Dorchester — Jun 8th 2010

In the absence of John, Mark opened the meeting, and announced that the Colliton Club had, at last, decided that we can be allowed access to the Club's Guest wi-fi network. Those members, out of the 19 present, who had brought their computers, promptly availed themselves of this facility, which was pronounced a great success, helping presentations to demonstrate the way in which the internet interacts with the kit being presented.

This was true, in particular with the iPad, two of which had been brought to the meeting. Mark had borrowed one from a friend, and gave his first reactions to this exciting new device. Disconcertingly, there is no desktop. Documents have to be accessed via the App which created them, and transferring documents to a computer has to be done by email. It was possible to ling the iPad to a projector (or ancillary display) which, however, could not be used to mirror the iPad display, but could display, for example, keynote presentations prepared or stored on the iPad. It appeared that the iPad was an undoubted success , at lest for Apple, who are selling them at the rate of one every three seconds. David Martin gave another view. He had purchased one for use with ebooks, and also to interface with his high-end Canon camera set-up, but had not got particularly far with either as he was still familiarising himself with the device. A question arose as to the cost of accessing the internet, other than by using wi-fi. For the UK, Tom has found that the costs using Orange are:

Bundle UK usage allowance Cost Additional UK usage (per MB)

iPad daily 200MB (until midnight) £2 5p

iPad weekly 1GB for 7 days £7.50 5p

iPad Monthly 15 3GB (see note below) £15 5p

iPad Monthly 25 10GB (see note below) £25 5p

Note for monthly bundles - on UK network and unlimited browsing at WiFi hotspots (monthly recurring)
Costs for internet browsing overseas are not known, but are likely to be very expensive.

Our second presentation was by Lionel, who demonstrated the Essentials for Elements package of plug-ins for use with the Adobe Elements graphics programme. At £45, this is a powerful set of filters at a price which represents excellent value for money. The filters included are:
- Enlarge it, which provides pixel interpolation by using a fractal algorithm capable of considerable magnification without noticeable loss of quality
- Cut it out - used for Masking - works by selecting colours to be preserved or rejected. This is considerably more rapid than the use of edge selection methods
- make it better - gives improvement options from which to select, based on the Intellihance Pro filter.
- frame it - range of image frames which can be combined
A more recent version of the software includes a fifth filter, but even so, Lionel recommended Essentials for Elements as offering Photoshop quality at a much reduced cost.

SR

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