 21st 2010
The evening opened with a very clear and useful presentation by Mick Burrell in his inimitable style. He showed us how to get our web sites onto the internet, first giving a brief appreciation of the different methods of creating them. For those of us who want a simple site that can be easily put together, iWeb is perfectly adequate. More able and not a lot more difficult to learn than any page layout application, Mick mentioned Freeway and Dreamweaver. For the real aficionado writing the HTML code is of course the way to go… If the object of the web site is to show off photos, then this is not the best use for a sitehowever. Dedicated gallery sites such as Picasa and Flickr are much better for this, and easier to use as it is a simple matter of dragging the photos to an uploader application possibly adding titles and tags beforehand. Hosting is provided by most ISPs which generally make an allowance of space on the web that is sufficient to host a simple personal site, though they do not permit commercial sites.
The next presentation, by a croaky Chris from Solutions was on iCloud. He explained that this is not as some people think a storage facility for all one’s documents, photos and music. What it does is effectively to synchronise between multiple machines - Macs, iPads and iPhones, so that a file that is created on one machine is immediately duplicated (or rather actually accessible) on any others that the user may have. Rather like Dropbox on a limited scale.
Finally, after the break and a very short Q & A session, Michael showed the DVD on Dragon Dictate, focussing on the way in which the application is set up and then on its’ really good method of creating, sending and dealing with emails and of working on the web, looking up required information and jumping from site to site. The ease of dictation was not shown as the application required the serial numbers, and these were – at home! However as the demonstration at Dorchester had shown the previous week the program is very impressive in the ease with which it converts the spoken word to text which can then be edited. (It even got the correct spelling, ewith no previous training, of Euans’ name!) This application is available to WAMUG members at a 15% discount off the £180 price. And on Friday last a light version, Dragon Express was announced, selling at a penny under £50 as an introductory offer. It isn’t clear at the moment which facilities will not be included, but at a guess the web and email commands may not be there.
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