Dorchester — Apr 9th 2013

John opened the April meeting with 23 members present.
It appears that we may be victims of our success in attracting new members, in that we are investigating methods of providing local displays of presentations, in addition to the main screen so that people, seated at the back have a good view of what is going on. This month's research (following March's exciting episode) was into screen sharing, which was explained by Martin, and involves an Airport base station connected to MacBook with ethernet. using VNC software. The MacBook display could then be accessed by other machines using WiFi. The technique works with the iPad also, but is more complex, and requires the purchase of special software.
The assembled company agreed that this approach appeared to achieve the required aim, thus Martin will document it, and will teach 2 or 3 people how to set it up as required for future meetings

Lionel then gave us a demonstration of how he uses the Numbers app to maintain User Group accounts (or, at any rate, the accounts of a similar sounding virtual group for which he also acts as Treasurer). This involved preparation of separate account sheets for the different meeting centres and then, essentially to merge these in various pre-programmed ways onto different types of sheet, to produce summary sheets, Budget sheets, and Income and Expenditure sheets. This had required a preliminary analysis of the different types of output that would be needed (e.g. for Committee Reports), and he is now able to produce these summaries largely automatically. Lionel had previously used Excel to achieve the same end until a few years ago, but said that he was now happy to rely upon Numbers to achieve the same task.

John concluded the meeting by telling us about GoodReader (by good.iware, cost £2.99).
It can be used on iOS devices, with pdfs to annotate them in much the same way as Preview on the Mac, and can also be used to organise them, and to share them using Dropbox. It appears to be a versatile piece of software, and has, for John, largely taken over from Evernote. However , a limitation may be that if one wants to send an annotated document to another, the recipient will not be able to read the annotations unless they also have GoodReader.

SR

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