November 8, 2008 Meeting Newsletter

Warren Walker brought in some waterfall and mushroom prints and an announcement of his first photo exhibit beginning with an artists’ reception at The Hangman, 87 South Main Street, Hardwick, VT on Thursday evening, November 13 and running through early December.

Mary Killian looking at Warren's prints.

Gordon Alexander asked where to find Macintosh dealers other than Small Dog. We told him about Lyndonville and Ormsby’s in Barre.

For a list of Macintosh dealers in Vermont and bordering New Hampshire area go to: http://www.apple.com/buy/locator/ and search for Macintosh products at Burlington VT and Hanover NH for lists of dealers. Or try other cities. Unfortunately it did not work for Canada.

Gordon also asked if anyone had tried Bean. Bean is a free word processing program that has advanced features not found in Text Edit such as a live word count, autosaving and date-stamped backups, floating windows like Stickies, and much more. It is not a page layout like Pages but it does have some layout features. Gordon likes it and uses it to write stories for the newspaper. It is available on such sources as http://www.versiontracker.com.

Gordon said he takes a lot of pictures. Imports them into iPhoto, but only saves a few. He edits those in Photoshop, then saves them in iPhoto. Almost every photographer seems to have a different system. Stephen and Warren tried to convince Gordon to explore Lightroom which Warren said is like Bridge on steroids with editing features. He said Apple’s program is not as good.

Gordon taking photographs at the meeting.. With him are Warren on the left and Harold Turner on the right.

Gordon sends pictures to himself to see if they go as to dark or to light. The gamma is different for PCs and for Macs. Midge Lubot said that she usually sends pictures as pdf because they look better. Gordon said the Newport Express wants pictures sent to them in pdf. Gordon sometimes changes in dpi in Photoshop and then saves them in iPhoto. He does not know why, but it works.

Stephen said a new standard for the pdf format is coming, and that Microsoft will then finally recognize the pdf format.

Geof said that parents are buying students new computers with Microsoft Vista and Office. The schools cannot open the new Office file format.

Mary Killian wanted to know why her Pages documents were not going on the desktop where she had saved them.

Stephen said there are two desktops. The system desktop and your user desktop. Or it might be saving as a template in Pages. She could search for it using Spotlight to search by name or Today.

Mary had her computer with her. Stephen connected it to the projector so that everyone could see.

Mary being helped by Stephen. Photo by Gordon Alexander.

It was an experience to see Stephen work. He was very careful to ask Mary how she worked, to preserve the way she worked, and to preserve anything she might want to use sometime. An example was archiving Internet Explorer instead of deleting it. He carefully removed some big files that Mary would never us to free up space on her computer.

The missing Pages file was found using Pages > Files > Open Recent. It was within a folder named desktop in the Pictures documents. The folder must have been created by accident.

Geof Gonter and Stephen both worked to help Mary with her problems - photo by Gordon Alexander.

When Stephen opened the document, Geof told him to control click on the icon to the left document’s name on the top of the page to see where it was located in the files.

Geof explained that the Users > Shared folder is a common site that all users of the computer can access.

Geog Gonter photo by Gordon Alexander

Users can drag files into the Shared folder that they want other users of this computer to be able to use, as well as get files that are in this folder.

When you drag a document into this Shared folder, the document assumes the Permissions that are set for the folder. This is the only file that does that.

The remedy to speed up Photoshop is R A M, get more. It also helps to reduce the number of files on your desktop because your finder always looks at those files for every command. Just put them into a folder.

Also, it may help to reduce the number of fonts because Photoshop manages them. You may be surprised by the number of fonts you have. They come with your system, but they also come from applications like AppleWorks, Photoshop,, and other Adobe applications.

Open the Font Book application to see all your fonts. Turn off the fonts you do not need, but don’t delete them. The day you delete Tahiti is the day you will need it.

At the bottom below the Font column of the Font Book page is a box with a check mark if the font is active or empty if the font is turned off. Click on this box to toggle between the two.

There is a keyboard viewer under System Preferences > International. As you can guess from the name, one of the purposes is so that you can memorize and use a French keyboard if you want to type in French. You can also use it in English to see what you will get if when you add an option key to your typing. But, don’t turn the different keyboards on unless you need them. It confuses the repairmen.

Midge uses a dashboard language translator. Gordon said that it is fun to translate from French to English then back to French for laughs. Geof likes the DoplerView widget for weather.

Midge Lubot, Mary Killian, and Stephen Farber - photo by Gordon Alexander.

Stephen showed us MainMenu.app which is another maintenance program. Geof likes Onyk. I use Cocktail. They all run Apple scripts and do the normal maintenance steps. They run the Apple chron program that run at 3 a.m. if your computer is on and running. They clean caches if you tell them to. Some also verify preferences and tell you the ones you might want to delete.

Someone asked why sometimes they could not hear their startup chime. When you adjust your volume it doesn’t react immediately, and you may click it more. In Tiger if you set the sound volume low, the startup chime will also be low.

Berry Hayes gave out notepads with a magnet back to attach to a refrigerator.

Berry gave his review of Fine Art Printing for Photographers just as the power ran out on my laptop for the first time at a meeting. I scrambled to take notes by hand when it might have made more sense to plug my PowerBook in. See the review in Reviews.