Opening Moments
Mike welcomed everybody to the meeting and then took a moment to reveal another layer of his psyche. Something to do with restaurant sandwiches. But nothing to do with possums - we think.
Member Dock
Our opportunity to raise funds is still going with your old printer cartridges and cell phones. Your personalized t-shirt from Matt is still available, too. New arrival at the dock: O'Reilly just sent us their two latest Missing Manuals - available now for checking out. See Charles to check out from the resource library.
Core Presentation
Mariel Hunkeler from Epson USA was our special guest for our Core Presentation.
Mariel and her husband Helmut are both with Epson. You can find them talking up the latest Epson jazz at a couple of our area retailers. Mariel's at CompUSA, Helmut's at Best Buy.
Some of the newest features:
The 700 printer - with 6 color photo-dye ink. CD's, slides, transparencies - this guy does it all printwise:
- Create professional looking CDs/DVDs
- Take advantage of convenient, user friendly features
- Restore the color to faded slides, negatives and photos (PC-free, or in our case, mac-free)
- Save time with quick print speeds
- Get beautiful reprints from high quality scans
- View, select, crop and enhance photos (PC-free)
- Enjoy remarkable photo quality made to last
- Copy all your everyday documents - no PC required
Beyond the hardware your printer media is important, too. That's your paper and ink. Epson feels they have superior products here as well. Their DuraBrite ink, for example, will survive underwater. That ink's just not gonna run! They've got great photo paper as well (see personal testimony form Tim down below.) And, always a full "tank" of ink when you pull that new printer out of the box.
Helmut reports that the "All-in-one's" have color-restoration feature/software that works great. A couple of samples were available for us.
Next month Epson will introduce a new scanner that will scan and REPAIR old cracked photos!! Wow! Can't wait to see that!
Epson reps want to hear what we think and what we need in a printer - Epson is listening to what they're reporting from the field.
Personal Testimony from Tim: when his family had to choose a printer for family photo's, they chose the 340. Tim's family also felt their color accuracy was superior on Epson paper (Disney uses Epson paper even when they're not using Epson printers.)
Tim also challenged the reps to encourage Epson to improve their gray-scale technology. On the 2200, it's good, but it could be better. (This is part of that hear-what-we-think thing they mentioned.)
A note on the Epson paper: CompUSA and Best Buy can order Epson paper, but they don't stock the full line.
In The Box Presentation
Here's a look at some of the applications and utilities that are already installed on every mac. They're "in the box" and ready to be used!
Grab
What is Grab? It's a screen capturing utility that "grabs" a portion of your screen (or all of it) and lets you save it as an image file. Why would you want to do that? You might want to capture a screenshot to: use in a newsletter, include on a website, send to tech support, or share with a friend. Grab launches from the Utilities folder found in the Applications folder. Grab does its thing in four different modes: Selection, Entire Window, Entire Screen, or Timed Screen. Timed screen gives you ten seconds to open up any menus you want to be part of the screen capture. One drawback to Grab is it saves files in the tiff format. That doesn't generate a good file size for the web or email attachments. Double-click on the tiff file to open it up in Preview so you can Save As... another file format. By the way, if you're going to have to open Preview to convert the file format, then take advantage of Preview's direct link to Grab - you can find it under the File menu.
Print Utility
Tim told us about the print utility, which, by the way, you can park in the dock. The setup utility lets you add printers and so forth, but did you know that most printers come with their own utility for managing that specifuc printer? Just click on the utility icon. That icon is a direct hook into your printer's utility program which allows you to do things like check ink levels, clean your print heads, and, when you're changing ink cartridges - then you need to do a printhead alignment. This printhead alignment is a wonderful thing - you should do this. Your printer will take you out to dinner. Man, this is great info! If only I had a way to remember to do all this...
Stickies
Stickies is a delightful leftover app from OS9. They're just like sticky notes on your computer screen. You can launch Stickies from your Applications folder. When Matt's working he will have so many things going on - it's hard to keep it all straight. Let's say you jotted down a freiend's number on a sticky note. If you're like Matt, that helpful reminder can get buried under a pile of windows. Hear that cry for help? That's your Sticky note! Fortunately, you can make it a floating note so it "floats" to the surface. Need to see more of your desktop? Make your sticky note translucent (it won't mind). Stickies are drag and drop like everything else - continued coolness! Matt was on the internet, found some code he neeeded - why write that down? Select what you want, go to the services menu, choose stickies, and boom! It's like having multiple clipboards that don't get overwritten.
File Permissions
Here's Charles - he wants to talk about one of his favorite things to show folks when they are starting out with a Mac. And it's pretty important to the care and feeding of your Mac. So, here's something you can do as preventative maintenance for your file system. Go to Applications - Utilities, and start Disk Utility. Disk Utility, what a good friend! What does it do? Start Disk Utility, you'll see the volume and the hard drive. Click on either one. The pane on the right side defaults to the First Aid tab. We just want to focus on the two buttons, Verify Disk Permissions and Repair Disk Permissions. The Repair button does the Verify part, and many times Apple has told Charles to just go ahead and run Repair Disk Permissions (why go through the Verify dance?). Your CPU and hard drive will affect the speed that this runs. What's going on here when you click this button? This is making sure that the file permissions are correctly set on all your files that were installed by the Mac OSX installer. This gets 99% of the files on your computer. This is fantastic maintenance for your computer's file system.
When should you do this? anytime you're about to install software. Also, NOW, if you've never done it before. When else? Before and after software updates. It will save you a lot of grief. Whew, we didn't know. Thanks, Charles. Now if only there was a way to shedule this to run automatically...
Automator
Ever wish you could reduce your busywork on the computer? Maybe, let's say, automate a chore that you just learned about at the GreerMUG meeting, like repairing file permisisons? Maybe you even want to schedule something to run on a regular basis?
Apple has always tried to meet this need with Applescript, which is an English-like scripting language. But Applescript still has a bit of a learning curve. Apple has now come a long way toward meeting its automation goal with Automator! Mike decided to give us a quick introduction to it. Automator launches from the Applications folder. Mike started Automator and explained what the different parts of its window are for. Fortunately, we don't have to replicate his mental fog-inducing explanations here in the show notes. Apple has a tutorial on its website that cuts through the fog. You can learn more about Automator at http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/automator/.
Any process or sequence of steps that you want to automate is called a workflow. And some workflows are hard to figure out, even after you study the tutorial. Fortunately, many folks have already done the difficult work of figuring them out for us. For example, during the show Mike created a simple five step workflow for sending screenshots as email attachments. But you don't have to re-create it to do the same thing, you can download one from Apple's website called Screenshot Sender 1.0. It's essentially the same thing as what we created at the meeting. These saved workflows are called Automator Actions. You can also search for downloadable Actions at http://www.automatorworld.com/.
Here's a couple of Actions we found for Charles and the rest of us so we can automate the Repair File Permissions task. One is called Maintenance 3.4 from Automator World. If you don't think maintenance is important, be aware that 10,000 folks have downloaded this one! Besides File Permissions, it runs several other maintenance scripts that Apple recommends. Another one we found is Update Washer which you can download from Apple's website. In the meeting we saved Update Washer as a Finder Plug-in and that made it available through the Control-Click pop-up menu. We did Save As Plug-in a second time and saved it as an iCal plug-in. That opened up iCal for us and scheduled it as an Event Alarm (which, of course, you can have repeated on a regular basis.)
Smart Folders
Because of Mike's apparent aversion for self-aware computers eventually taking over the world, he went a little long with all that Automator stuff and caused us to run out of time. So we didn't get to learn about SMART Folders from Tim. (SORRY, SkyNet!)
Give-away
This month we gave away a combo dinner from Market Square Deli located on Wade Hampton Blvd. in Greenville across from RBC/Liberty Life. They're Wi-Fi happening so you can surf while you eat.
Next Month
Our meeting next month will be TUESDAY night (a switch from Monday), May 23rd at 7PM at the Greer Public Library.
Our guest speaker will be Brad from Wolf Camera. He'll give us "Professional Photograghy Tips for the Non-Professional Shooter."
