January 9, 2007

Recap - General Meeting, January 9, 2007, 6:30 - 8:45 pm

MD Apple meeting, Tuesday, January 9, 2007
By Arno Drucker

Today was the day that Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at MacWorld in San Francisco. Much of our attention at this meeting was therefore focused on this event.

The evening was unusual in a few other ways. Larry and Mical Carton could not attend because of a conflict with another meeting and Harris Silverstone is in Japan on a sabbatical from Johns Hopkins University. Fortunately Steve Fox capably filled in by bringing his laptop and projector, helping set up the room and Chris Yavelow and Gerry Wiseman both provided the small group of loyal members and one guest with interesting demos of two different programs.

Chris showed us YEP – a free program in Version 1.1.2 (they will charge for Version 1.2), that organizes all of the PDF documents on your hard drive. As is stated on their web-site: “Every computer has loads of PDF files, probably scattered all over your hard disk. Use Yep to search, view and manage all these documents in one convenient place. Think of Yep as iPhoto for your documents.”

YEP is easy to download with an understandable and effective opening tutorial. It will quickly find all of the PDF documents in a file or folder (I was surprised that it found 71 in my Documents folder). YEP then imports them, assigning tags in the process. Tags appear larger or smaller in relation to their frequency of use. I was surprised to find an issue of “Seeds & Stems (our newsletter),” from 2002 - and was easily able to read the entire newsletter. I could open it externally, print it or email right from the desktop. The Help file “allows you to organize and search and tag your PDFs”. The Help file shows how to scan documents, import documents and store them on a .Mac account. The way YEP magnifies documents by just passing the mouse pointer over them, makes them instantly readable. Unfortunately certain menu items don’t work (e.g. Find, Spelling) in this version but may in a future version.

The program is easy to use – similar in its interface with iPhoto, as Ironic Software claims. The company, based in Toronto, Canada (http://www.ironicsoftware.com), may create other products later but for now, go to their website or http://yepthat.com for this fine program. Thanks, Chris, for bringing it to us.

“Business Card Composer” was presented by Gerry Wiseman. Version 4.1 costs from $34.95 (download edition) to $39.95 + $9 (S&H) for a shipped CD. Belight Software has several other products available from their website: http://www.belightsoft.com/buy/buy.php as well as at Apple stores, Amazon and others. There is a “Sample Tour” on the web site for Business Card Composer – seven pages showing some of the 600+ professionally designed cards. Gerry demonstrated the tremendous flexibility that the program has in creating the myriad of designs, sizes, etc. of cards and designs. A full range of graphics, fonts, colors, logos etc. are enough to set up your own business in producing business cards. There is lots of other information on Belight’s website, including a brief history of “visiting cards” – would you like to see Louis XIV? Or read about “Calling Card Etiquette in the 18th-19th centuries”?
Perhaps you’d like to invest in Belight’s “Printfolio.” For $84.95 you can get Business Card Composer, Swift Publisher, Disc Cover and Mail Factory plus image editing program — Image Tricks (all of their programs). Macworld is quoted : “What makes Business Card Composer so great is how easy it is to use.". Indeed, Gerry demonstrated this. Again, a thank you to Gerry for showing us this terrific program that does its job superbly.

The rest of the meeting was devoted to watching the “iPhone Introduction” from the Apple website: http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/j47d52oo/event. Steve Jobs said he was looking forward to this event for two and a half years. There is little doubt that the iPhone will be, as he proclaims, as important as the iPod or even the first Macintosh. It certainly created a tremendous stir, with a feature article in TIME magazine, as well as a lot of buzz on numerous TV programs. The only problems for some are the price ($499) and for others, the wait until it is available (projected delivery in June).

If you missed this meeting you missed some interesting software as well as the opportunity to have your questions answered and to participate in our organization whose purpose is to help each other and learn more about the Macintosh computer. Come to the next meeting.

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