Dorchester — Jul 10th 2018
Euan showed us that Text Edit is a surprisingly powerful and useful application; a capable word processing app with full formatting facilities, tabs, tables, grammar and spell checking — capable of creating and editing plain text, rich text and HTML. It will open and save documents in a number of word processor formats. He drew particular attention to three menu items: File > Revert to… which offers a Time Machine style history of each successive document Save. Edit > Paste and Match Style (apart from making text pasting into a rich text document convenient) allows users to select, for example, a Finder selection of your photos and paste their file names into Text Edit as a list. Format > Make Plain Text removes all characteristics of a text selection from, for example, a web page, and reveals the text as monospaced, basic black text. In Preferences > New Document you can choose between rich text and plain text. In Preferences > Open and Save you can select “Display HTML files as HTML code instead of formatted text.” Whilst not as fully capable as apps such as BBEdit, this does allow those with knowledge of HTML to create and edit code. Text edit includes Apple’s mark up tools for writing and drawing on images inserted into text files. In Safari, save page has an option to chose either Page Source (saves only the code source of the page) or Web Archive. Page Source files can be opened in Text Edit either as HTML code or as Rich Text — retaining the links to web page content such as images, text font and colour, or as Plain Text with no images, links and all text mono-spaced in black. In Safari the alternative option is to save as Web Archive which saves text, images, and all content of the page.
David showed the basic choices when preparing a Keynote presentation — standard or wide format and a theme. He showed a few slides demonstrating how Keynote shares many formatting features with Pages and other Apple macOS apps. These include text, images masking and instant alpha and he spent some time showing how to use animation, building in and building out effects with ‘Move’ showing us Brian Tapper’s tip of using zoom to place images outside of the slide so they can move on and / or off during animation. He showed the same slides being built up on an iPad, the + menu providing all the Insert options including Text Included as a Basic Image. The only two features he has spotted that are not available on iOS are to create ‘Move’ animations and to adjust text character spacing. In the case of the former it is possible to make use of Transition from one slide to the next. He ended by showing that on the iPad version you can draw on a slide by selecting Drawing from the Images Menu. You can also temporarily draw on a slide whilst presenting via iPad, ideally with the Apple Pencil.
We watched a short movie on the benefits of using the Emergency Number 112 on mobile phones.
