You won't find anyone more dedicated as a user group president or knowledgeable about Adobe products than Terry White. Always a crows pleaser, Terry prepared his top tips about several Adobe products (Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, InDesign and Illustrator). It was very appropriate to have Terry end our 25th Anniversary meeting schedule and have him record some very nice comments about our group. Thanks Terry and Happy 23rd Anniversary to MacGroup Detroit!  -JoAnn Olsen, President, MacTechnics

I want to thank our roundtable panel (Dean, John, Nickolas) for their insightful discussion regarding social networking. A special thanks to our new Director-At-Large,  John Fauver,  we now have a social network website for MacTechnics at ning.com.  John created our account at the last meeting  entitled mactechnics.ning.com for our user group to use as our forum, to post videos or special events relevant to our members.
When you sign up to join our networking website, you will be asked for an email address. It’s probably a good idea to use an generic email address (.mac or gmail or yahoo). You will also be asked to supply a password, your birthday (month, day and year) and type a secure code in the field provided then click the “Sign Up” button. An email to your designated email account will be generated to verify that you wanted to create an account on mactechnics. ning.com. Simply click on the link provided in the email to activate your account and start exploring

For those of you that have not made the switch to iWork ’09, David Ginbey should have made your decision easier if you attended our September meeting. I was really impressed with the versatility of Numbers (spreadsheet creator). It was great to jot down a lot of helpful tips about the program. Keynote was equally impressive and I am eager to try it for my next presentation.  

Here’s a tip for you to consider about upgrading to iWorks ‘09: Apple offers a free 30 day trial of iWork to download from their web site. One thing to remember is if you don't intend to upgrade after 30 days, save any new or changed files back in the iWork '08 format just in case they don't work any more once your trial expires. You can do this by choosing iWork '08 from the "Save copy as" menu in the Save As dialog.

We wanted to do something special regarding presentations this year, since it's our 25th anniversary.

Scheduling a Mac Movie Double Feature was indeed very unique, fun to put together, and for the most part very enjoyable for everyone that attended.

Welcome to Macintosh was an informative documentary explaining the growth and history of the Macintosh and activated many flashbacks of my first Mac (Mac Plus back in 1986).

MacHeads was a hilarious look into the lives of several Mac owners. You might have seen people like yourself in one of the many testimonials. I know I did.

Nevertheless, the movies were free to view, the food was free to partake and the conversation during the intermission and at the end of the movie was priceless.

Have a great summer and we'll see you on September 19th.

-JoAnn Olsen

President, MacTechnics

We had a very informative June meeting thanks to some very special presenters:

Gerry Felipe for his insightful Net Barrier demo.

Erven Thoma wanted me to include some additional information in this blog.

Apple Pro Tips: Lock Your Data with Disk Images

http://www.apple.com/pro/tips/lock_your_data/html?sr=pro.rss
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Hide Folders  by Altomac
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Daring Fireball:  The Invisible Bit

Our host and VP of Communications, Dean Martelle has provided a 1 page PDF (40kB) that you can download from this blog.

MacTechnics member, Bruce Oshaben, has provided me with additional links:

http://www.privacyalerts.org/data-brokers.html         Getting off all the lists is a lot of work but it is scary what they have.

https://www.dmachoice.org/dma/member/home.action;jsessionid=2B174A69F42D75C467735BDBEF025C8D.tomcat1
https://www.dmachoice.org/dma/member/regist.action
These guys are the ones sending us junk but they do have opt out for phone, email, mail, etc

https://www.protectmichild.com/
Never got much before but at least now one can have a cause of action/complaint.

http://www.reputationdefender.com/company   I just found this by accident.

Have a great summer! See you on August 15th.

My very special thanks goes to the following MacTechnics member that participated in the demo fair:

-  Jim Monkiewicz demonstrated AppFresh.
-  Nicholas dePaul gave us a detailed overview of Twitter.
-  One of our MacTechnics gurus, John Fauver, dissected OmniFocus.
-  Keith McConnelly encouraged me to take another look at GIMP and start using this program for photo/graphic editing.
-  Former President, Gerry Felipe showed us several very useful iPhone Freeware/Shareware.
-  Rob Hafer gave us some very useful tips for playing 2 games: Enigmo 2 and X-Plane.

Also thanks to Pat Allen for submitting that funny video and Denny MeLampy for submitting the ZipSkinny website.

The folowing link contains a PDF document of the MacTechnics April Presentation about Macintosh Accessibility.

David Ginbey doesn’t disappoint. Not only did he give us an excellent overview of iLife ’09, he also provided us with a fantastic raffle prize: a Mac Box Set (the set includes Leopard, iLife’09 and iWork ‘09). Nicholas dePaul was our lucky ticket holder. Congrats Nicholas!
 
The March 21st presentation concentrated on iPhoto and iMovie features in iLife ’09. iPhoto: The image editing tools are enhanced so that you don’t need to edit in another image editing program (i.e., Photoshop Elements) anymore. I like the fact that regardless how you edit the photo, iPhoto still keeps the original photo in memory. Also impressive is iPhoto’s Geotag (a process of adding geographical identification to photos) and photo labeling & organization.

iMovie: Contains some cool new effects such as,
picture-in-picture, green screen, motion maps and themes. Also impressive is the voice-over addition to footage. The cons: no third party

plug-in support or writing back to tape. I was most impressed with some of the new features in GarageBand.  The Lessons feature is something I will certainly use to brush up on my piano skills. Artist Lessons are very affordable ($4.99 a lesson) running 20 to 25 minutes in total, including lesson, performance and story. I thought the jam session was very interesting and a feature I would experiment with. Overall, iLife’09 gets a “thumbs up” and is worth the purchase.

Many thanks to our Director-At-Large, Erven Thoma for his insightful overview of Bento at our January meeting. Despite the snowy, bitterly cold weather, quite a few members made the trek to our January 17th meeting. First was a brief overview of the “Best of Show” at MacWorld 2009. There is a slideshow that will “catch you up” at this website: http://www.macworld.com/article/138002/2009/01/bos2009.html

Our main presentation was FileMaker’s Bento, which was shipped on Tuesday, October 21, 2008. Erven Thoma entertained us with several template creations, showing us how to organize various categories we might find useful around the house (i.e., recipes, address book, home inventory items, etc.) and for business needs (personnel, timesheets, iCal events, etc.). Erven took us through a step-by-step process regarding how each database sample was created. A full review plus helpful links appear in our February newsleter.