A good turn out for our first meeting of the year and two new members - Nick & Susanna, welcome. As requested, many people made an extra effort to bring along their Macs so we had a good selection of machines to play with and explain just how you do the things that had some of us baffled. We couldn't persuade DVD Player to let us pause a DVD and take a screen shot though, so if…
Read more…
Even better attendance than last time - it must have been the attraction of the mince pies that did it! This month there were two presentations. One by Michael showing some of the (useful) free applications that can be found on the internet. A dozen were featured, but had to be shown briefly, with a quick description of what they do. Anyone interested can have a list of the relevant URLs for downloading. The applications were…
Read more…
This months meeting took a different approach, we concentrated on finding out what we all wanted from the meetings in the new year, producing a list of what we wanted to cover. In between the coffee and doughnuts we had a very interesting discussion covering the items below and even managed to solve a few technical problems members had as well.
Topics for 2009:
Adobe Indesign / DTP Alternatives
Adobe Photoshop / Elements…
Read more…
Michael gave us his excellent presentation describing how he abandoned all his professional photo gear but recorded a day at Wembley with two grandsons using nothing but a compact camera and of course his Mac when he got home. Stills, a short movie and sound were all combined in iMovie to capture the atmosphere of the day and burned to DVD for distribution to the family.
There were of course the usual questions…
Read more…
At the last meeting before Christmas, John introduced his light hearted look at the Credit Crunch, a very topical Keynote presentation which he had devised to counter the prevailing pre Christmas spending spree anticipatory gloom, and which was received very well by the assembled company. The Chancellor could, in retrospect, have benefited by using John's approach to lighten the tone of his Pre Budget Statement a week later.
He followed this with a…
Read more…
Resurgam!
A very good evening at Solutions, the first for many months. Many thanks to Joe and Keith who journeyed down from Oxford to give an excellent presentation on building a web site simply and quickly using Freeway Express, a web-site building app which is easy to learn and use because it acts like a page layout program. It is more accomplished than iWeb, which is also easy to use, because it…
Read more…
Another good meeting at Lytchett with a reasonable attendance. We had two presentations, the first from Lionel showing us the version of Photoshop that's web based and free to use. Of course, as Lionel pointed out, Adobe would still like to sell copies of both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements so the web version is not as sophisticated and it's tools are probably on a par with the latest version of iPhoto but if you're running…
Read more…
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…
Read more…
John chaired the Dorchester meeting on October 21st, at which the 15 members present were offered two presentations.
The first, by Mick, described how it is possible for a very reasonable annual fee, to obtain a personalised e-mail address which you can keep for life, and which still can be used irrespective of how many times you change your internet provider (ISP). Companies such as Easily Ltd or Fasthosts deal with Nominet, who…
Read more…
The attendance at last night’s meeting was, to put it politely, dire. In view of the low turn out for the last few meetings, possibly explained in some part by the upsets for the April & May meetings, which did not take place, I have decided that unless the November meeting shows a marked increase, it will be the last Bournemouth meeting. It is not fair to expect our hosts, Solutions, to continue to…
Read more…