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GreerMUG October 2007 Meeting Highlights

Pregame Show
Once again we treated ourselves to Matt Nadeja's Think Tank. Very funny.


Opening Moments
Mike opened with a commercial from our friends at the Greenville Public Library System. We also acknowledged that now that iPlace has changed locations, we'll be in search of a new home. Dick Palmer said iPlace has certainly enjoyed its relationship with GreerMUG and wants to continue that so they are looking for a new meeting place for us as well. Thanks, iPlace!

MemberDock
Matt asked the group for help with finding a new home for GreerMUG. There are many places out there but they are very cost prohibitive. Thanks for your help! You can send ideas to Matt.

Matt also reminded us that one of our great MUG benefits is the ability to get a free book from Peachpit Press in exchange for writing a review for the book.

Also, our Members Only site is available at greermug.com. You can link to the members only section from the GreerMUG home page. Scroll down a little and click on the Members Only button.

Matt's Shareware Report
This month Matt showed us Monolingual
What is it? It's a free app that can remove all the foreign language files from your computer and free up tons of space on your hard drive.

Here's Monolingual's web address so you can download it:
http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/

Matt HIGHLY recommends backing up your system before doing this.

Matt also told us about AutoRate. How cool is this program? Here's a fun app that will rate your iTunes music for you based on how often you listen to your songs. Autorate stars the songs for you. Lots of options. Really fun, really cool.

You can find Autorate on the web at
http://www.tzisoftware.com/products/autorate

Once again, Show Notes has craftily acquired Matt's Keynote presentation which you can seen here.


Core Presentation
This month we are going to hear from our SIG (Special Interest Group) leaders. Just like a factoid is a little piece of fact, we're calling these sections SIGmoids, because they're just like a little piece of one of our SIG meetings.

First up, Mary Ellen who leads our Mac Basics SIG:

SIGmoid #1 Mac Basics
Mary Ellen told us about two programs that tend to be ignored on the Mac. One of them is TextEdit. Let's say you want to write a complaint letter. Okay, but at a company's website you get this little teeny tiny text box to write in. But with TextEdit, you can compose a longer letter and then copy and paste your ENTIRE complaint into the textbox on the website!. Show Notes says, hey, no more holding back! Well, as long as you're in TextEdit, besides spell checking, what else can you do? Wouldn't it be nice to have a different set of eyes proofing our letter for us? What if you had TextEdit READ your letter to you? OUT LOUD! WOW! You'd be surprised at how many mistakes you catch when you have your writing read back to you. You set this up in System Preferences. Choose Speech and then in the Speech dialog box choose the Text To Speech panel. All your setup options are here. Mary Ellen likes the Vicky voice. She says it was a mistake to show this trick to her students at school. Show Notes can imagine.

Mary Ellen does an example for us. That's great.
Thanks, Mary Ellen!
(By the way, our next Beginner's SIG starts in January!)

SIGmoid #2 PhotoSIG
Our second SIGmoid comes from Alex who is the leader of our Digital Photo SIG.

Alex started off by asking how many of us are visual people? Many of us raise our hands. Alex shows us how we can change our icon size in Finder. This is a fantastic way to preview photo images and see them as thumbnails in Finder.

While you're there, select several photo files, then Control-Click and choose Slideshow. Wow! Instant slideshow! It's like, you don't even have to be in iPhoto! An onscreen slideshow control lets you browse your photos quickly without having to import them all into iPhoto. Nifty, nifty.

Thanks, Alex!


Questions and Answers
Is there a way to alphabetize the bookmarks?
We think that you can do that in Safari 3, but not in earlier Safari versions. This power may be available in other browsers.

The group followed with some great discussion. Show Notes is sorry if you didn't get to be there.


Giveaway
Our giveaway tonight is a Greenville City Coupon Book. Our winner tonight is Bill McAdams!! Let the savings begin!


SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT!
Check out Tim's blog at TimothyGodby.com. A cool Mac blog - it 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!

Also, check out Matt Chandler's site NewMacUser.com !

Preview
Because of Thanksgiving, our next meeting will be the second Tuesday of November. That's November the 13th. Watch your emails and greermug.com for our meeting location. We didn't announce an actual topic for our Core Presentation, but Show Notes speculates that with the release of Leopard, we'll probably have something to talk about.