Snippets from Previous Meetings
Holiday Meeting
Barry announced that we had decided to have a meeting in spite of many people being absent because of school holidays. A relaxed evening followed where we helped each other about, and worked through issues.
For the seven members present, and with Barry's and Elizabeth's computers available, time passed until suddenly it was 10pm and home time.
Elizabeth brought a pps. file she had been given the previous day but could not open. Barry transferred this to his machine via file sharing. The file opened on Barry's Mac, which is running the latest version of Microsoft Power Point. It had not opened in Microssoft Office 98 on Elizabeth's Mac. This led to discussion about opening files from various applications and systems. Elizabeth said she had heard that the new Claris or AppleWorks program, which is in the pipeline, will be able to open Word documents. Later at home she opened an AppleWorks 5 Spreadsheet and from that opened an Excel 98 file and was surprised when none of the formatting was lost except the colours.
ViaVoice
Barry had bought IBM 'Via Voice' for Mac.
http://www-3.ibm.com/software/speech/
To quote from the box it came in, "'Via Voice' affords a 'multi-model' computer input environment freeing users from dependence in the keyboard and mouse for many applications. Via Voice is for Mac OSX edition users who enter data more rapidly by speaking than by typing and can be more productive".
Barry said he thought it would be handy for our chat sessions during the monthly on line committee meeting. The problem was that the program would not work on two of his Macs but did work on his son's G4 .
Discussion took place on the new G5 and the price which is somewhere about $4000 for the low end model. This should also bring the prices down for all the previous Macs. http://searchcgi.apple.com/cgi-bin/sp/nph-searchpre1.pl
Barry asked Colin if he had any problems and Colin replied, "not yet, not until I have bought the new e-mac". Barry then asked him when he had ordered it and Colin answered that he had hoped to order it tonight from Sheryl, while the printer special was still on. He informed us that he would have plenty of problems when it arrived. We all have problems in upgrading, which arise because it takes a while to work out what drivers and programs work with new systems.
Barry mentioned that Quark express was now available for OSX and that Steve Jobs said that it was a milestone as it was the last main application to change over.
Explorer is not going to be developed further for Macs from now on. OSX comes with Safari and its own E-mail program. Barry opened Safari on his computer so as we could all take a look at it.
Kevin said, rather than using Microsoft Windows, he was using Linix on his old PCs. Open Office and Star Office are available and many other programs for the Linix operating systems. He uses Macs in his work as well. Installing Linix is relatively easy and drivers for various accessories are there in the system already.
Discussion took place on many new accessories, cameras, printers, cartridges, scanners and the difficulties of upgrading and the applications which come with OSX.
Dave as usual, made us all a good cup of tea.
Elizabeth outlined the revisions made to our web site, which is still hosted with Neil Hichcox at D world in Timaru.
The URL is: http://www.dworld.co.nz/mac.users/
Lea suggested that we should thank Neil for hosting of our web site and Barry added that we should thank Lea for all the work she has put into it since1999.
Day Meetings
Neil Trower has volunteered to coordinate the day meetings and people interested could contact Neil: [ E-Mail Neil - ne.ol.trower@xtra.co.nz ]
Phone 684-7325
Neil proposed the next Day group meeting be
Monday October 13 at 10.30am.
Bring and share lunch.
The meeting closed at about 10pm
REMINDER
Next AMUG Evening meeting will be on Friday October 31
Next AMUG Daytime Meeting will be on October 13 at 10.30am.
[Committee Meeting on Mactropolis: Tuesday October 14 at 9:00pm
In the absence of Tony Regards to all.....
Lea Hullett
Secretary: Tony Climo, Aoraki MacIntosh Users Group
E-mail it.climo@xtra.co.nz