meeting-recap

It was our first meeting in our new rendezvous and due to a little snafu we met in a smallish classroom but it's quite a nice place. Rik took us on a brief tour and we peeked through the window at our usual meeting room: a lecture hall with desks. Wireless is supported. Applause to Stevens-Henager College in Boise for hosting, to Carol (?) for suggesting the venue, and to Rik for checking it out and making arrangements.

For those of you who didn't make it to our meeting last night [Monday, Mar. 17] (perhaps you were out drinking green beer), I wanted to tell you that I really enjoyed the meeting. I was tired and almost didn't come because I didn't see an announced topic. It turned out that we stayed to nearly 9 p.m., because the meeting was so interesting. Rik and Lauren demonstrated iChat, iglasses, and other fun things on Leopard. We even surprised Tommy who was online paying his bills in Texas (?) and had his iChat open. Thanks so much Rik and Lauren!!

Monday night [15th] Mark Winchester from MacAnswers gave us tips on how to keep our Mac running reliably. Some ways are through hardware, use a UPS, pick the right computer for your needs, have enough RAM and hard drive space and choose peripherals that serve our needs.

A big thank you to John-Eric for setting up and showing the Apple TV and giving us a taste of iLife '08. And thanks to all who showed up. We did have some goodies to raffle off but I guess we went a little long so next month we'll try it again. If you haven't seen the new iMacs get in and demo one. Once again Apple takes it for design, looks and of course ease of use. hope to see you all next month Rik

Thanks to Tommy for delighting us with a thorough demonstration of iPhone, including his observations and experiences (which didn't include the notification that he had 2 billion emails awaiting download[!]). He took us through detailed descriptions of all the widgets and answered questions from the floor. Thanks again, Tommy! Though Pat and others tried earnestly, Tommy could not be convinced to share his iPhone with the group on a one-week-per-person set-up.

Our December meeting took place this past Monday (the 11th), a break from our usual "third Monday" routine.

We started out with a small discussion of what you should think about and need, in the way of a camcorder, before you start making movies. The David Pogue Book on iMovie, or better yet, iLife, was also suggested. Then we created a small two clip movie, added opening Titles, ending credits, transitions between clips, created a still image from a video clip, added a voice over and background music.

I missed the October meeting (10/16), but the planned topics were:

Tomorrow night's topics will be (drum roll please)....RSS using Safari ( I've done some research and found some neat RSS tricks that maybe some RSS veterans won't know about, I didn't) and talk about Podcasts and some of the great Mac content that is available on them.