Bournemouth — Jul 17th 2012

Another good attendance resulted in much lively discussion before the meeting formally started. When Alan eventually managed to bring us to order, the Q&A session covered a variety of topics including how Alan came to have some old dormant 2004 Windows viruses on his 2007 machine, conversion of Appleworks documents, rumours of a new iMac (and whether or not it would be able to run pre-Lion versions of the OS to run Appleworks!), and a crashing Google Earth.

John Hooper then gave us a conducted tour of a number of keyboard shortcuts, starting with the various modifier keys and the mysterious function keys. Considering that there are over 200 shortcuts for Pages alone, John did well to whittle his selection down to just 65 which he thoughtfully provided in the form of a handout. The overriding messages were:
i) Keyboard shortcuts can be useful and save time, but there are still occasions when it is better to use the mouse or trackpad
ii) Don't try to remember too many shortcuts - well, not all at once anyway!

Another advantage of shortcuts cited was that, whilst other aspects of an Application's user interface can sometimes change significantly between versions, the keyboard shortcuts usually remain the same.

During the discussion, a search application Find Any File was mentioned as an alternative to Spotlight, as was the use of Command~ to cycle through Pages documents (It also cycles through the open windows of other applications). The ensuing discussion covered the use of screen grab shortcuts and access to non standard keyboard characters.

After the tea break, Denis King gave us a demonstration of how to use some of Photoshop's bewildering array of features, focussing on the use of layers. The demonstrations covered:
i) Removal of unwanted passers-by from a picture by merging multiple shots from the same vantage point
ii) Creating an 'out of frame' effect by selective deletion of different layers
iii) Merging pictures of a car taken in difficult lighting, then spicing the picture up with a few deceptively simple brush strokes
iv) Creating an impressive (if somewhat disturbing) Steampunk artwork - if you fancy a set of engine buffers on your belt, Denis is your man!

Denis was using the latest version of Photoshop and pointed out that, though the purchase price was high, it could be rented on a 12 month contract for about £17.50 p.m. 

Both presentations were well received and stimulated plenty of interest and discussion. 

Please note that there is no meeting in Bournemouth in August.

Comments

Page 1

Eleanor Spenceley said…

Whether or not it would be able to run pre-Lion versions of the OS to run Appleworks!

I assume your answer was no. I do not know of any version of Mac being able to run older versions of Mac OSX than the one it came with.
You could always run Snow Leopard Server via Parallels/VMWare which supports Rosetta which in turn still runs PPC software. :-)

Page 1