Dorchester — May 10th 2016

Brian Tapper from our Salisbury Group gave us a very entertaining and informative demonstration of Keynote which, he emphasised was his very personal way of using this flexible software. The images he had previously drawn moved across the screen along many different paths. Brian showed how by reducing the size of the Keynote slide, the pasteboard around it becomes visible so that items positioned off the slide can move onto, across or off the slide. We should have had the loudspeakers attached when Brian started to add a commentary, including the speaker’s face, by using the video setting on Photo Booth, another useful tip. He showed the large number of actions users can apply to words and sentences. There were lots of questions which Brian answered in detail about starting a new presentation, creating actions etc. Great fun, thank you Brian.

Euan introduced us to Karsten Bruns ‘External Editors for Photos’, a £0.79 OSX App which adds an extension to ‘Photos’ to replace a feature dropped by Apple in the changeover from ‘iPhoto’. The App is run once to add the extension to ‘Photos’. Then, when you are editing a photo, you can switch to opening and editing it in another full image editing application such as ‘Photoshop’ or ‘Affinity Photo’ direct from the extension button in ‘Photos’, and save the result back to ‘Photos’. There was a little confusion because several members assumed that at £0.79 the app must be IOS but no, it’s a Mac App and very useful too.

David ran through a few Social Media Apps that he thought members should be aware of. He had decided that it was not possible to give more than a brief description of each — with a view to more detailed presentations of the more useful Apps at future meetings. He mentioned ‘LinkedIn’ briefly before ‘Facebook’ which produced useful input from the few users, as did ‘Instagram’ and ‘Whatsapp’. Georgia mentioned Messages as a messaging feature built in to ‘Facebook’. David showed how to set up ‘Whatsapp’ to work on a Mac through a little app called ‘ChitChat’. He briefly covered Google ‘Hangouts’. ‘Tumblr’ and ‘SnapChat’ are definitely for the young who show some real creative talent on ‘Tumblr’. ‘Chitchat’ features the ability to send images which disappear after 10 seconds of being read, but the app does point out that a screen shot can copy and retain an image - the dangers of sexting! David touched briefly on ‘Pinterest’ which he recommends members try. He proposed that we cover ‘Facebook’, ‘Instagram’, ‘Whatsapp’, ‘Twitter’ and Pinterest in more detail in the future.

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