Bournemouth — Nov 15th 2011

The meeting at Solutions was quite well attended - a dozen people came to hear the three presentations.

The first was from Mick Burrell. In his usual clear and easily understandable stye Mick explained different routes to creating a web site and then of putting it onto the internet. As for creating, for a basic, simple site, iWeb is perfectly adequate. For a more ambitious production programs such as Freeway and RapidWeaver allow a site to be created in much the same manner as a page layout, saving the maker the trouble of writing the elements of the site in HTML. And of course the real aficionado would only contemplate the last using HTML and doing all the coding themselves.

Getting the site on the web can be done through an ordinary ISP. These companies usually provide some web space sufficient for a private site. They do not, for the most part, permit commercial or business sites.

If what is required is basically a photo gallery to allow friends and family to share your pictures then a web site is not the best way forward. Gallery sites such as Picasa and Flickr provide this service and make it very easy to upload pictures as they are produced saving the bother of having to add to or alter the layout of a site.

The second presentation was from a croaky Chris from Solutions who, despite his incipient cold, was able to tell us something about iCloud. Apparently it is not what many people thought - i.e. a storage base for all one’s documents, photos and music. Music is certainly catered for, but the basic idea behind iCloud is to provide an automatic synching service between different machines - i.e. Macs, iPads & iPhones. He showed us how easy it is to set up and aspects of its manner of working. Another clear and interesting presentation.

After the break and a short problem solving/Q & A session Michael showed sections of a video describing how to set up Dragon Dictate, to allow the user to speak to their Mac and have the words come up as text in a document in an application of the user’s choice, with the result then able to be edited as any other document. Unfortunately it was not possible to provide the live demo as the application demanded the serial numbers – on the CD back in Bridport! However, as with the demonstration at Dorchester, the abilities shown in the video for handling email and web browsing were a real hit with the audience It was not possible to go into any depth about the newest version, Dragon Express, announced the Friday previous, but it is just a penny short of £50 as an introductory offer, compared with the £179 for the full version. These prices are subject to a 15% discount for WAMUG members. Speak to Michael for full details.

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