Meeting About AaMUG AaMUG Officers O.U. & Microsoft
Find out more about AaMUG and how to use your Macintosh Computer.
The meeting will be held in the Academic Advancement Center's Computer Lab, 101 Alden Library.
7:30-8:00 PM -- Conversational Period
8:00-9:00 PM -- Presentations
The AaMUG meeting is open to anyone who lives in the Athens area. Students and faculty are encouraged to attend as well as community members not affiliated with Ohio University. Feel free to bring a friend!
AaMUG is a community organization open to anyone who wants to learn and share information about how to make use of the powerful features of their Macintosh computer. AaMUG disseminates information on Apple Macintosh computers, software, and related products and issues.
This October newsletter is being distributed freely to past, present, and potential AaMUG members. If you can't make it to our October meeting but would be interested in participating or finding out more, please contact any of the officers listed below.
Ohio University made the decision this past Spring Quarter to purchase computers for all freshmen residence hall rooms.
During the summer, the decision was made to only offer Gateway computers to students and to leave those 'Think Different' Macintosh users empty-handed. If they want a Mac, they have to buy it themselves, and then they don't receive the same quality of support as the Gateway users.
To find out more and how to make your OS choice known, come to the AaMUG (Athens Area Macintosh Users Group) October monthly meeting on Wednesday, October 20th.
For more information about the O.U. - Microsoft agreement, please see http://www.ohiou.edu/msela/index.html.
Once again, Apple has offered more and for less. Apple has had a hard time competing with the sub $1,000 Wintel machines for a long time, but no longer. Apple is now offering a new iMac for only $999 and without sacrificing performance. In fact, they have improved performance.
The powerful G3 processor in these new iMacs has been upgraded to 350 MHz G3 processor (with an option of up to 400 MHz) and the RAM has been doubled to 64 MB. All this and for less than the previous iMac!
For those who love to use their iMac for games, there is a new built-in sound system and a RAGE 128 graphics accelerator card.
The one thing this computer does lack is a fan. Apple has engineered the iMac so that there is no need for a noisy fan inside making this the quietest Macintosh available since the very first Macintosh back in 1984!
Apple has also come out with a version of the iMac called "iMac DV". "DV" stands for digital video which is what this machine was made for.
It comes with a DVD player and not one but two of the super fast firewire ports to which you can connect your video camera and other accessories. This is in addition to the two USB ports that come on all iMacs.
They have even bundled iMovie software which you can use to edit those home movies (see the next story in this issue).
With all the "DV" models of the new iMac, Apple is including it's "iMovie" software that will allow you to edit your digital movies. In the Macintosh tradition, this is an easy to use program. What's more, it is free to iMac DV buyers.
iMovie enables you to select your best scenes from your home movies and present them in the most effective way, without the false starts and miscues that mar most home movies. You can edit out the boring parts as well. You decide what's important, and what's not, and you arrange the scenes in the order that works best. With iMovie, you can edit, polish and reorganize your movie -- without touching or altering your original DV footage.
Once done, you can save the polished version and place it on the web or send it as an e-mail attachment to folks. Image, creating a compilation of the best baseball games that your child played for that year and sharing it with distant relatives or even putting it up on a Web page setup for the team! iMovie lets you do just that.
This is powerful software paired up with the new iMac DV which includes firewire ports to transfer the footage at super-fast speeds! Go to www.apple.com/imovie to find out more.
This is a super book for both beginners and experienced users. For the beginner, this book has everything you would need to know about the Macintosh 8.6 operating system. This book is loaded with screen shots which makes it easy to follow.
Although the experienced user will likely skim over much of the book, the author has cleverly set up "Tip" sections which gave this reviewer a few neat shortcuts. For example, one useful tip involved the use of the option key to avoid desktop clutter; if you hold down the option key while opening a folder by double-clicking on its icon at the Finder, the current folder will close as the new one is opened. This is just one helpful tip out of many.
There are several chapters that are helpful to even this experienced Mac user including a section on AppleScript, Java, and Networking.
It's not just a book, it's a CD-ROM as well! Included with the book is a CD-ROM that includes almost 50 popular shareware/freeware titles like Acrobat Reader 4.0.1, GraphicConverter 3.6.1, Kaleidoscope 2.1.2, and SoundApp.
If you are interested in purchasing the book yourself, the ISBN # is 1-57610-443-5 and is published by Coriolis (http://www.coriolis.com/).
-- Review by D.Lee Beard
With the introduction of OS 8.5, Macintosh users can now find information on the internet, much easier than ever before.
The traditional "Find" feature of the Mac OS has been improved to include finding information within the text of a document, not just in the name of the document or folder. You can also now find information on the internet using the powerful tool Sherlock.
Just go to the find feature as always (or choose "Sherlock" from the Apple Menu Items) and click on the "Search Internet" tab. Then type in normal language what you are looking for. In this example, I typed "USB cameras for Macintosh." Choose the search engines you want Sherlock to investigate, then click on the "Search" button.
A window then pops up with a list of related Web sites sorted by relevance. Click on one and it gives you a summary of the page at the bottom. Click on the blue text link at the bottom and it will take you to that Web page. As easy as 1-2-3.
Sherlock searches most major search engines, from AltaVista to Yahoo. Updates to Sherlock, that will be released with Mac OS 9 (on October 23), will include some superior features like finding the price of items for sale on the internet.
To find out about OS 9 in the November AaMUG newsletter, join AaMUG and guarantee your subscription to the AaMUG newsletter each month. To join contact one of the AaMUG officers listed on the back of this newsletter.
Dick Piccard revised this file (http://www.seorf.ohiou.edu/aamug/news/199910/index.html) on October 13, 1999.
Please E-mail any comments or suggestions to aamug@seorf.ohiou.edu.