Dorchester — Dec 13th 2016
David then gave a synopsis of our financial position at year end showing that our major purchase for the year, the USB flash drives, had been all but covered by our income of £1,725.00, leaving our end of year balance just £100 short of that of last year at £2,840.21. Clearly we have sufficient income to cover normal current expenditure and reserves to cover any increase in expenses or sudden need to replace or add equipment.
All the current committee had agreed to stand for another year and as there had been no nominations for any of the posts, the last item on the agenda was to vote for them to be re-elected. This was carried unanimously and the formal meeting was closed at 7:55pm.
Back to normal business, Euan reviewed Mac modifier keys—particularly the Option key—to apply keyboard shortcuts. He broke the list into sections, Startup Options, Sleep, Log-out and Shutdown, with Document and Finder shortcuts. The list is available to download here. At the bottom of the list are two URLs for many more shortcuts using other modifier key combinations.
David M. discussed new features in Sierra starting with unlocking your Mac simply by wearing an Apple watch. At the time he had not been able not set it up in the Security & Privacy Preferences, but has now done so by erasing the watch completely and re-syncing. Sierra now incorporates Siri which is activated by clicking the Siri icon in the menu bar or pressing and holding the Command key and the Space bar ( a brief tap of the same keys brings up the Spotlight Search window). The normal Command + Z “Undo” can be used in Safari to reinstate deleted tabs which are also neatly grouped under the History tab. Photos in Sierra is a major upgrade with Face management much improved and accessed through the People Album. Photos shows all the faces it has identified and automatically groups the photos featuring any single face it has identified. Where Photos has identified the same person’s face in more than one group, these can be merged. Favourites can be marked up or unfavourited, hidden deleted etc. “Memories” is a useful feature. Photos creates some memories by default but you can add, edit and delete memories very intuitively as well as change the themes for the memories slide show, which can also include music. Control Clicking on a photo in any part of the app will reveal a menu of possible actions. The new Search facility is surprising good: search for ‘beach’ and Photos will display all the photos it reads as including a beach. Editing features in Photos now include the familiar Markup.
Having enjoyed John Hopper’s excellent presentation to the Fareham group on Mac OS and IOS features to help the visually impaired, David could not resist showing a few of them. With John’s help we looked at how you can summon a magnifying glass to view parts of the screen, how to dictate text and have text read out. David demonstrated the importance of careful punctuation in text that will be read out on a Mac or IOS device. David Parnell showed us how the camera on an IOS device can be set up as a magnifier. All of these feature are found in Accessibility in Mac and IOS Preference Settings.
As part of Q&A and at the request of Mark, he and Euan demonstrated how to use Automator on the Mac to carry out useful routines. The example they used was combining a number of pdf documents and then exporting the text in Rich Text Format. Automator is very user friendly, you just need to think of a suitable application.
Inspired by Brian Tapper’s delightful “stop movie” wishing the Salisbury group a Happy Christmas, we ended the evening with a short and charming “A Christmas Carol” Keynote created by Euan which also demonstrated many of Keynote’s features.
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