This month well just relax and have a picnic. This meeting is open to members and their families and significant others. Members can also bring friends. We’ll light the grill at 5:30.

The place is Charnel Mulligan Park at 17th & Charnelton. That’s 2 blocks west of the Veterans’ Building where we normally meet. It’s a beautiful urban park with shaded eating space and lots of space for the kids to play. There’s a small market (Cornucopia) down the street if you forget anything and Safeway is 3 blocks away if you REALLY forget something.

EMUG will provide hamburgers, hot dogs, veggie burgers, buns, condiments, soda and paper plates. Bring side dishes, chips or salad. Bring your own cutlery (We’ll have some spares available).

** In case of rain we’ll abandon the picnic and meet as usual at the Veterans Memorial Building.

Bring a friend and bring a smile!

This month we’ll play about with iWeb, the MobileMe Gallery, facebook and Twitter publishing in iPhoto. Changes ihave been made to Apple’s MobileMe service. There have also been several upgrades to iWeb since we last visited it. Gallery is new and quite useful.

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

The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference is history for another year. We’ll cover the announcements and look at some of the products — mostly through a long telescope since the distinction between “announced” and “delivered” (and “delivered to our part of the world”) is seldom stressed in the technology sector. There’s still software to check out

Safari 4.0 is out, as are a number of updates to the iLife and iWork applications. Of course there’s iPhone news, as well.

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

This month we’ll do an overview of iPhoto, online image editing and sharing. We’ll touch on Picasa, Flickr, Photoshop Express, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop CS, and some shareware. We’ll demonstrate some simple editing tasks. We’ll also discuss the pro-level apps – Aperture and Lightroom.

Programs and strategies to insure the safety of your photos, among these, Back-up or Die will be featured. (With a name like that, who can resist.)

It will be an evening of tips and techniques. A CD will be available containing links and information regarding Digital Photography.

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

This is the list of files on the EMUG shareware disk. Disks are $5.00 at the meeting. I can arrange to meet members unable to attend the meeting later in the week. Only local members (Eugene-Springfield area). Don’t order a disk from South Carolina. I’m not driving that far to deliver a $5.00 disk.

The file is Shareware.pdf. Click this link.

When the page loads, click to select the file and then click the down-arrow at the right end of the line to download.

This month we do some housecleaning. We’ll look at some of those indispensable small and often overlooked programs, widgets and utilities for your Mac and your iPhone. To start with, we’ll spend some quality time with Preview and TextEdit.

We’ll also look at programs that have outlived their usefulness such as OS 9, MS Word and MS Office.

We’re open to member requests and favorites. Use the Contact page to suggest inclusions. We plan to produce a disk of shareware around this theme.

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

Safari 4 Beta is out. It contains a number of features that will probably make their way into OS 10.6 Snow Leopard. There are some incompatibilities with 3rd party plug-ins but these problems will iron themselves out rather quickly. We’ll explore Safari 4 and some notable small shareware applications & plug-ins.

We’ll also touch on some Mac-related help sites and reference videos.

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

We continue our exploration of the latest versions of iLife and iWork. Now that iLife is on the street we can illustrate the new stuff directly. We ran long last month and we still had lots to say and do. We expect the same this month. We’ll cover as much as we can squeeze into the meeting.

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

This month we’ll take a first look at the latest versions of iLife and iWork. A few highlights…

• iPhoto has Faces & Places and can share photos to Facebook. It also has themed slide shows and travel books.
• iMovie spots new editing tools, titles and themes. I was particularly impresed with image stabilizaton and travel maps.
• GarageBand has basic and big-name artist lessons available.

We’ll cover as much as we can squeeze into the meeting.

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

The Mac Store in Eugene has a host of special prices on Apple Brand and related goodies.

In addition, Jeff Scoble says the following special prices are offered only to EMUG members. If you’re not sure of your membership status we’ll be happy to check it for you.

Griffin TuneBuds blue or red: retail – $14.95 EMUG price – $9.95

Kingston 4GB DataTraveler: retail – $49.95 EMUG price – $34.95 (Jeff says, “I know I said a $10 discount, but what the heck…”)

Also don’t forget the 500GB LaCie Hard Drive free with trade-in of a qualifying Mac! This offer also includes migration of your files from the trade-in to your new Mac (There are some restrictions. The trade in value must be at least $100.). This is a great way to get credit toward your new Mac and you’ll end up with your Time Machine backup drive as well.

We thank The Mac Store for these offers and for their support through the years. We’ll see you in January for discussion and follow-up to the events at MacWorld.