Online — Nov 10th 2020

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"And now for something completely different". Euan talked to 24 of us about early computing. It wasn't as I thought a mathematics lesson but a poetry lesson, a history lesson, a lesson on ghost stories and yes, early computers too. The poetry comes from Lady Ada Lovelace, daughter or Lord Byron and the ghost stories (well, nearly!) from Mary Shelley.

Euan confidently walked us through the contributions of Babbage (difference and… Read more…

Online — Oct 27th 2020

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Barry has an office filling up with filing cabinets and when was then asked to act as an executor with an estate entailing a lot of documentation; how was he to avoid being overwhelmed by ever more paperwork? His investigations led to EverNote which along with all the note taking facilities you would expect can incorporate images, pdfs and a number of different formats with an excellent filing system an easy search facility. Evernote runs… Read more…

Online — Oct 13th 2020

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This time we had a presentation showing us some of the features available in Numbers. Mick set up a spreadsheet showing how it's possible to monitor a bank account, reconciling it with your bank statement to check for errors as well as analysing your income and expenditure to see where your money comes from and more importantly goes! This was also shown graphically using the pie chart option in Number's graphing facility.… Read more…

Online — Sep 15th 2020

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Once again, Tony came up with a different and interesting topic for our fortnightly meeting - Font Book. It's on all our Macs but few of us have any experience of it.

Tony started off by telling us the different types of fonts we may encounter - specifically Open Type, True Type and Postscript. The job of Font Book is to allow you to see and manage the fonts on your machine. It can show… Read more…

Online — Sep 1st 2020

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We've all heard the term "Haptic Touch" but do we know what it means? David Parnell took us through what it means, what it does and why it replaced the previous 3D Touch. Whereas 3D Touch was designed to tell how hard you press, Haptic Touch works on how long you press.

David showed us how to turn it on (or off) and then various useful tips for using it with… Read more…

Online — Aug 18th 2020

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We had our biggest online audience yet! 26 people watched Mick's Keynote explanation of how a home network works, how devices talk to each other and get information from the internet. We also looked at ways to improve coverage of wi-fi around your house using Power Line systems, range extenders or the newer mesh systems. A final look at trouble shooting issues in the form of asking ourselves logical questions and the use of… Read more…

Online — Aug 4th 2020

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John Hooper was in the chair for this meeting and took us through his efforts to go paperless - at least keeping or using less paper if not eliminating it completely. His method is to scan documents using the Notes app on his phone and then transfer them to his Mac into a filing system that makes it easy to find them. His did a live demonstration of the scanning process pointing out how the app… Read more…

Online — Jul 21st 2020

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Another polished presentation by Tony looking this time at colour. He looked in detail at the Colour Picker that appears in most apps when you're choosing a colour and in detail at the tabs along the top giving different ways of selecting one. New to several of the audience were the small pane at the bottom of the picker, visible in all tabs, where you can store frequently used colours for consistency and the palette… Read more…

Online — Jul 7th 2020

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Two weeks after the WWDC, we had our biggest audience yet, to listen to Euan's carefully prepared synopsis. Looking briefly at the changes to the upcoming iOS 14 snd Mac OS Big Sur (likely to be known as Mac OS 11 rather than 10.16). With a selection of videos, we were shown the exciting future of Macs running on Apple's own ARM chips, possibly appearing in a Mac by the end of the year… Read more…

Online — Jun 23rd 2020

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The point of Tony’s presentation was to get us all producing attractive documents, be they Pages documents or Keynote slides. We first looked at a few of the templates that Apple provides - all very well designed and a good place to start. Tony then moved on to his self designed layout and took us through the reasoning behind the size and positioning of each element. He was working on principles that Robin Williams… Read more…