Bournemouth — Jan 17th 2012

Another good turnout at Solutions and another good presentation from Mick. This time it was on the basics of iChat - the stuff we wanted to know about at the last iChat presentation but didn’t get! He explained that it is possible to exchange text messages, and to have telephone & video chats. Using two screens (and hats off to Mick for lugging the second one all the way down and back up to the multi-story car park) he was able to show how a video chat worked and then he went on to demonstrate that it is possible to take charge of someone else’s Mac - with their permission of course and under their watchful eye. It wasn’t feasible to demonstrate 3 or 4 way conversations but these are certainly possible though the results depend very much on the bandwidth available to all participants. A narrow bandwidth would result in the picture dropping out or being of poor quality. Nevertheless iChat is pretty capable and useful.

After a tea/coffee break Michael went through the basics of Pages. He showed the already knowledgeable audience the use of shapes, using them to emphasise text, and how they may be varied in shape and appearance. He also showed a couple of peculiarities. The first was when a graphic (a photo or other graphic item) is dropped into a shape. For some reason the graphic is imported in a very large size and consequently only a small portion of it can be seen in the shape - the sizing slider is right over at Large. Bringing the slider back does not have a great effect. But importing the image for a second time immediately fits it to the shape. No answer to this puzzle has so far been found. The other peculiarity was a difference between Pages ’09 version 4.0.5 and Pages ’09 version 4.1. In the latter Alt-clicking on a shape duplicates it. In the earlier version nothing happens.

In the Q & A session there was another peculiar item - a document, sent to print over wi-fi from a laptop one floor below the printer (which is wired direct to the iMac) didn’t print until the laptop was brought back into the room with the printer. The iMac wasn’t touched during this. No-one could resolve that puzzle either!

Next month we will be looking at the items in the Utilities folder to see what they do and how useful they may be.

Finally Mick announced that Michael is stepping down after the March meeting from running the Bournemouth meeting for four years. Mick wished him well and called for people to take over - it wouldn't be necessary for just one person to take on the job. AS attendances are improving (13 this time) it would be a great shame to let the meeting disappear.

Comments

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Roy Rainford said…

Two helpful presentations thanks to Mick and Michael, with useful discussion. Many thanks to Michael for running the group and best wishes to him in his "retirement".

Drew McFarlane said…

I echo Roys comments, a good meeting with helpful topics. Nothing technical, plain understandable language.
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