Salisbury — Nov 5th 2008

An excellent meeting! OK, we filled it up with presentations but we still had our question & answer session at the start and we had half an hour at the end to chat & deal with problems before heading to the local Italian for some much needed sustenance.

First up was Linda. She's been (very successfully) using iWeb to create a personal web site for family and friends to view - and anyone else of course - and uploading it to the space provided as part of her free trial of Mobile Me. She talked us through choosing from the many templates that Apple provide and adding her own photos and text to replace the content already there. She then showed us how to add more pages to the one chosen in order to build up the site and how to link them all together. Everybody was most impressed by iWeb, (or perhaps it was Linda's slick style) especially the members who having only been to us once before had come along specifically to see this demo.

Next was Liz. We didn't know quite what to expect as Liz teaches 3 year-olds their first basic skills with the Mac. So, although it seems natural to us to connect our moving the mouse to the cursor moving on the screen, this has to be learned. She brought along some of the software she uses and we were able to watch the exploits of Little Brown Bear On The Farm and see how mouse movement and clicking were learned by making animals move (I just loved it when she tickled the pig!) and sweeping away straw to reveal the family of mice hiding underneath. The highlight though was probably using the mouse to follow a set path which parked the tractor in the barn. It would have been even better if some wag (pardon the pun) hadn't called out that that must be how Lewis Hamilton learned to drive!

Finally Shane showed us a few tips in Photoshop. We went through making an A1 sized poster, turning your photos to black & white with a few tweaks more than the standard desaturate to make them look more as good old black & white used to, using a layer to create a photo that was part colour and part black & white and finally using the clone tool to remove unwanted parts of a photo. It all went very smoothly but then it should. Shane is seriously into photography and Photoshop as evidenced by the 200Mb files he used at one point which made his poor old G3 laptop groan a bit under the strain!

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