Dorchester — Sep 11th 2012
Jim spoke about the `Moneydance money management programme. This had started as an open source programme, but, although now commercial, was maintained and updated for a number of platforms, by a responsive and helpful team. He had initially used Quicken, then Microsoft Money, and now Moneydance, since 2004.
The programme can be used with online banking, or can import statements which the user downloads. It can reconcile such statements with day to day entries which the user makes, and works with iOS apps to facilitate the latter. The programme shows details of different accounts, plots graphs, converts currencies, and Jim has used it to manage accounts simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic!
David then told us about Reminders for To Do lists. This facility had been rationalised in Mountain Lion so that it worked similarly to that in iOS devices, and, of course, continued to be able to be set up on iCloud to synch with therm. Calendars and Reminders are now entirely separate on the Mac. Reminders in iCloud can be arranged in different user defined categories,
In Mountain Lion, the Notification Centre can be set to show reminders in different ways.
One feature of Reminders is that they can be set to trigger an alert at a specified time or location, e.g. when an iPhone is taken out of the house, or finds itself near a particular address.
Mick continued with the Mountain Lion theme by telling us about the changes which had been introduced.
• All Apple Apps now want to save docs on iCloud by default, unless the user selects an alternative.
• The new iMessage can be used to send messages to ios5 devices
• Notifications appear top right of screen and may hide e.g. hard disc icon
• There is a speech to text facility, Dictation, as for Dragon Dictate on mobile devices. On mac, works the same way over the internet, but asks to send contacts to Apple servers.
• There are enhancements for connecting to Facebook and Twitter, but Mick has not used these!
Overall, compared to Lion, he is in favour, byut regards the new OS as an incremental improvement, as opposed to the step change of Lion over Leopard. Broadly, he:-
Likes
• Safari search bar, which accepts URL or Google search
• iCal, where the monthly mini-calendars have reappeared
• 'Save As' returned to the File menu
Doesn't like
• Mail, where there appears to be a 'reply from' problem if you have more than one email address
On a more general note, he discussed the importance of turning off Java (not Javascript) in Preferences for Safari, or for Firefox, in Tools / Add-ons. This is because new versions of Java (now provided by Oracle) have security weaknesses, and, if not used, are best disabled. Most users will not be affected if Java is disabled in this way.
SR
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