Lytchett Matravers — Jul 13th 2008

We started the afternoon with Mark's presentation of Comic Life Magiq - yes, that is how they spell it. Mark concentrated on showing us just the features that have been added in this new version. The bit that impressed us most was that it now has a tool for cutting out one area of a photo and putting it onto another. This was very easy to use and you didn't have to be too precise to get decent results and could easily be worth the purchase price for this feature alone.

Michael followed up with a few clips - a sort of "my current favourite utilities". The first of these, Himmelbar, is an application launcher which sits on your menu bar and gives instant access to the contents of both your Applications folder and your Utilities folder so that they're always close at hand. YouControl is quite like Spaces in 10.5 but it will run in earlier versions. It gives you lots of virtual screens to tidy up your work area. The next one was probably the one I'd find most useful so it's embarrassing that I've forgotten its name! No doubt Michael will furnish us with a reply. It's another one to sit on your menu bar but this allows you to have multiple clip boards i.e. when you copy something to the clipboard, it's normally overwritten by the next copy but with this utility you can have lots of clips all and once and you just select the one you want to paste.

Finally, Martin showed us various ways of running different operating systems - not just Windows - on a current Mac and also how to control another computer from your Mac using VNC. I did ask Martin to make sure it wasn't too technical but I needn't have worried. He presented some quite complex stuff in an easy to understand manner and after a look at Sun's Solaris and Ubuntu Linux, the room filled with oohs and aahs as we were treated to a nostalgic look back at older versions of Mac OS - version 7 for example. A lot of the members had been using Macs for long enough to have used it when it was current so it brought back happy memories. He then took us further back in time by running an Omega and a Sinclair emulation which again brought appreciative noises from the assembled geeks ;-) (Geeks? Don't worry, that's just me sulking because he didn't have a version of my beloved Acorn Archimedes to show us!)

Mick Burrell

Comments

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Mick Burrell said…

Martin, you wouldn't believe how many times I read that before posting and didn't spot I'd called it Omega. I wonder if it would have fared better if they had ;-)

John Surtees said…

Would that multiple clipboard program be iClip by any chance. Great program.

Michael Corgan said…

The multiple clipboard demo was for Koolclip - also a great program!
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