Dorchester — Dec 14th 2010

John opened the December meeting with 15 members present.

We started with the Q&A session, in which the Keychain, and associated issues of Mail passwords were explored, and problems of sorting photo folders in iPhoto discussed. This led on to discussion of similar issues in Mail, and the use of rules and smart folders was explained. Finally, the use of V-cards to export multiple contact details in Address Book for subsequent use in another programme was mentioned.

The meeting was informed of the recent death of David Webber, one of the Dorchester Group's longest standing members, and several tributes were made to him. He will be sorely missed.

Being almost Christmas, the meeting then partook of Coffee and Mince Pies, and continued with a description, by Euan, of various CAD (computer assisted design) programmes. He cited Illustrator and MacDraw as examples of programmes which worked well in 2 dimensions, but these did not meet his needs as he required 3D visualisation. (But not, as in the cinemas, stereoscopic vision - perhaps that will come later!) He had tried Google SketchUp, Draftsight, and Blender, which were all free programmes, also TurboCad, which wasn't, but had finally settled on ViaCad 2D 3D, and was familiarising himself with the way of using this very powerful and flexible programme. He convinced us that it was indeed very versatile, and that it had a steep learning curve, and showed us some of the neat features which assist in rapidly constructing 3D structures. Mention was also made of the open source programme Sweet Home 3D, which, whilst not having anything like the flexibility of the other programmes mentioned, was good at doing what it was designed to do, namely to enable visualisation of different furniture lay outs in a room.

After the customary retreat to the Bar, Tom gave his perspective on the current market for iPad type devices. It appears that Apple have 50% of this market which is expanding rapidly, but other manufacturers are catching up, some entering the market with less sophisticated devices pieced more cheaply. At the other end of the market, other devices were more competitive with Apple, but Tom foresaw that, despite there being an ever increasing number of models to choose from, Apple would still hold the edge, in particular towards April 2011, when he anticipated a significant step forward in the technology of the iPad. It was less easy to predict the impact of all this on the laptop commuter, and e-reader market.

JSR

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