Bournemouth — Sep 18th 2012

Alan started the meeting by saying that the WAGs website had recently had a superb, major makeover (by our Webmaster Chris Willis) which he recommended everyone to visit. An interesting new feature was Chat enabling members to indulge in text conversations with each other on a public or private basis. He then asked members to suggest topics they would find interesting at future meetings and would be pleased to hear from anyone who would be willing to share a Mac experience with the rest of us.

One member had brought an external hard drive he used for Time Machine and asked for any ideas why it wasn’t working. The conclusion was that it had succumbed to a terminal illness and would need replacing!

The latest OS, Mountain Lion, is evolutionary (from Lion) rather than revolutionary in the view of Christopher Harrison of Solutions who gave us a run down of some of its features.
Messages is now integrated that text messages can be exchanged with iOS devices. Notes is useful for recording all sorts of information to send to your other devices or sync them although this may be a touch problematic. Safari has been improved and no longer has two search boxes; particularly useful is the facility to store web pages for reading off line. The auto save function in Pages is useful and acts a bit like Time Machine in that it saves previous versions of a document as well as the current one (File>Revert to>Browse All Versions). There is a Dictation facility which works quite well as long there is not too much ambient noise. Also useful is Notifications telling you when an email or Message etc has arrived. All in all a number of handy features, but of no use to those with an older machine which will not allow an upgrade to Mountain Lion.

After the break, John Hooper told us about his 1 month’s experience with the Magic Trackpad – a battery driven Bluetooth device which is used to control a desk top Mac using the so-called Muti-Touch Technology (much like the built in track pad on a Mac laptop). It is a smart looking piece of kit which sits neatly alongside a wireless keyboard if you’ve got one but it’s not essential. John had prepared for us a handout listing many of the ways in which to use your fingers to move the cursor, scroll, zoom in or out, rotate one way or the other, change between web pages viewed in the current session, find definitions of words, switch between apps and so on. The detail of many of these manoeuvres are illustrated clearly in the Trackpad section of System Preferences. John freely admitted that he found the device a trifle tricky but thought more experience and determination might make him like it as much as some others do. On the other hand, he was also pondering the possibility that he had already found a Christmas present for his son!

All in all a lively and well attended meeting with two extra touches. Michael Scruton showed us DVD recordings he and and his wife had made of of baby tits recorded via a cable from a tit box in their garden to their TV. He wanted to edit these in, say, iMovie but had to accept he couldn’t transfer the footage from DVD to iMovie. And we had a YouTube of an unusual printer problem - well worth a viewing! (Printer problem)

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