Dorchester — Mar 7th 2016

Mick demonstrated in real time how to create a ringtone for iPhone — a good reminder of how useful the Garageband App can be. Using an MP3 clip of the opening bars of Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’, he opened a new “Empty” Project in the latest version of Garageband 10.1, (any of the three options offered work) and dragged his MP3 clipping into Garageband. ‘Take Five’ starts very quietly before the full theme (as the strength of the signal in the displayed track showed) so Mick cut the quiet entry and found a good place 30 seconds on to end the ringtone clip and deleted the rest. He made the clip into a loop before exporting it to iTunes which automatically stores it as a Ringtone for transfer to the ‘phone next time they are synced.

Michael expressed surprise that Apple had never developed the clip board further and had allowed this gap to be filled by many others — as offered on the App Store. He had checked out a large number of these and filtered the list down to three Apps worth considering.  “CopyLess Lite” is free and stores the 10 most recent and three favourite elements, but Michael suggested it is well worth paying $4.99 for the full App which can copy up to 100 items to which you can have access anytime. “Copy & Paste Magic” at £0.79 is well organised with clear previews and paste by Drag and Drop. The best of the bunch, although paid for is “iClipboard5” which, quoting the promo, automatically keeps a history of everything you copy to the clipboard from any application. You can paste any clipping from the history in five different ways: 1) the Shelf on the side of the screen; 2) the special menu in the menu bar; 3) the Rapid-Fire hot key; 4) the Services menu; or 5) the all-new Paste Blaster.   Both Drew and John Lemon had purchased this App following a previous presentation by Michael and both use and like it, John particularly enjoys the ability to turn it on and off. Michael pointed out that iClipboard 5 can be purchased direct from Chronos  for $9.99 whilst the App Store are selling version 4.2 for £7.99.

David finally got round to showing some tips and tricks he likes. These include how putting any App into full screen mode gives it its own Desktop access via Mission Control, and how to make use of the Mac OS split screen feature to show two windows either from the same App or two different Apps. He reminded members about the Command + Tab key stroke which when held down, displays all open programmes as an enlarged mid-screen ‘Dock’. Selecting the previous App allows users to switch quickly back and forth between two apps by just tapping Command + Tab. David touched briefly on Split Screen Mode on the iPad and how to select a second App from the second screen, Mick pointed out that, unlike El Capitan, you cannot have two windows open from the same App e.g. Safari. David passed on a tip from John Hooper using the Apple Maps Flyover facility available for many major cities of the World. Because the WiFi at the Colliton Club is slow he and Euan had made a QuickTime movie from his iPad Screen of part of the Flyover London so they gave a quick demo of how this was done. Finally David showed a OS X Daily movie on getting the most out of Spotlight highlighting 10 specific features.

Comments

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Lionel Ogden said…

For Android users, as you cannot sync your phone with iTunes, an app called Ringtone Maker is available from the google playstore which enables you to use tunes on your phone to create a ringtone by cropping the tune in much the same way as described by Mick. Music can be transferred from your Mac to the phone using Android File Transfer.

Drew McFarlane said…

An excellent evenings entertainment, one of the best meetings we have had. Thank you to all concerned.
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