May 2009 MaUsE DoubleClick

May 2009
MaUsE DoubleClick
The Cut, Copy & Paste Issue !
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2008 MaUsE Executive
• Grand Wazoo: Michael Shaw
[email protected]
• Vice President: Aaron Vegh
[email protected]
• Apple Liaison: Bruce Cameron
[email protected]
• Treasurer: Stan Wild
[email protected]
• Logistics: Chris Greaves
[email protected]
• Publicity Director: Jim Danabie
• Photographer: Irma Shaw
Jim Danabie
• DoubleClick Editor:
Michael Shaw
[email protected]
• Secretary: Jeff Hurd
• Director: Guy Lafontaine
• Director: Marcel Dufresne
MaUsE Contact Information:
The MaUsE
c/o Stan Wild
58 Rothean Drive
Whitby, Ontario, Canada
L1P 1L5
w w w. m a u s e . c a
From The Editor
What you are looking at is the May 2009 edition of the
MaUsE DoubleClick, the online publication of the Macintosh Users East, (MaUsE), a motley collection of
mostly harmless cranks who reside in Southern Ontario
with their motley collection of old and new Macintosh
computers. The DoubleClick is published using a 2.8
GHz Aluminum iMac and QuarkXPress 8, the best
desktop publishing software on the planet. An antique
Kodak DX7590 is used for all pictures. Everything not
specifically attributed to someone else can probably be
blamed on the Editor. Back issues can be downloaded
from the MaUsE website: < www.mause.ca >.
Submissions from MaUsE Club members are almost always welcome.
This May 2009 DoubleClick has been one of the easiest issues ever, with photos or written contributions
from me, Stan, Aaron, Kevin, Marcel, Chris and
George. It so nice to get submissions from MaUsE
members. My thanks to you all for coming through for
me while I was in exile in far away places.
Send your submissions and articles to me at
< [email protected] >, especially if there are files
or pictures attached. I have never refused a submission
yet. Because we care about the environment, the
MaUsE DoubleClick is created using only recycled
electrons: matter was neither created nor destroyed in
the process of creating this issue. There are no infractions of the law of matter conservation. There is always
room for another piece on any Mac-related topic and Iʼll
make room if there isnʼt. I would like your submissions.
But I wonʼt beg.
Michael Shaw,
DoubleClick Editor
MaUsE Meetings are held in Room 1 at the new Whitby Public Library on
the south-east corner of Henry and Dundas West in Whitby, Ontario. Meetings start at 7:00 PM but there is an early session from 6:30 for people
who wish to discuss hardware or software issues or problems. Macintosh
virus problem discussion from 6:58 to 7:00 PM as and if required. Meetings are open to the public and admission is free. Raffle tickets at MaUsE
events are free but the free raffle tickets for Macintosh hardware or software will only be given to paid-up MaUsE Members. Please remember to
bring your Membership card to every meeting.
Cut, Copy, & Paste: The Mac is Still
Not A Typewriter...
If I may refer to a famous book title from Robin Williams, I would like
to point out an obvious and radical difference between a computer
and a typewriter, a revolutionary innovative feature that is totally fundamental to modern word processing and something that you probably use so frequently now that you use it without thinking.
Look at the picture at right. The image (in black & white) is from 1984
Mac System 1.0 and the coloured pictures below are from Mac OSX
10.4.11. Cast your mind back to the earliest Macintosh operating system you have ever used and the oldest Mac and you will find that the
Clipboard and the “cut, copy, and paste” commands were there for
you. It was not always thus. The ability of the 1984 Macintosh computer to allow the user to temporarily copy text or an image into RAM
and then paste it into another application was an outstanding new
feature that has radically affected the way people used computers.
Try to remember that clunky System 7 Scrapbook application with its
little bins where you could store a few photos and paragraphs of text
for later use. Try to remember how you could access the Show Clipboard from the Edit menu and how anything you put there displaced
the previous item, and how contents of the Clipboard would always be
erased every time you restarted the computer. Because the computer has memory, you can select an image or some specific
text, any amount of text, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a
page, or several pages, and cut, copy, or paste it with a keystroke. MacMagic !
For those of us who never learned typing and keyboarding at highschool on manual typewriters it is difficult to imagine a time when fixing a spelling mistake or inserting a single sentence or paragraph into
Page 2 of a ten-page document might require that the entire document be re-typed from the altered page onwards but that is the way it
was. Imagine you are using a manual typewriter (or a computer which
will not allow you to select, cut, cop, or paste text), to type a couple of
full pages of word-perfect text, or even one full page of writing without
a single missed punctuation mark or even one mis-spelled word. It is
like imagining life before the invention of the electric light.
In this issue I will look at a few of the popular applications that have
been written specifically to take the ability of the Apple operating system’s ability to cut, copy & paste and take this ability to a higher level.
Since the ability to copy to and paste from the Clipboard is so very important, it makes sense that any application that enhances your ability
to perform these functions will also be potentially important if you use
these features frequently.
Each of the “copy & paste” applications we’ll look at is different but
each in its own way is designed to overcome the same most severe
and glaring flaw in the way that the Macintosh operating system handles the copy & paste process: each attempts to overcome the rule
that the Clipboard can only contain one item at a time. There is no
reason why any organised person should have to type the same passage of text over and over again when all you really need to do is
save it and have the text on hand to insert with a single key stroke.
If any of these copy & paste programs look interesting or useful to
you, have a look for them on the internet. You will find that each has
its own strengths and that each of them has the ability to become an
indispensable tool if you use your computer a lot. For what they cost,
and for the amount of time you will save, each of them is a bargain.
Submitted by Michael Shaw
PC Tools iAntiVirus !
In this issue you will find a little bit of
everything. One thing you may not expect to find is an article about Macintosh anti-virus software. In my many
years of exposure to many Mac models,
many Mac operating systems, and
many Mac users I have never actually
encountered a virus-infected Mac but as the Macintosh OS continues
to gain in popularity and an increased number of users there may
eventually be a time when some sick slimy bastard somewhere writes
and publishes a serious piece of malware for the Mac OS.
http://www.iantivirus.com/
Recently I receive a message from a Windows-using friend in England who wanted to alert me to this product for Macintosh computers:
PC Tools iAntiVirus. He wondered if it was perhaps a solution to a
non-problem. I checked it out and seriously suggest you do the same.
PC Tools iAntiVirus is an unlikely name for a Mac program but well
worth a look. Download a copy (for free) and see what I mean.
http://www.iantivirus.com/
PC Tools iAntiVirus has been designed with the user in mind. The
user interface is purely functional, making it simple to scan for, remove and manage infections. You may perform a variety of scan
types using iAntiVirus, this allows you to strike a balance between the
time taken to complete a scan, and its thoroughness. When in monitoring mode iAntiVirus™ has been designed to work silently in the
background, threats are blocked and removed without any system impact, while only a small alert window is displayed to advise you that
your Mac has been protected against an attack.
Real-time protection
IntelliGuard protects your Mac against infections in real time. Whenever an infection is detected and blocked, an alert is displayed below
the system menu bar. IntelliGuard automatically places detected infections in quarantine, works silently in the background and uses minimal system resources.
Quarantine
iAntiVirus™ quarantines all detected infections, allowing you to easily
view and restore items in the case of a false positive (for example:
when scanning with engine heuristics set to high).
If your Macintosh computer ever becomes infected, a virus or worm
will usually attempt to spread itself to your friends, family and associates by accessing your email contacts and networked PCs. Just because it has never happened yet is no reason to be complacent. The
infection may also allow hackers to access files on your Mac, use it to
launch attacks against other computers and websites or to send mass
SPAM email. The iAntiVirus database has been designed from the
ground up to detect and remove Mac-specific threats. This enables a
high level of protection whilst keeping memory footprint and resource
usage at a minimum. The iAntiVirus database is not cluttered with signatures for Windows specific threats which your Mac is already immune against.
Automatic Smart Updates
Frequent updates to detect and
guard computers against new
threats and viruses as well as
provide enhancements to
iAntiVirus™ are automatically
installed and downloaded through the Smart Update function. Threat
signatures are updated within hours of a high risk malware outbreak
to protect you from the latest online threats.
Article Submitted by Michael Shaw
Demos of Alien Skin Software Available
Don’t you just hate it when you find a demo of some really interesting
software you’d like to try out and then you find that it has only limited
or partial features ? That doesn’t happen with Alien Skin Software.
Fully-functional demonstration copies of the Alien Skin software that
we have described in the DoubleClick, shown at our MaUsE meetings, and featured in our MaUsE raffles are now available online from
Alien Skin Software. Download a few and try them for free for 30
days. You can then order the program or purchase a license code
from the Alien Skin Online Store to convert it to the full retail product.
• The Bokeh demo is fully functional for 30 days.
• The Blow Up 2 demo is fully functional for 30 days.
• The Snap Art demo is fully functional for 30 days.
• The Exposure 2 demo is fully functional for 30 days.
• The Eye Candy 5: Impact demo is fully functional for 30 days.
• The Eye Candy 5: Nature demo is fully functional for 30 days.
• The Eye Candy 5: Textures demo is fully functional for 30 days.
• The Image Doctor 2 demo is fully functional for 30 days.
• The Xenofex 2 demo is fully functional for 30 days.
• The Eye Candy 3.1 for After Effects demo renders a red X on all
footage.
Get Alien Skin Software demos at:
http://www.alienskin.com/downloads/getmail1.asp
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Updates Available
Updates are available for customers using the following Alien Skin
plug-ins with the new version of Mac OS X. Alien Skin recommends
that all customers using Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard install the updates.
• Eye Candy 5: Textures
• Eye Candy 5: Nature
• Eye Candy 5: Impact
• BlowUp
• Snap Art
• Exposure 1
• Exposure 2
• Xenofex 2
Download the updates from the Software Updates page.
http://support.alienskin.com/Article_9FC26.aspx
News from George Dunbar,
PHSC Member
The MaUsE membership, particularly those interested in photography, will be pleased to hear about Canada's largest 'photo flea market' which is to be held on May 31 at the indoor Soccer Centre,
7601 Martin Grove Rd. The Photographic Historical Society of
Canada (PHSC) sponsors this Photographica Fair twice each year.
It's a buy, sell, trade event with magnificent bargains in everything
photographic - cameras, lenses, darkroom, video, books, images,
antiques, etc. Even new and used digital cameras!
We have sponsored Photographical Fairs every year since 1974.
Our Spring Phytographical Fair is the oldest show of its kind in
Canada. The one-day fairs are held every Spring and Fall in the
Toronto area. Members and the general public come to buy, sell
and swap old photographic equipment, images, and books. Recent
shows have offered over 100 tables of photographic delights to as
many as 1,400 paying visitors. Everything from rare wet-plate cameras to usable accessory lenses and dark room equipment turns up
at the shows. See the PHSC event poster on Page 7 of this issue
for more information.
I look forward to seeing other MaUsE members at the Fair.
The PHSC has a Web page devoted to the event where MaUsE
members will find complete information and also, if interested, can
view a video I made at one of last year's events. The link is:
< http://www.phsc.ca/fairs.html >
I prepared a seven and a half minute show bringing video to the
PHSC web site. Footage was shot at the Spring 2008 PHSC fair
and interspersed with stills from this and other recent fairs. The
music on the sound track is courtesy of my grandson, Tom Dunbar,
and friend Tyler Ball.
Dare To Be Creative, Ltd
Sponge
It does not take long for most of us to start filling up the large drives that come with our
computers. It does not matter what size you
start with, we manage to max out the capacity. There are a few ways to deal with these
extras. You can look up those applications
that sounded cool at one time but you have
not used since they were initially opened up.
As a reviewer, that is my main problem. I add
at least four applications every month. That
may not sound like a lot, but trust me, my internal hard drive is full. Also, I don't always
add the new software into the application
folder. I attempt to group similar software into
the same folder and sometimes I keep these
in a different spot.
Another problem is making movies and slide
shows. iDVD and iMovie makes project files
out of these and asks us where we would like
the file kept. The default location is the document folder of your computer. Again, I don't always put them into the correct spot and I
have found these files in different places on
my drive. As these files are very large (some
more than 10GB), it is essential that they be
removed or stored somewhere else, otherwise my hard drive will again quickly run out
of room.
A third minor problem occurs when the same application is loaded
over and over again. Sometimes Adobe Reader or QuickTime is
needed as a secondary application to ensure the correct functioning
of a newer application. The package that loads the new application
may or may not ask if you want all the extra stuff loaded in or not. This
might lead to duplication of software. This tended to be a bigger problem in the older MAC Systems like 7.5 or 8.6 where we ended up with
multiple copies of TextEdit and such. Only one copy of an application
need exist on your drive. Usually, no matter where you store it, it will
run when called upon.
Many different applications have been written to deal with these
three problems. Some are freeware and some are shareware. No
matter what you use, you get what you pay for. All of these helpful applications come with a warning that they are not responsible for lost
material. That warning scares most of us from attempting the spring
cleaning that our computers need. A lot of them are hard to figure out
and mistakes can be made using them. There is an application out
there that attacks all three of the clutter problems I have listed above.
Although it also comes with a warning about lost applications, the way
that it tackles the cleaning helps to reassure the user that the job is
being done properly.
Sponge from Dare to be Creative Ltd. is a tool that will help keep your
Mac clean and tidy and will help you to reclaim some of that needed
disk space. The window that pops up when you first start the application is as simple looking as you could hope for. There are three
choices to make: removing applications, sweeping disk hogs and finding duplicates. Removing applications, once chosen, will list all the
applications Sponge can find on your computer and put them in alphabetical (or size) order. It will show an icon as well as the path indicating where the application is stored. If you decide that a certain
application has run its course, then click the name of the application
and the move to trash window lights up. A second window then shows
all the files that will be trashed along with the applications. This
means that a clean uninstall of all the applicable files is done all at
once. No more searching for the plist to trash along with the main application. You need to click the move to trash button again to actually
move the application out to the trash. It will not be officially removed
until you empty the trash. Thus it is hard to accidentally remove a file
with all these warnings before it actually is trashed.
Sweeping disk hogs is chosen to make a list of everything on your
computer and how much space it takes up. This will allow you to find
any of those large document files that you should have trashed a long
time ago. The Sponge application is set up to show the files in a
columns view and gives you easy access to the many trees that the
files might be stored under. Running this part of Sponge will take
longer as it has to record every little bit of file it can find. My overtaxed
hard drive took just under an hour to map out. I found that I had a
sound file under Library/Audio//Apple Loops/Apple/iLife Sound Effects
that took over 1.4 GB of space. I did not know I had such a large resource nor do I know where it came from. Some game I used must
have loaded it in there. If I need space on that partition, this will be the
first thing to go. I also found another file with sounds that goes with
GarageBand. I have not yet used this application and I am not sure if I
ever will. So there is another 1.1 GB of space the Sponge found for
me. There were other unused files that I discovered, but none of
those were as large as those two sound files. I also liked the fact that
the size of files was colour coded. Files in the GB are in red, MB are
purple, etc.
The last choice is find duplicates. As I mentioned before, this is not as
big a problem as it used to be. Most application packages ask you if
you need to install the extras with their own application. I only had
some 70 MB of duplicate files. Removing all of those would not be of
much help for disk space. Running this part of Sponge also takes
quite a while. You are shown both copies of the duplicate files as well
as their pathway and creation dates. You can then choose which one
to remove or not remove.
Thus Sponge is able to find and safely remove installed applications,
track down and delete large files, and find duplicates. Yes other applications can do this, but Sponge provides all three in one easy to use
interface. It runs on Mac OS 10.4 or higher. The cost of this application is $26 (USD) and it is available as a free download from the
Sponge web site, http://sponge-mac.com/. It runs initially in a 15-day
trial mode with all features active. Try it out and see how easy it is to
use. Do your spring cleaning early.
Article Submitted by Marcel Dufresne
Photographic Composition Part 1
One of the main reasons why some photographs are more outstanding than others is because of their strong composition. Good composition is not new: the Greeks and Romans were practicing it 2,000
years before photography was invented. Good composition was evident in their architecture.
Today composition continues as an important part of contemporary
architecture. One definition for photographic composition is, “the
pleasing selection and arrangement of subjects within the picture
area.” Some arrangements are made by placing figures or objects in
certain positions while others are made by choosing a point of view.
You can shift your camera very slightly and make quite a change in
the composition. Good pictures are created. To create good photos
you need to learn the guidelines for good composition. After you have
learned the guidelines, you will realize that well-composed pictures
often take careful planning and sometimes patient waiting. Just ask
my wife. I don’t know how many times she has said, “Just take the
picture. What are you waiting for?”
Once you learn composition guidelines, you will find that they will become part of your thinking when you are looking at the world, especially if you have a camera in your hand. What are these guidelines
you ask. Well, I’ll tell you. There are six basic guidelines. They are:
• 1. Simplicity
• 2. Rule of Thirds
• 3. Lines
• 4. Balance
• 5. Framing
• 6. Mergers
An explanation for Simplicity is that you look for
way to give the center of
interest in you pictures
the most visual attention.
One way is to select uncomplicated backgrounds that will not
steal attention from your
subjects. Compose your photograph so that your reason for taking the
photo is clearly seen. Arrange other parts of the picture area in such a
way as to complement what you choose to be the center of interest.
With photographic Simplicity you will have to decide how much of
your subject you should include, and determine if the shot be framed
horizontally or vertically. You can simplify your pictures and strengthen
your center of interest even more by avoiding unrelated subjects and
moving in close to your subject. The example above shows a busy
background and detracts from the center of interest. The one on
the right shows how, by moving in close and changing from a
horizontal to a vertical you can dramatically improve your reason
for taking the photo in the first place.
An explanation for the Rule of Thirds is that if you place your subject
off center, it becomes more interesting and less static. Before you
take the photo, imagine your picture area divided into thirds, both horizontally and vertically. The intersections of these imaginary lines suggests four options for placing the center of interest for good
composition. By using the Rule of Thirds you get excellent placement
for your subject and, in wider shots, a place for your subject to go (as
you can see with the above photo of the sea plane).
Next month I will do another Guideline for your enjoyment and then
finish off the series with the third part in the July issue.
Submitted by Kevin Livesey <><
The Lenovo S10 Mac
Out of both a belief that it could be quite practical, and a desire to
have a cool new gadget, I recently took delivery of a new Lenovo
Ideapad S10. This netbook has been on the market for about a year
now, and NCIX had it on sale for $350. I added a gig of RAM and got
the complete package for a total of $409, after shipping and taxes.
Today I’m going to provide a review of the netbook, particularly
around its suitability as a conversion to the Mac. Mostly, I want to
communicate that this baby works really, really well as a highly
portable Macintosh.
Hardware
But first, let’s look at the hardware. Netbooks are pretty standard in
this department: they run Intel’s Atom processor, and this one features a 1.6GHz N270. It’s a single core processor (as far as I’ve been
able to discover, anyway), but it seems sprightly enough for standard
tasks. More on this later.
The S10 also comes with 512MB of RAM soldered on the motherboard. Whoooo… but there’s a single expansion port that takes up to
a 2GB SODIMM. However, sources online indicate that the S10 can
only address a maximum of 1.5GB, so even if you do put the 2 in
there, it will still see only 1.5. Well, the 1GB upgrade that I bought
from NCIX was on sale too, so that made the decision easy.
The machine features a 10-inch screen. This was important to me:
other netbooks in the $350 price range (all dollars are Canadian, by
the way) are currently in the 8-9 inch range, and I just didn’t like the
look of them. At 1024×600 pixel resolution, those pixels are just too
damned tiny on an 8-inch screen. I’m 35 years old (that’s to say, my
eyes are entering middle age as well), and I use a 24-inch Apple Cinema Display as my main screen, so 10 inches is as small as I can go!
The quality of the display is very good: fine response time, good
colour, etc. Unless you’re some kind of display nut, you’ll have no
issue with this one.
One of the first things I noticed about the S10 when I unpacked it,
however, has proven to be a challenge: the keyboard. I knew it was
going to be smaller than your average keyboard, but Lenovo made
some unfortunate layout decisions. Two, in fact, that set my teeth on
edge.
The right-hand Shift key is the same size as the regular keys, and
placed to the right of
the up arrow key. I
shook my head in
disbelief when I saw
this, and then I tried
putting my fingers
on the keyboard —
I’m a touch typist —
and understood why
they did this. That
Shift key is placed
exactly where you’d
find it at a distance
relative to home row on a regular keyboard; when your right pinky finger reaches out for it, the distance feels right. But when I actually
used it, I found that my touch typing is imperfect at best, hence the
wideness of the regular Shift key. Do you know how often hitting an
Up arrow instead of the Shift key causes problems? Think about
working in Terminal, especially. I’m hoping that practice helps alleviate
this problem.
The backtick/tilde key is positioned to the right of the Esc key. Look,
for many of you this
is a non-issue: most
people don’t even
know what a tilde is,
for chrissakes. But
for me it’s a vital part
of my keyboarding
experience. You use
the backtick/tilde key
in two situations: to
reverse the polarity
of the Application
Switcher (Command-Tab to go forward, then Command-Backtick to go back), and to
cycle through an application’s open windows (Command-Backtick to
cycle). The reason this key is used has nothing to do with the fact it’s
a backtick or tilde. It’s because of the position of that key relative to
Tab. Now, with that relationship broken on this keyboard, I have to
grope for a key located one-in from the left. Mistakes abound. Hopefully some muscle memory will assert itself on this problem too.
The trackpad is about the width of two postage stamps, but it’s surprisingly usable. I’ll talk more about this in a bit. A couple final points
on the hardware. The battery is a 3-cell lithium ion, which in my first
test last night held its charge for three hours. I’m pleased with that.
There’s also a webcam, but its quality is nothing to write home about.
Fortunately, I’m writing to you instead.
A Word About the Size
Look, I could go find the physical dimensions of this thing to
give you an idea of how little the S10 is. But that’s just numbers; let me try to describe what the size means.
• 2 However, Leopard will only boot from a Mac. To trick it into
booting from the S10 (or any PC, for that matter), you have to jump in
with a bootloader. I used a 2GB USB key with a copy of Syslinux installed. It required a very brief trip to Windows in order to bless the install somehow, but the Lenovo booted right up into it. From there, I
specified the Leopard hard drive to run from, and we were away to
the races. It was a pretty exciting moment to see that grey Apple logo
on my S10 for the first time:
I can stretch my hand across the keyboard and touch the Tab
key with my pinky and the Return key with my thumb. It’s so
light I can pick it up, with just my fingers, by the front left corner below the keyboard, while the display is open, and wave it
around while I talk. It’s solid and rugged enough that it feels
less like a pricy computer, and more like a telephone. And it’s
just barely large enough to sit on my lap while I type.
But it’s small enough that I rarely do: I slouch on the couch
with it sitting beside me, perhaps balanced between my leg
and a cushion. It works in a surprising number of positions —
and get your mind out of the gutter.
Practical use shows that I can use this computer pretty much
anywhere, and while it gives me the capabilities of a computer,
it feels like a much more casual device. Again, a telephone
comes to mind: a piece of hardware that vanishes because you really
can take it anywhere.
The Missing Link: Software
When I first booted the Lenovo S10, it showed its most crucial flaw:
Windows XP. Or should I just say, Windows? It really doesn’t matter
what version, I simply refuse to use it. As a full-time Mac user, I definitely preferred to get that OS installed on it, but having read deeply
on the topic, I was prepared to admit that I may have to settle for
Linux (and likely, Ubuntu). Fortunately, that turned out not to be the
case.
I’m not going to go into detail about how I got OS X installed: by the
time you read this the methods may have changed, as the hacker
community is hard at work on a lot of these issues. I primarily used
this thread on the s10Lenovo forum, minus the bits where you install
Windows on a separate partition.
In a nut, this is how you do it:
• 1 Install the Leopard install DVD onto an external USB drive.
You do this with the Restore option in Disk Utility, essentially cloning
the DVD to a hard drive. This allows you to boot from the hard drive
into a Leopard install, and even if you’re not using it for this, installing
the OS from a hard drive is dramatically faster than from disc.
• 1 The Leopard install process is pretty straight-forward. However, it fails at the end because it can’t set the disk as a startup volume. Again, it’s the boot loader issue rearing its head. Until you get
that resolved, you’ll be booting from that USB key.
• 2 The stock installation of Leopard is missing a number of
vital components (at least for me):
Video ran at 800×600
No sleep
No audio
• 3 Using a project from the Dell Mini hackers called DellEFI, I
installed some of the missing drivers. Video, for example, was working great after restart. And it let me boot directly from the hard drive,
so no more USB key.
• 4 Tweaking then occurred. A change of settings in a plist
somewhere yielded the ability to sleep (this is huge, folks!), and a little
more software got sound working. Finally, I got a piece of software
that activated two-finger scrolling on the trackpad. Sadly, it isn’t that
stable, but an alternative configuration supplied with the software allows you to set the right side of the trackpad for vertical scrolling, and
I find that works very well.
The net result is a computer that has all the features of a Macintosh, with no functionality — that I’m aware of — missing.
In theory, I should be able to upgrade using Apple Software Update.
However, it hasn’t been tested yet, so when 10.5.7 comes out any
day now, I’m going to hold off till I hear from the braver souls out
there.
Using the MicroMac
For the first time, I actually believe this machine is going to be stable
and reliable enough to use. This is a big moment: it means I can
spend the time to install applications, move data over, and actually
get some work done with the damned thing. Here’s what I have
planned:
While I have a MacBook Pro, I’m taking a big risk every time I take it
away from my desk. Perhaps the dent in the corner, gained within the
first two weeks of owning it, put this in mind. But when I go to a client
meeting, or do some work at the Second Cup, or visit family, I really,
really like the idea of having a computer that has all the important
stuff, without it being a big deal if it exploded. Aside from the plastic
shrapnel in my face.
I haven’t tried running Photoshop on this thing yet, but I’ve run Coda,
Transmit, TextMate, Mail, Safari, NetNewsWire, Twitterific and iChat
— at the same time — and it felt good. Benchmarks will show this
beast is not that fast, but clearly, it’s fast enough.
I spend a lot of time using text editors and file transfer apps, and
there’s more than enough oomph here to accomplish those things.
Now, I’m on one last problem: how to ensure the data I need is always going to be available on the MicroMac when I need it? This is a
real head-scratcher. First off, I can’t just mirror my main Mac’s hard
drive to the thing: there’s only about 50GB of free space on it, compared to my MBP’s 320GB hard drive. But I don’t need to to hold all
my music and photos, either. Just my development sites, my Mail
store, Safari bookmarks, FTP preferences, my working files directories… there’s several items that I would like synced across.
I asked on Twitter last night and received a couple responses. DropBox, for example, was rejected immediately because it assumes one
folder where items are available on every computer. Cool, but not
what I’m after. A couple suggestions came in for Rsync, and I’m liking
the sound of that, because it’s available on every Mac, and I can customize it to my heart’s content. I just need to make sure that it syncs
correctly: a deleted file on my main Mac should cause the one on my
netbook to go, as well. Time will tell.
Conclusion
The fact that I’m now embroiled in all these implementation details
should suggest something very clearly: I’m fully invested in this computer, and it’s obviously functional enough that you can use it on a
day-to-day basis. As I marveled to my wife: it’s like having a MacBook
Air, but without the cool look, super-thin profile, and $2,500 price tag.
It’s easy to see why these netbooks have become so popular, and
why people are clamouring for Apple to make one.
But clearly, with a little effort, you
can have one for yourself today!
Article Submitted by
Aaron Vegh
Copy & Paste #1: iClip
Simply Useful
This is just the first of several articles about
cut & paste programs that appear in this
issue. Check them all out. One of them will
be right for you.
iClip is the copy & paste program that I use
the most. It has such handy features and
has been rock-solid on every Mac operating
system I have tried it on. With over 40,000
registered users, if you value your time, you
owe it to yourself to be the next Mac user to
start saving time and become more productive with iClip.
The iClip application puts a tiny icon on the
Menu bar. Clicking on it causes the drawer
of bins to slide onto the screen along the
right side (my choice). Clicking on it again
when I am done makes the bins disappear
again. The bins are square, medium sized
and slightly transparent. My choices. Also,
when I run the cursor up against the right side
of the screen the bins pop out and then hide
again. An alternative choice might be round
bins that pop up from the bottom of the
screen as I have shown at the bottom of this
window.
I can have as many collection (or libraries) of
bins and access them through the Clips button. I can delete clips or entire libraries, edit
them, re-name and re-organize them as I see
fit, and expand any clip library by clicking on
the plus sign at the bottom of the bin set.
If I have anything selected in any application,
be it text, or image or URL, I can open iClip
from the Menu Bar and click on the little blue
arrow pointing into a bin and the selected
item will be copied and appear there. Similarly, if I have a document open with the insertion point active I can open any iClip bins and
click on the little blue arrow pointing out of
any bin to paste its contents into the document. The button between the arrows opens
up the contents of the bin in a separate window so it can be edited as required. This
works really well with email messages. Since
I tend to write quite a few very similar messages to a lot of people requesting sample
software programs to review in this, the most
excellent of all possible Mcintosh User Group
publications, I have created and kept a set of
DoubleClick request and reply templates
handy in iClip and use them over and over by
pasting them into email messages and then
filling in the blanks as required to indicate the
name of the requested program and the expected date of publication.
If iClip sounds like something that could benefit you, get on the internet and check it out
on the Inventive website at :
http://inventive.us/iClip/
Submitted by Michael Shaw
Red Sweater Software
Black Ink
Some of us are in the habit of
doing a Crossword puzzle daily.
These cruciverbalists have their
own favourite sources that you
might say they are addicted to.
For some, it is the New York
Times or the Wall Street Journal.
Mine is the Toronto Star and I also
use Thinks.com which is not in a newspaper
but from the Internet. Whichever one you like,
Black Ink is an application for those passionate about solving Crossword puzzles.
With Black Ink you get immediate access to
ten of the top Crossword puzzles out there.
With an Internet connection, the Boston
Globe Sunday Crossword or the Sidney
Chronicle is available to you. You then have
the choice of completing the puzzle on your
computer with an easy to navigate interface
or printing out a paper and pencil version so
that you can finish it at your leisure. Either
way, you have that puzzle to play with.
Completing the puzzle on the computer using
Black Ink has many favourable options. First,
you can time yourself. The hard line solvers
must get the puzzle done in a certain length
of time or it is not considered a win, even if
they get all the answers. I personally am quite
content just to finish these puzzles (when I
can). You can also enlarge the puzzle on the
computer screen if you need to. Saving the
puzzle to complete at a
later time allows you to
leave the puzzle and not
have to worry about finishing it that day. Moving
around the puzzle is just a
mouse click away. For instance pressing the delete
button repeatedly will erase
the complete word quickly,
one letter at a time.
Secondly, when using the
computer you can get a little bit of help. The purists
out there would definitely
frown on this practice, but you can
check the puzzle to see if some of
your choices are in fact wrong.
There is a "Solution" item in the
menu bar of the application. The
"Solution" menu allows you to
check the current letter, the current word or the entire puzzle for
correctness. If a letter is wrong, it
is marked with a small "x". Some
online crosswords that I have
played actually erase the incorrect letters but
Black Ink makes you do the work. From then
on, if you put a letter in that checked box it
will again put an "x" for the incorrect letter, but
it will insert a green check mark if the right letter is used. This check mark applies only to
the boxes that you actually had letters in and
not the whole puzzle.
The second category under the "Solution"
menu reveals the correct letter, correct word
or the entire puzzle if you have thrown in the
towel. This second choice means that you always have the solution at hand even if you
have not subscribed to the newspaper in
question. The last choice under the "Reveal"
category is to "Reveal incorrect". This choice
is coupled with the previous check the puzzle
button. If you have checked the puzzle for the
correctness of the letters then "Reveal incorrect" will put in the correct letters for
whichever ones you had checked. An oval
with a dot in it (resembles an eye) shows any
of those boxes that you had help with. Also
under the "Solution" menu is the option to use
OneAcross.com which will search for possibilities for the word you are looking for and the
letters that you have in place. This is like
using a Crossword dictionary to help in your
search. None of these extra aids are available if you print up the puzzle and do it offline.
I tend to 'cheat' when I use the computer so I
often do print up the puzzle. I go back to the
computer when I have difficulty solving it.
Black Ink comes with Crossword puzzles
from these sites: New York Times, Wall Street
Journal, Houston Chronicle, Thinks.com,
Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe, Chicago
Reader, Onion AV Club, Chronicles of Higher
Education, and Sydney Morning Herald. The
only Crossword puzzle that is free out of
these choices that I know of is the
Thinks.com. The rest are much more difficult
to access. There is also under the "File"
menu a choice of opening other web Crosswords if you know the correct URL for them. I
confess that I have not had much success
with this choice, probably because the sites I
have gone to have a different format to their
Crossword puzzles to that used by the afore
mentioned sites. The puzzle has to be distributed in the "Across Lite" puzzle format and it
has to be distributed with a predictable, datebased URL pattern. I found this answer while
checking the very extensive support and discussion area that Red Sweater has for their
applications. This area is definitely worth
checking out if you encounter any problems.
Black Ink requires Mac OS 10.4 or higher.
You can download a free 30-day trial version
of the application from http://www.redsweater.com/blackink/. That way you can see
if it will assuage your addiction. The application sells for $24.95 USD which can be purchased online since all you are paying for is
the registration code that unlocks your trial
version. There are many free sites on the Internet for Crosswords but you pay for what
you get. The top notch Crosswords are not
free. I certainly recommend that you download the trial version and see what it's like. At
least you can be solving great Crosswords for
a month this way.
Article Submitted by Marcel Dufresne
Copy & Paste #2: PopCopy
You know that sickening feeling when you've
copied something to the clipboard, gone to paste it
into another application, and then realized that you
had copied something else to the Clipboard? PopCopy aims to fix that, and build upon the idea. Any
images, text, or files you copy into the clipboard
will go into the MenuBar. You can pull these back
up by choosing it in the MenuBar, or with a hotkey
combination you choose yourself. Try it out, and
you will fall in love with it.
PopCopy is a revolutionary way of copying and
pasting on your Macintosh. With PopCopy you just
install it, set a hot key combination (like Control-P)
and forget about it. From then on every time you
PopCopy works so unobtrusively that I often forget
use the Copy command in any application the text
that I even have it installed. That is actually one of its
or image you have selected will be stored in the
best features, though. Using PopCopy is like having
PopCopy application. PopCopy 2 was written from
a memory that goes back further than your own.
the ground up to be the most useful thing you can
Records of all of the copying and pasting I have
put on a Mac. Its most powerful features are that it
done
to create the past few 2009 DoubleClick issues
works in the background, is always available from
are held in the PopCopy Previous Items.
the menu bar, and it has a memory that goes on
for months. The PopCopy icon in the MenuBar changes from text to
The Preferences are simple in the extreme because the only choices
music to image to reflect the type of data most recently copied. The
items in the list of stored clips are similarly labeled. Alternatively, if you you make are how the application appears in the Menu Bar and
have a big monitor with an uncluttered Menu Bar you can set the pro- whether the HotKey action will be available.
gram to show a preview of the last text copied instead of just an icon.
Submitted by Michael Shaw
When you have any document open with a blinking cursor in it
and you need to paste anything you
have recently copied, just click on
the PopCopy icon in the menu bar to
show the PopCopy application access window. In the context of PopCopy, “recent” means anything you
have copied within the past hour,
day, week or month !! Besides your
most recent ten copied items there
is a “Previous Items” tab that opens
a hierarchical list of the last thousand or so images and portions of
text that you have had occasion to
copy and paste. Scroll down the list
to search among all of your copied
items. Select an item and then use
the HotKey to either paste the selected item directly into your document or, if you prefer, into your
Clipboard so you can paste it later.
Membership Matters - by Stan Wild
At the April 22nd MaUsE meeting the first of the club’s ‘Loyalty Draws’ was held amid much merriment at Don being the surprised winner of the $100 MaUsE gift card; (Don coincidentally happened to be the ‘small boy’ [LOL] from the audience who was holding the envelope containing the
lists of members names and draw numbers). This was quite unexpected as there were 85 numbered poker chips in the bag from which the winning numbers were pulled by a guest lady visitor, a
one in eighty-five chance. Barbara (who was not present at the meeting) was the winner of a
deluxe SONY 8 GB flash drive; her prize was mailed out to her the following day.
In the coming months there will be eight more loyalty draws, each for a $100 MaUsE gift card and
a deluxe flash drive. The rules for the draws are simple: all paid and honorary members are eligible
to win regardless of whether they are at the meeting or not, but any member may only win one of
each prize per year. However, having won one prize they will still be included in subsequent draws
for the alternate prize. So, if you win $100 MaUsE Gift Certificate in one draw, you will still be eligible to be entered to win a flash drive in a later draw, and vice-versa. Also at the April 22nd meeting
we were pleased to welcome three new members, Fred, Damon and Fred... Yes, two ‘Freds!’ The
club is always happy when people who first come to a meeting as a guest visitor quickly realize the
benefits of membership and sign up to become full-fledged members. Welcome to membership
Fred, Damon and Fred.
Michael has reported elsewhere in this excellent publication on the meeting, but, as Membership
Chairman I will add the fact that the meeting attracted over fifty members and guests, a very good
percentage of our membership, particularly impressive because we were competing with a Stanley
Cup playoff game on television. Obviously those fifty-some people had their priorities right!
You will have seen in the notices that Guy sends out prior to each meeting a request for your input
regarding the MaUsE club’s program contents. We do want you to get in touch with Aaron, our Vice
President and program coordinator, or President Michael or any member of the club’s executive
with your program suggestions. Also, if you have a favourite website or computing tip that you
would like to share with your fellow members, please volunteer to present it at an upcoming meeting. Macintosh Users East is your club and your suggestions, comments and participation are vital
to the continued health of the club. Yes! They matter.
And finally from me this month, you will be pleased to learn that your executive have acted on the
requests that we have been receiving for a second ‘Evening With Mac’ later this year. Please now
mark your Fall calendars for 7.00 p.m. Wednesday, October 7th, Meeting Room 1 A & B, Whitby
Public Library, for that always-popular event. We have also reserved meeting space for two
Evenings With Mac in 2010, April 14th and October 13th.
As always, if I can be of assistance to you in any matter with regard to the MaUsE club, please feel
welcome to contact me at < [email protected] >.
Stan Wild, Treasurer and Membership Chairman.
Looking at iLife '09
by iGrandpachris '38
This years version of iLife has the same
applications including iWeb, iPhoto,
iMovie, iDVD and GarageBand. Out of
all the iLife application my vote for
best of class is iMovie '09!
• Garageband
Garageband has a nifty set of tutorials
teaching you - how to play the piano or guitar. Simple video and practice methods for those who wish to learn music. GarageBand is the
backbone applications that works to help you learn. it is a virtual
music learning tool. The options are endless. It provides that smooth
integration with iMovie that Apple is famous for. In Garageband you
can make Podcasts, iPhone ring-tones, learn how to play instruments
like the guitar or piano and buy more training at the Lesson Store.
• Thirdly I created a series of iWeb pages on the Macbook
and uploaded them using my domain: www.visitgrandpachris.com. I can update the web site on the Macbook review it and reload up to the site all using iWeb. Cool
• iDVD
And reliable iDVD burns your songs, photos or video to CD or
DVD without a hitch. Integration throughout the applications
make the purchase price for iLife single $99 or the best buy
family pack $129 (5 users) a great bargain.
• iPhoto
iPhoto is the premiere data bank for your photos with an excellent editing set of tools to enhanse photos in a really professional way.
iPhoto is an excellent data base for all you photos. it also integrates
into all the other ilife applications.
• iWeb
While iWeb is stable, easy to use for the publication of any simple
web design you may wish to create and put on the web. iWeb works
well with Mobile-Me or any other web hosting service. I took the challenge creating a new web site with iWeb and a little help from Aaron. I
took these steps.
• Firstly I registered a domain with Godaddy.com.
• Secondly I hired Aaron for a setup Home page at Godaddy.com the
hosting site.
• iMovie '09
Let's look into iMovie '09. iMovie '09 is made for anyone to
use. It has a very simple interface with some cool features to
get your camcorder or photo camera stuff into a DVD,
iPod/iPhone, or up on YouTube. And it will make you look real
good. The video stabilization feature especially will make
your YouTube a better place for watching home-made videos
without making our eyes bleed.
iMovie ‘09 Maps and Backgrounds
The maps visual affects are pretty cool but not something that can be
used with every project. There's eight different moving maps to
choose from— real ones that you can put your real locations on, as
well as set your desired duration. When changing the destination
points on a map, it conveniently pulls up a search window for city or
airport, which makes finding a specific location very simple.
iMovie ‘09 Themes
Themes are selected in iMovie. There are six different themes to
choose from and each one puts a visual effect on the first and last clip
in the project. The first will show an intro title like a scrap book with
video playing on it and at the end it will insert an impressive "Directed
by:" holder for your name as title over your last clip. What's cool is it
will also add theme-related transitions to the transitions selection.
Same goes for the titles. You only get about four new transitions and
titles, but it's nice to keep each element of the project in theme. Fortunately more titles can crack open your creative juices as iMovie 09
has over 32 titles selections.
iMovie ‘09 Precision Editor
This window can also display audio tracks, effects and titles along
side the video clips so it feels more like a timeline than a simple project window. There is also the option to move titles and change audio
tracks of clips. The problem here is that the precision editor won't let
you do precise manipulation of a music track. This is frustrating, especially when you're trying to line your video up with music. For the simple trimming of clips precision editor works pretty well.
iMovie ‘09 Edit to Music with GarageBand
If you have a lot of photos you wish to time with a beat of a music
track iMovie has a basic system for doing that kind of editing. But for
anyone that is having trouble adding and editing music/sound effects
into iMovie projects or wishes to really spice up audio in their video,
the easiest way is to export to Garageband which has a precise timeline editing system. In creating background music, for example, after
an iMovie Project is finished the completed movie can be sent directly
to Garageband where your self created music is added to enhanse finished project. I enjoy using the option Magic Music
selecting Funk, Jazz, etc. for my movie backgrounds as I have
no idea how to really create properly movie themes but again
iLife applications make me look good.
Overall Impressions
Most of the points that experienced enthusiasts complained
about in iMovie ‘08 have been addressed. The additions of features like video stabilization and effects enough to make this
iMovie '09 very useful. The new tools like precision editor and
drag-and-drop are nice needed additions for the layout but a
timeline as in garageband is still better. If you didn't mind the
new iMovie layout but wanted more creative tools, you got
them. In my opinion ‘09 exposes your content in a way that is
just brilliant and allows you to do movies you would never have
done with former versions of iMovie.
I’d say ’09 makes the essential things (finding and selecting
portions of footage; putting it on a viewer; previewing specific
parts) so easy that people take them for granted, forgetting
how much more tedious and clumsy it is in older approaches.
And finally keep in mind that taking your camera out to record
a scene with a story to tell is the best beginning. And most important is to keep the camera rock-still letting people or things
do the moving in your footage. It’s not just about how to make
movies. It’s about your footage.
Submitted by Grandpachris proud web-master for
www.visitgrandpachris.com
Copy & Paste #3: CopyPaste Pro
Multiple Clipboard Resource
Of all of the copy & paste programs in this issue,
CopyPaste is probably the one that will be most familiar to the greatest number of long-time Mac users.
One of the revolutionary features that came with the Mac in 1984 was
the unique ability to select text or pictures, etc, then copy that data
into a clipboard, to hold that content temporarily and then paste it in
the same application or a different one. A few years later CopyPaste
was the first application to add multiple clipboards. This meant
that more data could be moved in less time. CopyPaste also allowed
these multiple clipboards to be displayed, edited, archived and saved
through restarts. CopyPaste revealed the untapped potential of
the Mac clipboard.
The latest incarnations of CopyPaste has those same underlying abilities, but with this latest version unveiled in 2008 (CopyPaste Pro)
CopyPaste has gained a new instantly available window (like the
Apple application switcher) that lets you navigate through the Clip
History and Clip Archive with a speed and ease that is again as revolutionary as the first version of CopyPaste. An editor is now part of the
CopyPaste Pro ecology.
CopyPaste Pro is profoundly simple to use and yet extremely powerful. CopyPaste Pro Features:
• Multiple (unlimited depending on memory) clipboards available by
hotkey, menu, contextual menu, clip palette and clip browser.
• Save all clipboards thru restarts. Never lose an edit again.
• Clip History maintains a stack of cuts or copies and even drags.
• Clip Editor (Bean) allows immediate editing of any clip and also is an
excellent word processor.
• Clip Archives to keep available info you use repeatedly
• The Clip Browser allows vertically viewing all clips and their contents. Particularly good for pictures.
• The Clip Palettes allow horizontal viewing and access to all clips.
Particularly good for text.
• Drag images from Safari directly into the clip history
• Clip Tools to act on clipboard data in dozens of useful ways that
save time like: - Email extractor which grabs email addresses
from large amounts of text - Url extractor grabs URLs from
large chunks of text and many others
• Drag and drop any clip in the clip browser and to/from applications
• Contextual menus to give easy access to the clipboards from anywhere
• With the clip editor open text, PDF, RTF, HTML, Apple Archive and
many other file types
• Easy ways to organize and make available all the clipboard data for
reuse.
Visit Script Software at:
http://www.scriptsoftware.com/copypaste/
Submitted by
Michael Shaw
Dunbar’s Then & Now
Shortly after connecting to the Internet, I was
amazed to find that on-line archives display
many wonderful old, historic photographs of
Toronto. I have spent many delightful hours
surfing the Web sites of The City of Toronto
Archives, Ontario Public Archives, National
Archives (Ottawa), Toronto Star and Telegram
archives. Many of the photographs depict
streets and building that I recognized from my
childhood. I was particularly pleased to find
photos of some of the amusement areas I frequented as a youngster: Sunnyside, Hanlan's
Point, Kew Beach and cinemas such as Shea's,
Cameo, Community, Palace, etc.
Many of the archival photos are from 'before my
time' and show the early streets of Toronto;
King, Queen, Danforth, Broadview, Pape and
others which I know well. Upon finding such old
scenes, I wanted to explore and find what those
locations looked like today.
It was great fun to go around with printouts of the old photos and try
to shoot new pics from the identical angles. I suppose I got that idea
from the work of Toronto historian, Mike Filey, who has published
many books with similar photos. Photoshop makes it quite easy to
assemble the 'before & after' images into what I like to call Then &
Now. I have dozens of other locations in downtown Toronto that I will
be exploring when the weather is more to my liking. I'm particularly
fond of an old photo that shows Queen and Bay when Bowles Lunch
was on the south-east corner. Anyone else remember that?
Danforth & Broadview
King East at Yonge 2006 & 1900
Article Submitted by George Dunbar
King East at Yonge 1878 & 2006
350 Danforth Avenue
In last month’s DoubleClick I asked for submissions
from the membership for this issue. Many MaUsE
members have come through. My thanks to all of you
for these great submissions.
Here is a selection of photos that George Dunbar has
been working on. If you have been doing something
fun and interesting with your Mac, please let us know
what you are up to.
Michael Shaw
Doubleclick Editor
Synium Software’s
Screenium 1.1
Screen Recording Tool
Screen shots are a vital part of any description of just about every process that
you have ever seen described in print on
your Macintosh. The old saw about a picture being worth a thousand words is no
more true anywhere than on your computer. For Macintosh users the ability to
freeze the actions on screen and take an instant static picture of your entire Desktop (Command-Shift 3) or any portion of it, (Command-Shift 4) is as simple as hitting a few preset key strokes.
Like everything else about computers, progress has been made. For live presentations and demonstrations put on before an audience, nothing beats a movie.
The very latest and greatest utility for recording a high-quality video copy in real
time of what you see happening on your Desktop is Screenium 1.1, from Synium
Software. Following the much anticipated launch of Screenium 1.0 only a few
months ago, this new version now features many "under-the-hood" improvements
to the already powerful capturing engine, one of the reasons for Screenium's highly
acclaimed quality. And you don’t need the latest Intel Mac to run it: Screenium 1.1
integrates smoothly with Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" as well as with 10.5 "Leopard" and
still supports Mac hardware from older productivity workhorses running on single or dual G4 processors right up to the most recent multi-core Intel CPUs.
Screenium 1.1 is available now as a full version for $29.00 USD. A fully-featured, time-unlimited demo version is available for free and supports recordings
of up to 30 seconds. The end product is amazingly clear with CD-quality audio.
You can download a copy of Screenium at:
http://www.synium.de/products/screenium/index.html
Screenium 1.1 captures live video from your Mac's screen, combined with
multichannel audio and picture-in-picture video and sound from your
Mac's built-in iSight or externally tethered, QuickTime-compatible Webcam. Video tutorials and webcasts are a snap, combining and mixing
voice-over from your built-in and any external microphone or audio device, together with system sounds or application audio.
Screenium 1.1 Features:
• Timed, Single Window, Mouse Area and random sizes up to Full Screen
• Capture any resolution your Mac supports, from iPhone size to "Full HD"
• iSight picture-in-picture recording, supports any QuickTime-compatible USB
or FireWire Webcam
• True Multi-Channel Audio, external sources also supported (analog and digital, USB and FireWire)
• Intuitive HotText captions
• Built-in Library to easily manage and post-process your movies
• Highly customizable quality and compression settings
• Intuitive, keyboard-controllable User Interface
* Create stunning educational videos or monitor whatever happens on-screen!
Like with most modern Mac applications installation of Screenium is a simple matter.
Download a copy from < http://www.synium.de/products/screenium/index.html >
and simply drag the Screenium application to your applications folder and you are
done. Launching the program will bring up the Screenium Preferences window and
give you access to the built-in Screenium Help files. The Help files can also be downloaded as a 28-page .PDF Screenium User Guide (a very good idea) with very important information about getting started with the application, understanding the various
Capture Modes the program supports, understanding and setting video and audio
preferences, and using all of the powerful built-in features that have been updated
since Screenium 1.0. Obviously, the more you already know about video before you
open Screenium the more control you will have over the movies you create but getting started with the program is easy because the User Guide spells out the steps
and the keyboard controls for starting and stopping the video capture in various
modes appear on screen as hints so learning to use the program is a matter of determining when you want your capture to begin and end. With Screenium you can set
the program to record in any one of four modes: Fixed Area, Full Screen, Mouse
Area, and Single Window. As each video is created it is automatically stored in the
Screenium application library.
With all of the recording modes
this program offers, the superior
audio quality and plentiful video
compression options, the ability to
include an iSight video and voiceover to the movies, the ability to
include animated mouse clicks,
and the ability to present text on
the screen as part of the video, I
would say that for the $29.95 price
tag Screenium 1.1 for Macintosh is
the best possible value in video
presentation software.
System Requirements:
Screenium 1.1 needs any Mac with the following minimum hardware requirements:
• G4 867 MHz G4 or better or an Intel Core Duo CPU at 1.6 GHz or better
• 512 MByte RAM or more
• Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger) and above or Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and newer
• To use all Screenium features, an iSight or QuickTime-compatible Webcam
To mark the release of Screenium 1.1 and as a special offer to the MaUsE club Nils
Heeren at Synium Software has offered to sponsor two full commercial licenses for
Screenium 1.1 to be used as MaUsE Raffle prizes at our May 2009 MaUsE Meeting.
Submitted by Michael Shaw
DVDs Play Where ???
Recently I was in England and found that a friend over there, a great
International Traveler, has a big box of movie DVDs he has collected
over the years from just about every DVD Region Zone Code possible. He has a cheap new Chinese DVD player that will play DVDs no
matter what zone they were devised for but most older DVD players
are set for a specific zone and are not compatible with other zones’
disks.
Region codes theoretically prevent people from taking their disks
from the countries they were originally marketed for and using them
in other countries. Because of zonal restrictions the DVDs you pick
up in a flea market in Europe may not work in Canada or the USA.
They will definitely not work in your Apple computer unless you set it
up to recognise European PAL videos. Macintosh computers can
only be set up with zonal changes five times. After that they are
locked on the last recognised format.
• Region code Area 0
Informal term meaning "worldwide". Region 0 is not an official setting; discs that bear the region 0 symbol either have no flag set or
have region 1–6 flags set.
• Region code Area 1 (Blue on map)
Canada, United States; U.S. territories; Bermuda
• Region code Area 2 (Dark Green on map)
Western and Central Europe; Western Asia; Israel, Iran, Egypt,
Japan, South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho; United Kingdom, Turkey,
French overseas territories
• Region code Area 3 (Light Green on map)
Southeast Asia; South Korea; Taiwan; Hong Kong; Macau
• Region code Area 4 (Turquoise on map)
Mexico, Central and South America; Caribbean; Australia; New
Zealand; Oceania;
• Region code Area 5 (Yellow on map)
Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Africa, Central and South Asia, Mongolia,
North Korea.
• Region code Area 6 (Red on map)
China
• Region code Area 7
Reserved for future use (found in use on protected screener copies
of MPAA-related DVDs and "media copies" of pre-releases in Asia)
• Region code Area 8
International venues such as aircraft, cruise ships, etc.
• Region code ALL
Region ALL discs have all 8 flags set, allowing the disc to be played
in any locale on any player.
Make sure you know what your DVD player (and computer) can handle so you don’t get stung by purchasing DVDs at garage sales or
flea markets in Greenland or Tierra del Fuego that will not play on
your Canadian system.
Dan Knight’s Low End Mac
During my time as Editor at the DoubleClick I
have made countless references to the Low
End Mac (LEM) website, mostly about the
various lists I have joined there, like the Low
End Mac QuadList (since I acquired by first
68040 Mac, a Quadra 950, from Jim Foster)
and the Swap List that I still belong to where
Mac users can contact other Mac users to
buy and sell used Mac stuff. Since 1997 the
Low End Mac website has been the meeting
place for people who need or want to discuss their older Mac systems. The discussion Lists were subscribable and divided up
into hardware categories so that people with
Compact Macs, Macs with 68040 processors, PCI PowerMacs, Clones, Mac OS machines with multiple processors, G3, G4,
iMacs, PPC 603 Macs, Performas, or any
other niche computers could find other similar users with whom to discuss upgrades,
problems, performance and other issues.
For Mac users without a community of other
users the Low End Mac website is still a vital
resource with lots of good information on
how to extend the life of older Macs and improve their performance.
In 1997 Dan’s personal website had almost two
dozen Mac profiles, from the Mac Plus through the
last 68030-based desktop Macs, a few links to
other online Mac resources, a whopping 3 graphics, and absolutely no advertising. In the 12 years
since then it has grown to become one of the most
dependable sources of upgrade information for
time-challenged Macs. If Low End Mac has a message it is this: every Macintosh will eventually be a
“low end” Mac. Think of it: no matter what Macintosh model you are presently using, whether its a
24-inch Intel iMac or an 17-inch MacBook Pro, it
will in the course of time slip into obsolescence
and, if it lasts long enough, wind up as garage-sale
fodder or sitting on the shelf at a second-hand
goods shop with a $25.00 price tag on it. Alternatively, it could wind up on your front lawn set out for
garbage collection or sent to a recycling depot to
be crushed and shredded. I think of Low End Mac
every time I see a Mac SE/30, Quadra 840AV,
Bondi Blue iMac, Macintosh IIci or Mac IIfx at a
yard sale or sitting on a shelf at the Goodwill.
Although it is requisite for professional power-users
to have the fastest and best Intel Macs possible, in
reality there are very few of us who are professionals in that sense. I only know of a couple of people
who actually make their living on a computer and
really need the latest Mac to do it with. For the rest
of us its a matter of getting by for the time being
with any Mac we happen to have that can still do
what we need it to do and run the applications we
need to use. Extending the life of our beloved older
Macs through RAM and processor upgrades secured at a reasonable cost is often a sensible solution to the
requirement of
The mission of Low End Mac is helping users get the
keeping current
most value from their Macs and Mac clones. We're not
with Mac OS and
concerned with having the fastest, most tweaked out
application upcomputer possible. We're not concerned with keeping
dates. Check out
ancient Macs in use long after they've become bottleLow End Macs
necks. We are concerned with value: getting the most
website to see articles, opinions, and
use from your hardware for the money, whether that
links to Mac hardmeans an upgrade or a newer Mac.
ware upgrades .
Dan Knight < http://lowendmac.com/ >
Copy & Paste #4: Clipboard Evolved
The Ultimate Clipboard Manager for MacOS X
Clipboard Evolved is a easy to
use, feature rich, light weight clipboard manager for Mac OS X. It
requires 10.5 "Leopard" and a
PowerPC or Intel processor. There
are several differences between
this copy & paste utility and the
others mentioned in this issue. For
one thing Clipboard Evolved,
from Mach Software Design, is
very new. It is so new that it only
works on Macintosh
computers capable
of running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Like iClip, clicking on the Clipboard Evolved icon
in the MenuBar can provide a set of hidden bins that lurk out of sight. Holding down
the Control key while clicking the Clipboard Evolved icon in the Menu Bar will call up
a Recent Items list and give access to the Help, Preferences, and five default clip
libraries with suggested titles. If you elect to dispense with the lurking bins you can
enable a clip board window that actually looks like a clip board. By default it has 30
empty bins waiting for text and images. By default the clipboard is vertical with horizontal rectangular bins but it can be set into grid mode, as shown above, with rows
of square bins.
Clipboard Evolved makes it fun and easy to organize your data in a user-friendly
clipboard. Unlike most other clipboard managers, which either gives you the choice
of a window or a menu, Clipboard Evolved offers both a beautiful clipboard window
plus a menu for easy access to copy items. Designed to fit neatly and unobtrusively
in Mac OS X, it's the perfect multiple clipboard for Mac OS X.
New in Clipboard Evolved, Dock Mode makes it even easier and faster for data storage by enabling you to quickly get your data in and get out it just as fast. You can
position the dock on the left or right side of the screen and choose whether you want
to hide it or not. If Dock hiding is off, left-clicking the clipboard menu bar icon will
bring up and hide the dock. If Dock hiding is on, you can move your mouse to the
edge of the screen to bring the dock up. You can also drag stuff to the edge of the screen to bring the dock up. With the new
Dock Mode, dragging and dropping, right-clicking, double clicking, single clicking, clipboard history, and keyboard combinations,
there's never been so many ways to get to your data how you want, when you want.
There is a lot of glitz and glitter to this very modern program. Because it is designed to work on the latest Macs and the latest
Mac OS, it has embraced the new Leopard-style graphics and contains optional complex video-card dependant animations.
Activating Clipboard Evolved
• Drag text, images, files, or URLs to the Clipboard Menu Bar icon; the Clipboard window will pop up.
• Left-Click on the Clipboard menubar icon, the Clipboard Window will pop up.
• Right-click on the Clipboard menubar icon, a menu will pop up which contains your Clipboard data. Click on a menu item to
paste it into the active application. If the menu item is a file or folder, clicking the menu item will open it.
• You can set up a hot key in Preferences to show and hide the Clipboard window or dock.
• If Dock Mode and Dock Hiding are on, you can move the mouse to the edge of the screen to bring the Dock up. You can also
drag stuff to the edge of the screen to bring the Dock up as well.
1
2
3
The Three Possible Clipboard Evolved Views
• 1 Lurking bins that slide onto screen from right or left edge
• 2 Square smaller grid bins on a horizontal clipboard
• 3 Rectangular horizontal stacked bins on vertical clipboard
Getting Data into and out of Clipboard Evolved
• Clipboard Evolved has an option that allows you to keep a record of
your clipboard history.
• You can drag in text, colors, images, files, and URLs into one of the
clips in the Clipboard, as well as drag them out again.
• You can select clips in the Clipboard window itself and use your normal
keyboard combinations such as Command-C to copy, Command-V to
paste, and the Delete key to delete the contents of a clip.
• You can right click on a clip to bring up an edit menu, I.e. Cut, Copy,
Paste, Delete.
• If you like to keep URLs and Files in the Clipboard window, these can
be opened with a simple double-click.
• You can set left and right double clicking to copy, paste, paste data into
the currently active application, or enter text for a clip.
• You can set up hot keys to copy the contents of a clip.
There will be a few free licensed copies of Clipboard Evolved available
to MaUsE members at the May 2009 MaUsE meeting.
Article Submitted by Michael Shaw
You can download Clipboard Evolved here:
http://www.machsoftwaredesign.com/clipboard.dmg.zip
Be sure to check out the demonstration video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYgMcOB8QtA&fmt=22
Markzware
PasteBoard XT 8
Markzware has finally released an upgrade to
its highly-recommended PasteBoard XT utility for QuarkXPress 8. Pasteboard is an
XTension that changes the width and height
of the pasteboard. This is similar to changing
the pasteboard width percentage using the
QuarkXPress application preferences menu.
For those of you who don’t know what this is
about, the pasteboard is the visible but nonprinting, area around and outside the actual
document pages in a desktop publishing application window where objects like text and
image boxes can be temporarily placed.
Rather than drag and drop images from the
application onto the Desktop they can be
dragged to the non-printing part of the application window and left there indefinitely.
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The “pasteboard” analogy is a carry-over
from before computers, when pictures and
paragraphs of text were placed onto separate
paper cutouts and could be arranged by moving them around by hand while composing
pages before printing. Anything that might appear on the page could be spread out on the
pasteboard so the setup person could see all
of te possibilities at a glance.
Text and image objects can be dragged from
the document page to the surrounding pasteboard and vice versa: With modern desktop
publishing software the pasteboard is where
you can store image variations and text objects while deciding which work best together.
Markzware’s PasteBoard XTension for
QuarkXPress 8 is available from Markzware’s
online store for only $29.95.
PasteBoard XT changes the width and height
of the QuarkXPress pasteboard. It allows the
user to adjust by value as well as by percentage, giving a wider range of options than that
within the QuarkXPress application.
Select (Pasteboard Settings...) from the
QuarkXPress Utilities menu and enter a percentage of the documents page width and
height to adjust the pasteboard. Note that the
resulting height will be applied to all sides of
the document page and will in fact widen a
smaller pasteboard if the height is greater
than the width. Of course, the pasteboard
plus the spread dimensions are always limited to a maximum of 48 inches. Pasteboard
XT will then automatically adjust the spread
and page guidelines according to the new dimensions so that they remain relative to the
page.
Quark PasteBoard
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Quark PasteBoard surrounds the document
page and accepts text
and image objects for
temporary storage
MarkzWare
MarkzTools 7
While travelling I've been temporarily forced off my 2.8 GHz
Intel iMac Extreme and it has
been a true deprivation. While
traveling in far-away countries I
have had to rely on my old faithful
antique G4 iBook. The biggest
hardship has been the loss of
QuarkXPress 8, a program that
is an unalloyed joy to use. I do
not have it on the G4 iBook but I
do have QuarkXPress 7.3 and
switching back to this earlier version in order to create the complete March and April and part of
the May issues of the DoubleClick
has brought me back
to the set of XTensions
I used to use before I
upgraded. (XTensions
are QuarkXPress-specific plug-ins designed
to work with and enhance QuarkXPress in ways similar to the ways that Photoshop plugins work with and enhance Photoshop. Some XTensions are created
by Quark and some are created by other companies). One of the
nicest and most appreciated of the XTensions I used with QuarkXPress 7.3 is Markzware’s MarkzTools 7.
MarkzTools 7 is an XTension that
can be used with any version of
QuarkXPress 4, 5, 6 or 7 to prevent corrupted QuarkXPress documents, overcoming the dreaded bad file format [70], [39], and [108].
You can verify your saved Quark documents automatically every time
you save changes. Furthermore, using a special temp file MarkzTools
can try to help you recover documents that have become corrupted
during a save operation while using Quark. This special temp file is
only available to MarkzTools behind the scenes and is not selectable
by the user. In the case of a badly corrupted file in which the page layout data cannot be salvaged, the “scavenge text” feature may extract
text stories from a document file. Besides the automatic verification
feature, MarkzTools 7 has a selection of utilities that can be accessed
as separate commands from the MarkzTools tab found under the Utilities menu in QuarkXPress. MarkzTools alerts you whenever you are
about to save a lower version document to a higher version. It also
makes QuarkXPress backwards compatible, allowing you to open
higher version Quark documents. The (gray previews) features allows
you to convert your full color picture previews into gray pictures,
greatly reducing the file size on your hard drive.
MarkzWare
MarkzTools 8
Ever since QuarkXPress 8 was
first released I have been sending
subtle hints to Markzware about
the need for MarkzTools 8 for
QuarkXPress 8 for Macintosh.
This amazing XTension adds the
following features to QuarkXPress, and more:
• Convert any version document
down to version 6 or 4.1 — without opening it into QuarkXPress
• Warn you when you’re about to
save a document created by a
lower version into a higher version
• Verify the integrity of a document without opening it
• Save files to your computer before saving them to a networked
server
• Salvage corrupted files by extracting text and/or pictures
• Split QuarkXPress 6 & 7 projects into the separate Layouts contained in them.
• Convert all picture previews to gray boxes, to reduce the QuarkXPress document file size for archiving
• Set a Mac OS color label on every document
when you save it
How to Use MarkzTools 8
All of the MarkzTools commands and preferences are available from the Markzware Menu
in the QuarkXPress 8 MenuBar. The first time
you launch QXP8 after installing the MarkzTools
XTension you will be required to put in your activation code. After that
the MarkzTools menu will be functional. Set the preferences ! They
will control how the XTension operates. Select the checkbox to instruct MarkzTools to verify the integrity of the current Layout of your
Document Project just prior to it being Saved. That way, if a problem
is discovered then your original document file on disk will not be updated, thus serving as a
type of “document insurance.” When the Verification
process begins, MarkzTools
will always first Save your
Layout to a temporary file in
which case MarkzTools can
then Verify the temporary file
and, if successful, replace
your important original file
with this new one, which is
to say allow the original file to become over-written. For example, if document data had somehow become scrambled in
memory and was saved to disk you’d end up, of course, with a
bad document. By Verifying the data before updating your
master file, MarkzTools can therefore prevent unwanted disasters. Since Quark documents are often hundreds of megabytes of pictures and text overwriting a good document with a damaged one would qualify as a Very Bad Thing.
If you ever attempt to open a Quark document and find that it is unreadable for any reason you can select the “Salvage Document File” menu item to instruct MarkzTools to attempt to recover a corrupted document. The Salvage function will bypass specific
complex elements in the document which individually could be corrupted. For example,
sometimes an object might have Runaround data which has become scrambled in which
case the Salvage routine will set the Runaround to None, thus bypassing the corruption
and allowing the remainder of the document to be safely recovered. Sometimes a document file has become so physically damaged that it might be very difficult to recover. A
file might be physically incomplete and therefore absolutely impossible to salvage. In this
case MarkzTools will attempt to recover whatever portion of the document it can.
In extreme cases where the document cannot be salvaged at all, your only hope will be
to at least extract the text stories from the document file. This is another feature of
MarkzTools. Hopefully while working on a large file you will have kept copies of the images used in it (vital if you intend to publish the document as a .PDF) but the actual typing of the text portion may be lost. Salvaging the text gives you the best chance of
recovering the text portion of a document so you will be able to rebuild the document in
the least amount of time. When you select a document to extract text from the Extract
Text feature opens in its own window and
gives controls that help you navigate
through the file. Text you choose to extract appears story by story and are automatically address to a new QuarkXPress
page.
If you need to share documents with
Quark users who are still using older versions of the program MarkzTools 8 can
help you downsave and convert your
QXP8 documents to be compatible with
earlier versions of QuarkXPress but unsupported features from the latest version
of the program may be lost.
MarkzTools 8 is priced at US$199, with
$99 upgrades for users of MarkzTools 6
and 7. If you haven’t yet upgraded to
QuarkXPress 8, take heart: Markzware
also has versions of MarkzTools for all
earlier versions of QuarkXPress.
April 22nd MaUsE Meeting
Aaron could not attend the meeting so Guy stepped up to the plate and
filled in as Master of Ceremonies. Later on, he also ran the Question and
Answer portion of the meeting. Stan gave the Treasurer’s Report and described the mechanics of the special Loyalty draw. We had a full agenda
with Marcel presenting MacHeist and the process of creating a picture DVD
using iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD. Michael did a short presentation of Google
Earth “street view”. Stan ran the first of the nine scheduled “Loyalty” draws
and Don won the $100.00 prize. Chris ran the usual MaUsE Raffle at the
end of the evening: Raffle prizes included many of the software titles reviewed in last month’s MaUsE DoubleClick, including a full copy of iLife ‘09
which was provided by Apple. We had a wonderful turn-out, enjoyed a few
laughs, and picked up a few new members.