Meeting About AaMUG AaMUG Officers
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.
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.
If you can't make it to our November meeting but would be interested in participating or finding out more, please contact any of the officers listed below.
The latest version of the Macintosh operating system, OS9, released on October 23rd, has a whole host of cool new features.
Sherlock 2 alone justifies the $90 upgrade cost. Heck, it could save you enough money to pay for the upgrade cost since Sherlock 2 can be your personal shopper. It will scour the Internet looking for items that you tell it you want to buy, and it will bring you not only the results and the links to them, but it can also give you the information sorted by price.
Sherlock 2 also has different search sets to help you find people and news on the internet. To know how current some information is, you can even sort such things as news by date.
In addition to the Sherlock upgrade, OS9 also allows you to individually configure a single computer with different preferences for different users.
With the multiple users feature, you can set up preferences like bookmarks, e-mail addresses, and desktop appearance for each individual user.
Also, you don't have to remember your password thanks to its futuristic speech recognition capability known as "Voiceprint Password". The computer can recognize your voice and give you access accordingly. With this feature, your voice is your password. Of course, you can still use a typed password in case you develop laryngitis or your son's voice changes as he goes through puberty.
Speaking of children, if you want to keep your child out of certain applications or files, OS9 allows you to do that as well, with built-in encryption capabilities and multiple user setup. You can also restrict access to the computer based upon the user.
Also, if you love playing games on your Mac, you'll love the fact that OS9 has integrated OpenGL for the Mac and Game Sprockets making gaming titles more real, more powerful, and more fun.
Transfering files has never been easier. With OS9, you can now transfer files via TCP/IP from your computer at work to your computer at home as long as you are using OS9 on both computers.
A live demonstration of OS9 will be held at the AAMUG meeting Wednesday, November 17th. There will also be a prerecorded Quicktime presentation of Steve Jobs, Apple iCEO, presenting OS9.
The AAMUG meeting will be held in the Academic Advancement Center in 101 Alden Library and starts at 7:30pm. Be sure to bring a friend and come see the latest in Apple technology.
Stock investors apparently think that the Apple platform is going to be around for quite a while and will continue to be very profitable.
In the first week of November, Apple stock prices soared to an all-time record high. By the end of the first week of November, Apple stock sold at $87 per shareŠthat is more than double what it sold at just a year ago. Chart source: http://moneycentral.msn.com
Have you ever wanted to do something with your Mac, but weren't sure if it was possible? Things like recording CDs, adding RAM, getting better 3D performance for games, or implementing a sophisticated backup plan? If so, the Mac Upgrade and Repair Bible is for you.
It is mostly a reference book, but I found that I learned a lot about Macintosh computers and how to maintain them by reading through the book. For a book that is supposed to be very technical, I found it to be fairly user friendly, like the Mac itself. There are some parts of the book that are too technical for me, but they are few and far between.
This book not only helped me to assess whether I could or should upgrade, it also walked me through the upgrade as well. It even has a troubleshooting and repair section that everyone will need eventually.
If you are even thinking about upgrading your current Macintosh, or thinking about buying one to upgrade, you need to check out this book. It tells you by model what kind of upgrades you can perform.
It does lack information on iMacs which could be a problem for some, but most of us with iMacs aren't ready to upgrade just yet anyway. Only minimal information is given on USB and Firewire as well.
The books also comes with a CD-ROM which includes over 50 shareware, freeware, and demo tools including memory mapper, CacheSaver, Fonts Manager, SoundApp, and more.
For those interested in purchasing this book, the ISBN# is "0-7645-3217-0" and is published by IDG Books Worldwide, Inc. (www.idgbooks.com). I purchased this book through a book club dedicated to books related to Macintosh computers. If anyone is interested in joining such a club, let me know and I'll happily share the information.
Review by D. Lee Beard
beardd@ohio.edu
I just found Print to PDF a few days ago. It is a nifty little Chooser file that -- for a shareware fee of $20 -- lets you mimic the effects of the much pricier Acrobat Distiller. If you haven't used either of these programs, here's what they do: they allow you to produce PDF files simply by picking a special driver in the Chooser and then using an application's normal Print function.
PDF files, if you aren't too familiar with them, appear like images of word processed or desktop-published documents, keeping the formatting of the original document intact. In effect, scanned images of the pages in the document are created. This is very handy, nay necessary, in cases which depend on heavy formatting, which can't reliably be done with straight HTML web pages.
In my library world, PDF files are most commonly found in the form of electronic journals, thousands of which the Ohio University Libraries have online access to. But you can find them all over the place; I recently downloaded a passport application from the State Department's web site. If you are of a sufficiently masochistic nature, you can get your Federal Income Tax forms this way, too.
PDF files are ubiquitous enough that I consider the free Adobe Acrobat Reader software an all but essential add-on to web browsers (along with RealAudio, for more relaxing activities).
So how does it work? It's really simple. Just copy the file to the Extensions folder inside your System Folder, go to the Chooser and choose it. After doing the requisite Page Setup in your application, say a word processor, choose to the Print command. You'll be asked for a destination for the output file, choose one, and click Print. That's it.
One feature that I have not had the chance to try is embedding live URLs in the documents you export. I can't say from firsthand experience how well this works, but the accompanying manual does include live links, which one might presume were accomplished by the author's software :-)
As one might expect for the price, there are limitations, the chief of which is that it only works with a small set of standard fonts, the usual suspects: AvantGarde, Bookman, Courier, Helvetica (normal, condensed, and narrow), Palatino, Symbol, Times, ZapfChancery, and ZapfDingbats.
In my little bit of experimenting, I've successfully produced PDFs from WordPerfect, Word and Excel for Office 98, Ready,Set,Go!, and TexEdit. Two color graphics in one of my desktop-published documents came through just fine, too.
All in all, Print to PDF is a nice little "niche" product that can appeal to the more casual user who doesn't want to shell out the money for the full-fledged Acrobat software. Well worth the $20.
Print to PDF can be downloaded from Jim Walker's web site: http://www.jwwalker.com
Review written by Tim Smith
tsmith1@ohiou.edu
Dick Piccard revised this file (http://www.seorf.ohiou.edu/aamug/news/199911/index.html) on November 17, 1999.
Please E-mail any comments or suggestions to aamug@seorf.ohiou.edu.