GreerMUG May 2007 Meeting Highlights

Pre-game Show
15 reasons to own a Mac and the latest Mac commercials! What a great pre-game show!

Opening Moments
Mike opened with rather unusual pet news. Something about dogs and cats, Show Notes is a bit furry on the details.

MemberDock
SIG Input - our MemberDock is soliciting input on what other kind of Special Interest Groups our membership is interested in.
Beginner SIG - Mary Ellen will be teaching our Beginner's SIG. There are four sessions to our Beginner's SIG. Once you've been to all four, you're "graduated."

Core Presentation
Tonight's Core Presentation is by Tim Godby. Glad to hear Tim's voice is doing so much better!
Our presentation is some digital scrapbooking software called iRemember. Tim did some research, and believe it or not, scrapbooking is a pretty popular passtime here in America. Professional scrapbooking companies charge a pretty penny for their services. But you can do it yourself - digitally!

Installation - This software wants you to be in icon view in Finder in order to install. It does take a loooonnggg time to install. Don't give up. Much clip art, young grasshopper, take very long time to install.

iRemember greeted Tim with a question mark - almost as if the program was saying "I don't know" and Tim is like "neither do I". Tim highly recommends going through iRemember's tutorial/helpfile. If you do things their way it makes life a whole lot better.

Tim says start with a template. Templates are cleverly hidden in the program. iR Clip Art is a parallel program you need running in the iR universe. Many of iRemember's components live here. It's like two programs in one. What a symbiotic application!

Folks can print their own scrapbook or send them off. Tonight we're pretending that we're printing our own. There are a gazillion templates to choose from. Tim chooses his Snow Bird template and drags it over to the main window. This is a great way to begin.

What's the next thing you'd do? Choose a photo!!! That's right! But where's that media browser??????? There's is none yet in iRemember. Great sadness. iRemember has special features resulting from its parallel universe construction that annoy the hound out of Tim. Show Notes can't capture Tim's emotion accurately. MUG Meetings - you gotta be here!

Tim runs through some introductory steps of building a Scrapbook. "Woe to the iR programmers", cries Tim!! Good thing they're not here in person. Seriously, Tim got to talk with one of the programmer's while preparing for tonight's presentation and got to share some valuable user input!

Tip within the Core: Tim's font window has a preview pane - it's opened from a button that you can click on, too - Show Preview/Hide Preview.

Starting a new page? don't hope for intuitive navigation here! Fortunately,Tim has unlocked iR's mysteries and proceeds to show us.

Intuitive dragging can drive you insane. Learn the iR way. Locking can be your friend in the iR universe. And, making a placeholder container for items before you drag them in can make your life a whole lot easier.

Watching Tim interact with iR really is worth the price of admission. We feel your pain, Tim, we really do.

Tim replaces the border with chiseled corners. This simple action provides several minutes of entertainment for the entire group as we follow along with Tim.

Now Tim shows how to add Text.

Now let's do a new page so we can see how to add a pattern to the background. (It's under Special.) Tim shows us a great example of how this software is even something Dads wouldn't mind using to create memories of their kid's special life moments.

Once you're finished, how do you get your finished product into a real scrapbook? Fortunately, iR has a selection of empty scrapbooks with clear sleeves so you can print your digital scrapbook and not have to send it off.

You can find iRemember from MacScrapbook on the web at http://www.macscrapbook.com/index.php.

Chronos also has a scrapbooking application called iScrapbook. You can try it for 30 days - it might be more intuitive.
You can find its webpage at http://www.chronosnet.com/Products/iscrapbook.html.


Questions and Answers
Q: Cost? A: $39.95.
MUG members get 20% off.

Q: Can I expand Finder to read long filenames without using the mouse?
A: No, not really. We'll check. (We're talking super long filenames and we want to read the ends of the filenames and not the beginning of all the filenames.)

Quicksilver is recommended by Tim. The url is http://www.blacktree.com/.


Give-away
Tonight's give-away is a copy of the iRemember Digital Scrapbooking software demo'd in tonight's Core Presentation.
Congratulations to Kevin Buttram, our winner this month!


SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT!
Check out Tim's blog at TimothyGodby.com. A cool Mac blog - its coolness begs for your interaction. Tim has done a great job pulling together lots of news and stories of interest to the Mac community. Check out the latest today!


Preview
Next month we'll introduce our brand new PhotoSIG. The introductory PhotoSIG meeting will take the place of our regular June meeting which will be Tuesday, June 19th.