Bournemouth — Jun 18th 2019

Staying with our back to basics theme in June in Bournemouth, Michael Corgan gave a talk about Spotlight, one of the basic services provided primarily by macOS, but also available on iOS. Michael also spoke about Preview and still found time to offer some general hints and tips.

Spotlight
This can be accessed with Cmd-Space on MacOS or stroking down on the home screen on IOS.

Michael gave a very comprehensive overview of the many features Spotlight can provide. For example:
* searches can be made of the hard disk (including emails) and the web
* calculations
* unit and currency conversions
* dictionary definitions
* translations between languages
* even weather forecasts and restaurant suggestions

Preview
Clearly there is more to preview meets the eye! Michael explained that not only is it an image and PDF viewer, but also it has the ability to:
* edit images
* edit /markup PDFs
* scan documents
* provide a slideshow
* create contact sheets of images
* import from various sources (HDD, camera, scanner)

A few key points are captured below:
The version of preview is linked to the version of Mac OS. Therefore it is not possible to use the latest version of preview on an older version of MacOS.

Preview can easily be set as the default app for a document by opening the ‘Get Info’ window and selecting ‘Open with Preview’.

One can scan multiple images in one scan—a great timesaver. Preview will detect the separate images, or can be guided by using the ‘overview’ facility.

Preview has powerful editing facilities. For example, images may be adjusted much like in a photo app (crop, rotate, hue etc) and items can be annotated and overwritten allowing forms to be completed without printing out and re-scanning.

PDFs can be signed by selecting ‘create signature’ and either writing on the trackpad (unlikely to provide great results in my experience) or by taking a photo of your signature and importing it.

Hints and Tips
Michael also explained some miscellaneous useful techniques, such as how to:
* record an important telephone call using the iPhone on loudspeaker as the source and a Mac running QuickTime as the recorder.
* print reminder lists (by opening Reminders, copying and pasting to a word processing app).
* save Messages in iOS as images in order to distribute them (take a screenshot and then share image)
* save a photo or video in Notes (by opening notes, clicking the ‘+’ button and selecting a photo or video from the pop-up menu)
* use ‘Quick look’ to quickly inspect files (by selecting the file in the Finder and pressing the spacebar)

Qs and As
In the question and answer session Tony explained that the up-and-coming Version of Mac OS ‘Catalina’ will not support 32-bit apps. In order to check for 32-bit apps on your machine, he recommended an app called ’32-bitCheck’ (https://eclecticlight.co/32-bitcheck-archichect/).

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