Dorchester — Jun 10th 2014

With apologies from John, David Moon took the chair opening the evening by reporting that Rowland Wren a longtime member of WAMUG Dorchester has moved to Spain and the assembled gathering wished him well. David then did a short hands on look at the basics of iPhoto running through the Preferences and then looking briefly at Photos, Events and Albums.

Stephen gave a full presentation on his personal use of iPhoto. Armed with two Pentax DSLR cameras Stephen clearly takes his photography seriously and with great enthusiasm. He defined his five stages of photography. A) the subject B) traditional filters fitted over the camera lens D) cameras - with particular reference to DSLRs and their controls E) computerised editing/enhancing D) sharing of the finalised image. Moving through these stages Stephen touched on many things including his personal preference for aperture priority, polarising filters and stopping down slightly towards underexposure. He encouraged members to regularly format memory cards and get outside their personal comfort zones and experiment away from the "Automatic" function with mode and setting controls and subjects they would not necessarily take photos of. He showed how he tweaks images in iPhoto with straightening, cropping, adjusting: the Enhance and Brighten buttons are well worth trying and changing to Black and White can often rescue a poor picture. Finally he gave insights on his preference on sharing including not posting direct from iPhoto to Facebook but to export the photos first, often then using Preview to add text which with some really excellent results.

In answer to a question from David Chaplin, Mick explained that USB Memory Sticks are formatted by default MS-DOS (FAT) limiting file size to 4Gb. He then demonstrated how to transfer files of any size between Macs on a local Network.

Mark showed how to have multiple iPhoto libraries including how to divide a single library into two or more as well as starting a new library from scratch. The justification for multiple libraries is practicality and not slowing down iPhoto with a massive library such as Mark’s 137 Gb total.

For the final session of the evening Euan gave a resumé of the recent Apple WWDC Keynote. Appropriately, it focused on developers and was divided into three parts: OS X Yosemite and IOS 8 as well as “Swift". Both system upgrades will be launched in the Autumn. Each is still tailored to specific platforms but with parallel features connecting devices more closely ("Handover" and “Continuity”). For example you can start typing an email on an IOS device and instantly switch to the Mac where the part written email is waiting to be continued. The same applies to documents you may be working on. If you need to call someone you can do so directly from your Mac via your iPhone which might be in another room in a drawer. You can store any type of file on iCloud Drive which for the first time allows limited finder-type access to IOS. Apple also announced new “Swift” coding software (not to be confused with Swift-lang which is open source). Swift promises to radically reduce the ‘coding clutter’ associated with the ‘C’ family and while Swift code can be inserted into older ‘C’ code, it should eventually replace ‘C’ altogether. It opens further opportunities for new software products. This was warmly received by the audience and in later on-line discussions. Euan encouraged members to read more on the Apple website, watch the Keynote on-line, or follow the discussions on the web. The Keynote is not difficult to absorb, and is aimed at non-developers as well as pros.

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