Dorchester — Dec 12th 2017

This was something of a gala meeting, and not to be missed! Our choral ensemble performed quite well after a slightly uncertain start. Martin laid down a live guitar backing track in Garage Band by selecting the Voice option for the track and using his MacBook Air’s internal microphone. After a choral dress rehearsal we sang the first verse of ‘Summertime’ before Martin added it as a new voice track over the accompanying guitar backing playing through separate speakers. Ron’s fine base voice was quickly spotted by members seated nearby so he was commandeered to give a solo performance through the MacBook Air microphone. We settled with some relief for Ron’s solo rather than our ‘choir’ and Martin exported the finished track to iTunes. Anne took over and imported the track from iTunes into some film she had set up in iMovie. This was an excellent reminder of how much you can do with the amazing audio-visual apps that come with Mac OS. Anne and Martin commemorate their holidays with short video diaries and accompanying music, and were persuaded to show one they had made of a trip to France: “We Love Périgord”, a fine, professional production, we could sense the truffle temptation in that beautiful landscape.

Consoling ourselves with mere mince pies, we had a very useful Q&A session. David M could not understand why when he printed labels from Contacts he got duplicates of each. Under guidance from Mick he removed the On My Mac contacts as all were in iCloud, but that made no difference. Despite David’s insistence that there were no duplicates, Drew suggested that he run Look for Duplicates under the Card menu. Sure enough there were 58, problem solved. In turn, Drew dislikes a recent update to Pages where text which is a link, while still underlined, is now in black not blue. Mick showed how to set up a new paragraph style in the Format window; if you change a particular style and want the change to extend everywhere, just click on the update button. John M wanted to know how to forward links e.g. for an item from an online catalogue. He was offered many solutions, the most basic being to click on the URL in the browser (if not immediately highlighted: Command+A to select All) then Command+C to copy before pasting into an email. John H pointed out that, on a Safari browser page, the instruction Command+L highlights and selects the full URL.

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