Dorchester — Jun 9th 2015
Mick outlined how Pages can be used to create simple newsletters with a professional appearance. He emphasised the importance of starting off with a plan; deciding which fonts and sizes to use for text, and headlines, and standardising the page layout. This facilitates formatting and styles to ensure that text is consistent in appearance and simpler to manage.
He gave several tips, such as spanning a text box over a multi-column page for a headline, or summary, and explained how to manage font sizes and spacing for headings and body text to ensure that lines of text in adjacent columns line up neatly.
David, with Sheena and Chris then showed how Handoff works, and how, when moving from one enabled device to another, small icons appear indicating that a document being created/updated on the first device can be opened on the second to continue the previous work. Chris reported an experience where a document could be worked on on both devices at once potentially causing confusion.
David showed us his Apple Watch, which he has been using for a few weeks, and which can do all sorts of things to do with weather forecasts, receiving and responding to messages, emails, showing photos, and recording the wearer’s health statistics, even nudging the wearer (Haptic touch) when the Watch felt that the wearer has been sitting down for too long, and it’s time to stand, walk, or even run around for a bit. (On top of this it also tells the time.) To accomplish these tasks, it functions through a linked iPhone, and can be linked to other health sensors. He felt Siri was coming into its own with the watch and referred to a useful site providing a dictation guide for Siri http://www.siriuserguide.com/siri-dictation-guide/
Euan gave us a brief summary of Apple’s WWDC Keynote covering OS X El Capitan, Metal, iOS9, Watch OS, and Music. Apple is still generating huge enthusiasm for its new products, both hardware and software. Steve H gave an update on his previous iTunes presentation showing that building compilations and grouping common data is easier than he had thought and thanked Trevor for his correction.
Andy concluded proceedings by explaining how, while students can use Google Translate to cheat on homework, if the student mistakenly translates the set piece into the wrong language (perhaps Portuguese rather than French) the ruse will become painfully obvious! Developing this theme, he explained how it is extremely easy to learn a language by searching for popular songs and their lyrics in that language, translating the lyrics into one’s native tongue as above, then performing an extended karaoke session until the translation is fixed in the mind. Perhaps we could all become fluent in, say, Norwegian before the next meeting?
SR
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