Dorchester — Jan 8th 2019

During Q&A Annie told us about a new personal safety app, HollieGuard; “In danger? A simple shake or tap activates Hollie Guard, automatically sending your location and audio/video evidence to your designated contacts.”

Following Q&A, Michael gave a presentation on Spotlight, Apple’s system based search engine for both Mac OS and IOS that helps you find documents, contacts, apps, dictionary definitions, and much more, Michael demonstrating the Mac version. Spotlight is accessed by the magnifying glass 🔍 top right of screen or by the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Spacebar. It is only necessary to start typing in a word and Spotlight will start offering words e.g. Saf and one option will be Safari, hit the Return key and Safari will open. Spotlight will search all files for a word, will calculate e.g type 12*16 and Spotlight will immediately display in grey = 192, grey allowing you to increase the sophistication of the calculation including brackets etc. Spotlight will convert e.g.type in 5 Kg and Spotlight will offer 11.02 pounds but also list some other conversions e.g. ounces, grams etc. When you type in a word Spotlight lists possible sources of info such as Definition, Films, News, Pdf docs, Music etc. so you can be more specific (take a look at System Preferences - Spotlight). Michael listed various useful short cuts Slide 12 - see link below.

Michael then gave us some bonus tips, including how to record a phone call using a Mac, how to print a Reminders List by copy and paste into a word processing app, how to save iPhone Messages, how to search for a specific Reminder in IOS, how to capture photos and videos directly in Notes IOS, how to forward a Message/Text message from iPhone and finally various tips for photography on iPad and iPhone. Full details on Michael’s Keynote.

David gave a short introduction to Instagram showing how to post photos with as a collage or as separate pages and how the use of #tags is the key to getting interested parties to see your post .e.g. if trading. Problems with the internet connection rather limited the demonstration!

After the break David Chaplin delighted us with a very short movie trying to decide what sex is a computer! Back to more serious matters, John showed how he uses and recommends others to use Time Machine. He uses a compact rugged LaCie drive for his laptop and a separate 6Tb LaCie drive permanently connected to his iMac. He recommended always use and external drive as large or larger than the internal drive on your machine. John ran through slides showing how to set up Time Machine. Whilst Time machine will back pop automatically at specified intervals John makes habit of selecting the Time Machine icon in the menu bar and clicking ‘Back up now’ every time he opens up the device. He finished by giving a live demonstration of recovering a deleted or earlier version of a document using Time Machine

We ended the evening with Euan demonstrating another impressive update to the HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) Adjustment Layer on the latest Beta version of Serif’s Affinity Photo. Serif says it has been rewritten and that it now supports custom hue ranges, a new algorithm, new UI and picker controls.

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