Fareham — Mar 26th 2011

Seven people attended the meeting including a new Mac user seeking information on migrating from the dark side - welcome.

Prior to the usual business, we announced that the April 30th meeting will be held at Portchester Community School, White Hart Lane, Portchester, where we will be shown round and see in use the school's two Mac suites of computers.
Portchester School


Back to the March meeting - Derek described how he rationalised the data distribution across the 5 spindles on his Mac Pro and how he substituted one drive for a Solid State Drive (SSD). He was able to show a couple of videos showing the boot time from a hard drive and from the SSD.
The improvement in process times were quite significant:

Boot time went from 122 seconds to 36 seconds, Aperture start time went from 14 to 7 seconds and the time for Aperture to pass an image to Photoshop (including Photoshop initialisation) went from 42 to 9 seconds.


Derek then demoed some of the unsung features in Preview - yes, the app you use to view PDF files. He showed how it could show you the picture location (if the camera collected GPS data). How it could transform RAW files to other formats as well as supporting a limited degree of editing eg levels, exposure etc.
Add comments and annotations and bookmarks to PDF files.
Preview is the 'Swiss Army knife' application on the Mac.

A general question session followed including puzzling over the strange Finder window that was on one the machines - it was TotalFinder and also the rather exotic screen saver that transformed images.

Test URL

Portchester School

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