Dorchester — Feb 10th 2009

The February meeting at Dorchester had a mainly geographical theme.

Steve started things off with a demonstration of how the Mac can be used successfully with a hand held GPS device. Garmin, who make GPS devices, are slowly becoming more Mac-aware, so that if you buy a GPS with a USB connection, they have software (Road Trip, see www8.garmin.com/macosx) which can upload planned routes to the device, and download tracks from it. Two other inexpensive programmes are also useful: Topo Draw (www.hiketech.com) allows routes and tracks to be shown on a map (which first has to be scanned in, and calibrated), and GPSBabel (www.gpsbabel.org) allows conversion of a wide variety of gps data formats. Tracks can also be read and displayed by Google Earth. So the Mac is slowly starting to catch up with the facilities available to the PC user, but the Ordnance Survey's maps, being still only available in PC format, remain as a significant barrier to progress.

Mark continued with the geographical theme by demonstrating how one could add gps data to the EXIF metadata attached to a digital photo, to indicate the position of the camera, or the location of the major elements being photographed. This involves the use of Google Earth, and HoudahGeo, and was used by Mark to assist the Dorset County Museum's survey of the County Boundary.

To conclude, Mark demonstrated the new version of iPhoto, with the Faces feature, which enables an iPhoto library to be scanned in order to collect photos of a particular person. The new version also has a greater variety of options for showing slides, and customising slide shows. It can also be used to geotag pictures within the iPhoto library.

Mark used the Jing programme (www.jingproject.com) to record a video demonstration of the two demonstrations which included Google Earth, as we do not have access to the Internet at the Colliton Club. These videos are available to view at http://www.screencast.com/t/8jCiKBDbm
SR

Comments

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Mark Ford said…

I wonder if anyone followed up the video on Screencast and how useful it, and Jing, might be in future.
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