When we began to plan the content for June’s meeting we had no idea that MAC|LIFE Magazine was planning the same thing. While our lists did overlap, we came up with several varying preferences within the group in attendance. Thanks to all for your participation. Deanne DuFresne sent me several ideas, some of which we didn’t touch on during the meeting. They are part of the list.

INTERNET

• Adium - Cross platform/Service instant messaging
• NewsFire - RSS reader
• Twitterrific read and publish to the Twitter community
• Chax - makes iChat more enjoyable
• Cyberduck - FTP, SFTP, WebDAV & Amazon S3 Browser for Mac OS X.
• Call Recorder - Automatically Record Skype Calls

EMAIL

• TextExpander - Mac Typing Shortcut Utility Saves You Time!
• Mail Attachments Iconizer - take control of email attachments.
• MailTags - Adds enhanced organization to Apple’s Mail

PRODUCTIVITY

• Scrivener - Outline. Edit. Storyboard. Write!
• Anxiety - Lightweight To-do Management
• celtx - Integrated Media Pre-Production
• Yep! - it’s iPhoto for PDFs
• Inquisitor 3 - Spotlight for the web.
• Yojimbo - organize information of any sort
• Desktop Curtain - makes your screenshots cleaner looking
• Witch - keyboard shortcuts for window switching
• FileChute - Send files too large to email.
• ThisService - Create services from any script
• A Better Finder Rename - Rename LOTS of files. Quick and easy!
• Terragen - photorealistic scenery rendering software
• SketchUp - create, modify and share 3D models
• VueScan - Runs your scanner. Works with over 750 scanners. Very powerful!
• Quicken equivalents - a discussion thread on the topic at Tidbits.com
• myNotes - an easy note manager for your Mac
• MacAstronomica - turn your laptop into a guide to the night sky
• World of Where - Learn geography on your Mac

MEDIA

• Acorn - image editor
• Pixelmator - image editor
• ImageWell - image editor
• Audacity - audio editor and recorder
• HandBrake - DVD to MPEG-4 converter
• Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes - makes maintaining you music collection fun!
• VLC media player - cross platform media player and server
• Connect360 - share your iTunes and iPhoto files to our Xbox 360
• Graphic Converter - convert images from one format to another
• Mac the Ripper - a DVD extractor for OS X
• Times - a different RSS reader
• CDpedia - organize and manage your CD collection
• Jing - capture and share video and images
• Pandora - A new kind of radio station just for you!
• Senuti - transfer music from your iPod to your Mac
• Screenshot Plus - Screen capture widget

UTILITIES

• GeekTool - brings out the Geek in you
• TextMate — The Missing Editor for Mac OS X
• Coda - One-Window Web Development for Mac OS X
• Transmit 3 - takes FTP to the next level. Again.
• SuperDuper! - Heroic system recovery for mere mortals!

GAMES

• Battle for Wesnoth - opensource fantasy wargame

Our June meeting will explore shareware and freeware programs for your Mac. Some of these little programs do the most amazing things. We’ll focus on three main areas with occasional side-trips.

Utilities: Imagewell; Pixelmator; GraphicConverter; Adium; VLC; Handbrake; Senuti; Mouseposé.

Web: Stumbleupon and FlikrSpy

Games: Battle for Wesnoth

This is only a partial list of the goodies we’ll explore. Feel free to suggest others.

As always, the Macintosh Mystery Hour precedes the main meeting. Bring your questions. Bring your answers. Bring a friend!

Here’s the link to the PDF Dick Lennox used as the guide for our May meeting.

Dick’s PDF on Kerry’s iDisk. The file is iPhoto Tips.pdf. Click the down-arrow at the left right side of the screen to download the file.

Thanks for a great presentation, Dick!

The Mac Store is opening a new store at the Clackamas Town Center. Our friend Jeff Scoble sent a link to the Grand Opening Specials. Pay close attention to the LaCie 500GB hard drive offer. Those of you planning to use Time Machine for backup can really get going for not much money! You DO back up, don’t you? ?? ??? !!!!

We’ll focus on digital photography for the May meeting using a “Soup to Nuts” approach. iPhoto plays well with all the iLife and iWork applications and spend a little time exploring this. There’s also a new Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 to review and also news about Apple’s Aperture2. We’ve got some printing tips and some new plug-ins and more.

We’ll show a few photo sharing sites, including Flickr, Kodak and others. Send us your favorite Digital Photo site links (please annotate with a short sentence description)
Bring your photo prints to share, or links to your photo sites.

The Macintosh Mystery Hour precedes the main meting. Bring your questions. Bring your answers. Bring a friend!

Maybe not officially, but it should be!

Steve Jobs gave us an idea of the gravity of the situation when introducing Time Machine a year ago. Four percent of computer users actually back up adequately. If you ask yourself the question, “What will it cost me to reconstruct my data for the last day, or week, or month?” then you begin to appreciate the value of automated backup.

We’ll hopefully have a Time Capsule to play with. They seem to fly in and out of stock which indicates that many users already have asked themselves the “Cost” question mentioned previously. We’ll also demonstrate the set up process for Time Machine.

The Macintosh Mystery hour precedes the main meeting as always.

Bring your questions. Bring your answers. Bring a friend!

Dick Lennox led us on a real romp through some of the best features of the Leopard OS and the iLife applications. He recommended an article by Robin Williams on the Peachpit Press web site. She explores the 10 most overlooked features of Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. This is a real eye-opener! I opened each of the mentioned programs and tinkered along with the article. I’m inspired to play with the iLife applications and the system just to find other gems. Thanks Dick!

We discussed the need, or lack thereof, for antivirus software on our Macs. One article I forgot to mention is on the Tidbits site. Should Mac Users Run Antivirus Software, by Rich Mogull, gives a good overview of the issues and dangers involved.

Jeff Scoble from The Mac Store gave us a brief update on the state of the wireless systems in the Veterans’ Memorial Building. They rearranged the wiring and replaced the main hub. They reset the broadcast bands to avoid conflicts internally and externally. They did everything but jack up the hood ornament and run a new car under it! The result is great connectivity and blazing throughput. We had 13 laptops plus a couple of iPhones and some other devices using the wireless network without a hitch. Thanks guys!

Rod Jensen was preparing a short presentation for the future on Spaces and it happened that a portion of his presentation dovetailed into a question posed from the floor during the Macintosh Mystery Hour. He folded a portion of his content into the discussion seamlessly. Pretty good for a first time presenter who wasn’t even working directly on his chosen topic.  Thanks Rod!

We have a number of seemingly disparate items to discuss this month. The common element is APPLE, Inc. (As if you couldn’t guess.)

The new iPhone SDK leads the pack and we’ll explore its implications for us. Safari 3.1 has also been released and we’ll take a first look at this opus. The Leopard update (OS 10.5.2) is out and there are updates for the iLife and iWork applications as well. Plenty to talk about!

The Macintosh Mystery Hour preceeds the main meeting. Bring your questions. Bring your answers. Bring a friend!

We will now meet on the THIRD Wednesday of each month. Same time. Same location. Dmitri has adjusted the countdown timer under our Banner and it now looks at the third Wednesday of March. We’ve already had our meeting on the 12th so don’t show up on the 19th of February!

We’ve changed our meeting night to relieve an ongoing overbooking problem at the Veterans Memorial Building. They worked around it as much as they could but it finally became apparent that someone had to move and we’re the smallest and most nimble group. It appears that the majority of their Wednesday business falls on the second Wednesday of each month.

With this move nearly everyone will be happy. The sole, and painful, exception is Webb Sussman, our publicity manager. He made it plain when we started the process of change that we should do what was necessary despite his current conflict. Webb will continue to support the group in his current capacity. We thank him for his support and understanding.

So! Our next meeting is Wednesday, March 19th and we will meet each third Wednesday thereafter.

Bring your questions. Bring your answers. Bring a friend!

• Steve Jobs opened his bag of tricks at MacWorld last month. We’ll explore the new stuff from Apple this month. It’s not clear the MacBook Air will be here yet but we can hope!

UPDATE: It’s here!

UPDATE: Our spies at MacWorld have returned with SWAG!

The Macintosh Mystery Hour precedes the main meeting. You never know what you’ll learn. Bring your questions. Bring your answers. Bring a friend!

• We need to change our meeting night starting in March. The Veterans Building is full up for several months. All their regular Wednesday business is clustered on the second Wednesday. We’ll be making a hard choice very soon to change our meeting to another Wednesday of the month. Your input will be sought by email soon. We’ll try to gore as few oxes as possible.