Bournemouth — Jan 21st 2014
Mark gave us a presentation oF Comic Life, version 3, which is available for twenty one pounds from the App Store. Although intended for authoring comics, the app comes with lots of templates which can be used for other things such as how-to guides, recording the progress of projects, producing worksheets, and making colourful records of family events etc.
Mark demonstrated how media can be dragged from folders or iPhoto libraries and placed into one of the various panels of the chosen template, modified used various image adjustments and effects available within the app, and augmented by one of a variety of speech bubbles.
New in version 3 is the script editor. Although basically a word processor, the script editor also features SmartScript technology which enables the various text elements of the script to be brought into the body of the work very simply.
The finished work (comic) can be exported or shared in a variety of formats.
Alan then took the floor to to share a couple of features of Mail: the facility to drag an individual message to the desktop and the export of mailboxes for archiving purposes. These tips generated much useful discussion including a warning about possible incompatibility of exported mailboxes with later versions of Mail when the OS is upgraded and the use of the newly enhanced flag facility for organising messages. Mark told us how he uses MailSteward to archive his emails in a searchable database on an external hard drive; he has set this up to be done at the same time every day.
After a short break, the Q&A session included the adjustment of trackpad settings in System Preferences to avoid accidentally triggering pop-up menus, the pitfalls of sharing a document between devices which require different versions of the app to open and read that document, the upgradeability of plastic MacBooks, problems in transfer of PDFs from Mac to iPad, and how to overcome the 4GB file size limit of the default MSDOS FAT 32 format when trying to share a large movie with PC users via a USB stick (NTFS for Mac can help with this issue apparently).
All informative stuff, shared in the informal, mutually supportive atmosphere that has become the trademark of the Bournemouth meetings. Rounded off by a short video of Alan's cat! - M. & T. H
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