Dorchester — Jan 13th 2009

The first meeting of 2009 started with a bumper attendance and an excellent session. A particular welcome to four new members. Martin kicked off by guiding us through the history of Mac portables with examples from his own collection - mostly working. He had begun to think that his appearance at a meeting meant others stayed away! What rubbish! His well informed and enthusiastic presentation led to interested and lively discussion and we are all grateful for the trouble he took to lug all his hardware to Dorchester.

I think we may have cracked the problem of matching members who are looking for help with those who may have answers. The difficulty has been that queries often involve long discussions that are not always relevant to everyone in the group. It was good to see so many members bringing their own machines.
Immediately before we took the regular ‘bar break’ people with problems briefly described them to the whole group and those who had thoughts about an answer identified themselves. During the break folk got together in small groups, looked at their machines, posed questions, discussed issues and solutions were found.

When everyone was back from the bar Lionel briefly introduced us to Open Office v3 and its use in collaboration with MS Office. The copy that he had brought on his memory stick proved useful to others. This is the first version of the powerful productivity suite that runs natively on OS X & Intel Macs. It lacks the latest features of MS Office but as the review in the current Macworld puts it …” It’s speedy, feature-rich, and does what it says it will do very well ...it is definitely worth the effort. [of downloading for free]” (page 53). It will be interesting to see how iWork '09 fits in to the range of software on offer.

John will be back next month to steer us through our meeting and we hope to get a first look at some of the iLife ’09 suite.

MF

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