Dorchester — Jun 14th 2016

16 members and 1 Guest

“Of Squiggles and Marks (letters, points and punctuation), a whimsical talk” began with finding the best punctuation for a highly ambiguous sentence, and establishing when a spoken word like ‘so’ or ‘ok’ is used as ‘punctuation’. There followed a very brief revue of modern punctuation marks. Euan explored emoticons, emoji and symbols through the macOS “Emoji & Symbols” and “Keyboard Viewer” menus to show how Unicode catalogues every glyph in (almost) all languages. He explored what we actually “read” when we are reading. The invention and development of punctuation marks through Ancient Greek and Latin followed. After a short pause to consider Victor Borge’s Phonetic Punctuation, Charlemagne appeared and the beginning of uniform spelling and sentence and paragraph division. We considered Chaucer and Caxton’s contributions. The European moveable type revolution started by Gutenberg who published his Bible in the 15th C. came next, followed by the Venetian Aldus Manutius and his Grandson. Martin Luther’s German Bible represented the 16th C. Euan followed this brief historical sketch with interesting modern ‘punctuation’ by the American poet e.e. cummings. SMS & messaging slang, with messaging features in the upcoming iOS 10 concluded the talk

David demonstrated ‘WhatsApp’ Messages and recommended it as a particularly useful alternative to Apple Messages as it works across all platforms and offers VOIP telephone with other users. The free App highlights who in your address book is a signed-up user, and offers a simple link to invite others to join. Though essentially a smart phone app, most facilities can be used via a web browser on a computer — although the Mac app ‘ChitChat’ seems to make a better job of it. David demonstrated Twitter next, and stressed that much benefit can be had without needing to be an avid Tweeter. He showed how you can ‘follow’ (and be ‘followed’) and how, if you want to tweet you can direct the message to one or more specific people using their @ address. All their followers will also see your tweet. The use of the # (hashtag) is a key feature of Twitter. By adding # to the front of a word that word can be picked up by others using the search facility e.g. #AppleWatch or #Syria. While a tweet is limited to 140 digits you can include media and, most important, URLs. David explained that he follows economists whose tweets typically will lead to full page articles, videos etc. David ended by demonstrating “MarkUp” which is a feature of Apple Preview and Mail where it can be used on attachments. David added arrows and dimensions to a photo and used the magnifying glass (loupe) to highlight a feature on the photo. He showed how to Markup and Reply to a document by completing a pdf form and adding a signature. The signature can either be written on an IOS device or you can hold up a handwritten signature to the built-in camera.

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