January 2007

January 2007
Macintosh Users East
President : Michael Shaw
Email: wazooster@gmail.com
Vice President & Resident Mac Genius
Aaron Vegh- Email: aaron@vegh.ca
Apple Ambassador Hm: (905) 983-9205 Orono
Bruce Cameron Email: rbcameron@rogers.com
Treasurer and Grammarian: Hm: 905-404-0405
John Kettle- Email : hjke@pteron.org
Publicity Director and Jolly Good Fellow
Jim Danabie
Logistics and Morale Officer: Chris Greaves
Email: cgreaves@i-zoom.net
Secretary Email: Stan Wild
Halston.Wild@gmail.com
MaUsE DoubleClick Editor: Michael Shaw
Email: mause.doubleclick@gmail.com
Nebulous Executives at Large:
Director Marcel Dufresne
Director Guy Lafontaine
Macintosh Users East [MaUsE]
208 Winona Avenue, Oshawa, Ontario, L1G 3H5
MaUsE Message Line: 905-433-0777
www.mause.ca
Back issues can be downloaded from the <www.mause.ca>
website for a laugh.
Submissions from MaUsE Club members are always welcome. Send them to me at <mause.doubleclick@gmail.com>
if there are files or pictures attached. I have never refused a
submission yet. There is always room for another piece on
ANY Mac-related topic and Iʼll make room if there isnʼt. I
would like your submissions. But I wonʼt beg. Apple, Macintosh, and the Apple logo are trademarks of Apple Computer,
Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.
The MaUsE (Macintosh Users East) is an independent user
group and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise
approved by Apple Computer, Inc.
The next meeting
will be held at the
new Whitby Public
Library in Whitby,
Ontario, at 7:00 on
Jan. 24th, 2007
!!!!!!!!
Henry Street
New Whitby
Public
Library
Notice
The MaUsE Meeting in January will be
held on the 24th at 7:00 P.M. in Whitby,
Ontario, at the New Whitby Public Library
on the corner of Henry Street and Dundas
Street (Highway #2).
Henry Street is four streets west of the four
corners in Whitby and FREE parking is
available after 6:00 P.M. just south of the
nearby Scotia Bank.
Be there and bring a friend.
(Highway #2)
Please feel free to contact any of the following individuals if you have comments or questions relating to Macintosh Users East or Macintosh computing in general.
From the Editor
What you are looking at is the January 2007 edition of the
MaUsE DoubleClick, the monthly newsletter from the Macintosh Users East, (MaUsE), a motley collection of old and
new Mac users, harmless cranks for the most part, who reside
in Southern Ontario with their motley collection of old and
new Macintosh computers. I am the Editor so everything not
specifically attributed to someone else can be blamed on me.
If you think you can do better you are welcome to try.
King Street
Free Parking
Scotia
Bank
Center Street
Dundas Street West
2007 Executive Contact List
WingNuts 2: Raina’s Revenge
Submitted by Marcel Dufresne
WingNuts 2 from Freeverse Software puts you in the pilot’s
seat as you hop to different geographical locations and different
time periods shooting at various planes. It is a enticing shoot
‘em down arcade game. An airborne aircraft carrier is your
refueling depot and follows you from one screen location to
another. There is a massive fleet of over 100 different flying
machines—everything from vintage World War II-era aircraft
to modern jets—using robotic pilots that will try to blow you
and the carrier out of the sky. You have to lay waste to these
hordes of baddies, bomb ground installations including radar, missiles, beam
weapons, and anti-aircraft guns, and reach various objectives—like collecting
components of a nefarious machine.
Each of the 30 levels ends with the introduction of a Boss—a super-powerful
enemy that takes many, many hits to destroy. Occasionally they’ll get away,
but usually after the second or third time, you will capture them, and it’s time
to warp into a new location and face off against new bad
guys.
Your planes’ weapons aren’t your only protection against
the enemy. The sky is filled with parachuting Goodies—
sometimes just extra points you’ll collect, sometimes
rescued crew members, but most often power-ups for
your vehicle that will top off your fuel tank, boost your
shields, and even add permanent improvements, like
expanded fuel capacity, improved guns, or more powerful
bombs.
As the game starts out, you have a limited number of
vintage planes to choose from, and you can collect more
by bombing occasional temporal rifts that appear after
you’ve defeated a level’s boss. Before too long, if you’re
careful, you’ll have a nice collection of different aircraft
to choose from, and upgrading them with improved fuel
capacity and defenses will help as the skies get more and
more crowded.
Eventually, if you play carefully, you will have a whole fleet
of varying planes, each with its own strengths and weaknesses,
and each with the ability to increase its power. Most of the
planes are modeled after real military aircraft each colored
in a pleasant blue to differentiate it from the enemy aircraft.
Likewise, the enemy planes are mostly patterned after actual
aircraft, and there’s no home country here; you’ll be shooting
down American planes as well as German, Japanese, etc. If
your airplane begins to take too much abuse or is low on
fuel, you can always land on your carrier and switch to
another. This will prove helpful not only for repairs, but also
for upgrading (if you see a weapons upgrade floating about,
for example, it’s often worthwhile to land your current plane and retrieve the
upgrade with a different plane that’s in more need of the improved weapon)
and for making sure you’re attacking targets with the proper plane; obviously,
to destroy a powerful ground target, you’d want a plane with powerful
bombing abilities. Be careful, though. Although new planes are awarded to
you as you progress, if a plane is destroyed, you won’t get it back. Before I
knew what I was doing, I lost a lot of good planes.
WingNuts 2’s interface is clean and the screen is
dedicated to the action. You need to look at the radar
screen to find out where the enemy is located and also
the Goodies. A Heads Up Display (HUD) shows your
fuel and shield status, the status of the planes in your
hangar, how well the carrier is doing, your score, the
number of components you’ve recovered for that
level, and the status of your plane’s special move
capabilities. Some planes can do barrel rolls, for
example, while some can do loops; these are handy in
tight situations when there’s a particularly nasty bad
guy on your six that you want to get away from in a
hurry.
It’s also important to keep your aircraft carrier in good
shape. This presents an additional challenge, as your
missions will carry you all over the map, and yet
you’ll need to stay within quick reach of the carrier to
prevent it from being destroyed. Two things help you
out here: first, the carrier is tough, and second, it
hovers around the screen, so you can simply stay
nearby and wait for it to get to your objective. There’s no time limit, after all.
Plus, after you’ve thinned out the enemy planes, the carrier will be able to
fend off the attackers while you take care of other things.
There’s another new element for you: goals. Wingnuts 2 doesn’t just ask for
you to destroy as many enemy targets as possible (although you will certainly
have to do that in each mission), you’ll also need to retrieve certain artifacts,
rescue prisoners, etc. Again, this keeps things interesting and gives you a
reason to keep playing level after level.
Some levels are positively frustrating—you’ll have to shoot down hundreds
of planes before you get to the Boss or to the end of the level. It’s occasionally
a bit too frustrating, but fortunately, the game saves in between levels, so you
can always return when you want. (You can also save at any point you want
separately).
While the screenshots may give you the impression that WingNuts 2 is a
graphically undemanding game, nothing could be further from the truth. Just
like the original, you’ll watch as the planes you shoot down crash into the land
or sea and explode—but this time with even more pizzazz. Fortunately, you
can dial back effects on slower hardware in case the default level is too much
for your Mac to push without stuttering.
Screen effects allow for an excellent use of color and transparencies, creating
effects that not only alter your strategies (good luck finding ground targets
when you’re flying through a hurricane or clouds) but also make the game
visually exciting. The ground maps are static, but that’s for the best. With all of
the action in the air, the last thing you’d want are animated waves distracting
you from your enemies and their homing missiles. Another nice touch is that
when the action gets really intense—say, against larger bosses—the camera
pulls further back, allowing you to see more on the screen.
A female voice is on hand to offer strategies, warnings and encouragement,
and a rogues gallery of villains, full of cheesy, occasionally pun-laden, and
weird dialogue, pop up from time to time to make sure you understand just
how hopeless your mission is. The soundtrack and sound effects are great.
If I had to make a complaint, I’d say that the size of each level hurts the
playability. It takes a while to get through these, and there’s no way to save
your game in the middle of a level. You can pause at any time, but that’s not
always a viable solution, and it doesn’t help when you lose your favorite plane
at the very end of a level, forcing you to start all over again if you want to keep
your fleet intact.
WingNuts 2 runs natively on Intel and PowerPC Macs. A PowerPC G4/
800MHz or faster machine is called for, and you’ll need Tiger. If you have an
iSight or a webcam connected, you can even save a picture of yourself in the
game’s high scores tables. It’ a bit of a useless feature, as there’s no online
sharing of high scores, but it’s fun anyway. The cost of the software is $29.95
although you can download a demo for free to try it out.
Wingnuts 2 is simply a joy to play. The action is intense without being
overpowering. It’s challenging without being oppressive. It’s fun to look at,
and it’s funny to listen to. It takes a while to play through, and the included
level editor will allow for replayability...provided you’re willing and able to
create your own levels or wait for others to do the same. It rated a 4.5 out of
5 from MacWorld. Try it for free and find out what I’m writing about.
Price Beyond Belief !
Beyond Micro Mobile Disk.
You can’t be too thin, too rich, or have too many friends. You can’t
have too much RAM , too fast a processor, or too much storage. Just
before Christmas I received a flyer in my email inbox from TigerDirect.ca. Since I bought the Kodak digital DX7590 camera there they
put me on their list to receive notices of bargoons. And sometimes
they some terrific bargoons, like the one described here. Unlike a lot
of big discount websites, the TigerDirect.ca has prices in Canadian dollars, uses cheap domestic UPS shipping, and sends out their parcels duty
pre-paid. When they advertised an external 250-gig USB 2.0 external hard
drive for only $79.97 I jumped on it, and within a few days it was delivered.
You’ll soon discover that nothing’s beyond the ability of Beyond Micro
to create high performance data storage solutions at an affordable price.
Proof positive is this Beyond Micro USB 2.0 Mobile Disk. This intensely
compact, durable disk supports PIO modes 0, 3, 4 and UDMA modes 2.
It works with both PC and Mac. Features an innovative stackable, spacesaving design. And works with plug and play simplicity. The Beyond
Micro Mobile Disk complies with T13’s ATA/ATAPI-6 Draft Specification, supports Wakeup ability and boasts an external 30-watt power supply adapter. For performance beyond the extraordinary in a compact
size that’s so perfectly adapted to your digital lifestyle, that its Beyond
Micro, choose the Beyond Micro Mobile Disk. Save big dollars by selecting the Beyond Micro data storage solution.
The BeyondMicro USB 2.0 unit came with a power supply, USB 2.0 cable, and setup instructions. It also came with a CD with software on it for
Windows but there was no requirement for software when the drive is used
with a Mac. When I plugged it in I got a message
on the screen indicating that the drive was unreadable and should be initialized. In clicked on the
Initialise button and the process took less than
half a minute to complete. The 250 gig drive formats out to about 232 usable gigabytes of usable
storage and I partitioned it into two 116 gigabyte
drives, Shemp and Moe, to complete the quartet
of drive icons on my Desktop. The drive spins down
and sleeps when not actually
in use, is incredibly fast when accepting large folders of files, and gives me the
speed and storage that I could never get in a portable Mac iBook. (USB 2.0 is up
to 40 times faster than USB 1.0). The light shows green when the unit is turned on
and the red light only comes on to indicate data transfer or other activity. The drive
sits up on edge so it can radiate heat efficiently enough that it requires no fan for
cooling. I can feel it humming if I touch the case when the drive actually does spin
up but I can’t hear it at all and it does not feel hot. According to the information in
the Disk Utility the ATA hard drive inside the Beyond Micro box is a 7200 RPM
Hitachi HDT725025VLAT80 PATA-133 hard drive with 8 megs of cache. All of
that is good.
It was not my intention to buy an external hard drive right now but at prices like
these its hard to refuse. In the Spring I hope to begin publishing the MaUsE
DoubleClick using different software (!) and different hardware (!) and this USB
drive will become the repository of all of the DoubleClick files and documents
during the transition.
Adobe Photoshop
Elements 4.0
I know where this one came from. We bought
a new scanner, a Canon 8600F, from FutureShop for $250.00 and included with the CanoScan scanner software bundle was a couple
of Adobe CDs, Photoshop Elements 4.0 for
Macintosh and Windows. This was a pleasant
and unexpected surprise. I love getting good
bundled software when I buy a scanner or printer. If its something I can use
it really affects the cost of the hardware. Photoshop Elements 4.0 for Macintosh retails for $80.00 US, or $90.00 Canadian.
Installing Photoshop Elements was as simple as inserting
the CD, double-clicking on the installer, and aborting the
installation about ten minutes later when the message
came up on the screen that the Adobe Elements Help data
file was corrupted and the installation could not proceed.
Quitting the installer caused the Adobe Help application
to relaunch and report that the Help data was corrupted,
requiring a force quit of the installer, which caused the
Adobe Help application to relaunch and report that the
Help data was corrupted, requiring a force quit of the installer, which caused the Adobe Help application to relaunch and report that the Help data was corrupted, requiring a force quit of the installer, at which point I thought
: Hmmmmm.... I forced the computer to restart re-tried to
re-install Adobe Photoshop Elements and got the same
results. Then I went into the Adobe folder in the Application Support folder in the Library folder and deleted the
Adobe Photoshop Elements Help folder. After that the installation procedure went OK, but it was the longest and
slowest installation I have ever done.
Once it was all over I found there were a few other surprises, too. Version 4 builds on the same visual interface
as previous versions, so using the program was a nobrainer. Launch the program and select to open a file from
the File menu. Immediately I noticed the “Browse with Bridge...” command.
When I selected this command Photoshop Elements disappeared and Adobe
Bridge CS2 launched. I don’t have Photoshop Creative Suite so I am not familiar
with Adobe Bridge, but I’m learning to like it. Adobe Bridge CS2 is a separate
application and feels very similar to Apple’s iPhoto 6. Within Bridge you can
manage, sort, delete, and view your images on your hard drive Folders in a number of different ways. Bridge also displays file properties such as name, type, size,
dimension, resolution, creation date, modified date, bit depth, color mode, camera, and whether the flash was on or
off, to name a few. Bridge also lets
you apply a rating system, assign color labels,
and attach keywords to
individual photos or
batches for easy sorting
and searching. The Favourites tab takes you
out of your computer to
some pretty interesting
sources of images, like
the Adobe Stock Photos
library, actually 23 libraries of almost a million cataloged photographs from companies
that sell images over the internet. Be careful what you buy. The pictures are sold
individually and some of the pictures are very expensive. All prices are in American dollars. Fascinating stuff to look at, though.
Another unexpected find was the Magic Extractor tool found under the Image
menu. The new Magic Extractor is perfect for plucking objects from backgrounds. In some ways it works like an AKVIS plugin: it has its own window
with its own set of tools and on-screen instructions just like a stand-alone application. Because the Magic Extractor allows you to mark as much (or as little)
of both the area you want to retain (the foreground) and the area you want to
discard (the background), you get a more accurate selection. The Magic Extractor is easy to operate and completely amazing. Simply scribble red spots on the
area you want to keep with the red Indicate Foreground brush, and scribble blue
spots on the area you want to discard with the blue Indicate Background brush.
Adobe wisely included a Preview button allowing you to see the results before
accepting the change.
There is a lot more I could tell you about Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 for
Macintosh but the Adobe site tells it better, with feature sheets, tutorials and
testimonials. Visit the Adobe website to check it out for yourself.
The requirements are: any PowerPC Macintosh with a G3, G4, or G5 processor,
Mac OS X v.10.3 or 10.4, at least 256MB of RAM, 750MB of available harddisk space, a 1,024 x 768 16-bit (XGA) display and a CD-ROM drive.
SubRosaSoft’s FileSalvage 5.1
Founded in 2002, SubRosaSoft specialized in privacy related
and system utilities for Macintosh. SubRosaSoft’s design philosophy revolves around easy-to-use yet extremely powerful
software. Their range of thirteen Macintosh utilities includes security, file and device management, home security, forensics,
and data and device recovery. Users range from entry-level Mac
users and hobbyists to system administrators, consultants, and
forensics professionals.
We will have a look at
FileSalvage 5.1 with
thanks from the MaUsE
to Mark Hurlow of SubRosaSoft who has graciously sent us a review
copy and a second copy
for our January MaUsE
Raffle.
• FileSalvage works on faulty hardware - FileSalvage can also
recover data from mechanically unsound devices. The software
uses several tried and tested methods, which in addition SubRosaSoft has improved upon, to read the same piece of information
and to automatically skip of areas of the file system that are fully
unreadable. By employing these methods, FileSalvage is able to
recover data from sources that may have appeared to other software to be too physically broken to use.
• Preview - Allows the user to preview a range of available files
before choosing to recover them. Using the underlying architecSubRosaSoft FileSalvage 5.1 is a delightfully easy-to-use Macintosh application for ex- ture of Mac OS X, FileSalvage can read and display audio, video,
ploring and recovering deleted files from a drive or volume. FileSalvage is designed to image, text and other files. If you know exactly what type of files
restore files that have: been accidentally deleted, files that have be- you wish to undelete you can find just what you are looking for.
come unreadable due to media faults, and files that have been stored
on a drive before it was re-initialized or formatted. Use FileSalvage
to recover your lost files, iTunes libraries, iPhoto collections, and to
rescue data that has been lost. . The easy-to-use interface is designed
with any level of OS X user in mind and is highly accessible to all,
with the potential completion of the whole recovery process in just a
few clicks.
When you launch FileSalvage you are shown a window with three panels, shown here at
right. You can choose to Undelete files, Salvage files, or explore the drive using the Expert
panel. The program is very straightforward. The program detects all of your drives and you
can select the suspect one you wish to work on. For just this type of thing I have a USB Zip
drive attached to my iBook. Since the Zip biscuits are quite small, just 100 Megs, I have no
trouble copying the contents of the entire suspect biscuit to a folder on my 60-gig internal
hard drive if necessary. It is imperative to have at least one accessible drive larger than the
suspect when running a data recovery utility like this because FileSalvage will never write
to the disk or device being salvaged from. This makes the software “risk-free”, as it does
not attempt to repair a disk or alter its contents. Instead FileSalvage simply reads it and
copies the relevant files to a destination of the user’s choice.
• Recovers files from corrupt media – Data corruption does not stop FileSalvage from
working. In fact it will happily process an entire corrupted file system for intact data and
recover whole or partial files wherever it finds them.
• Recover images - FileSalvage can analyze and recover files
from most third party tool disk images such as standard ISO,
EnCase® (unencrypted images only), UNIX dd, Drive GeniusTM, and SubRosaSoft CopyCatXTM.
The most common usage of a utility like SubRosaSoft’s FileSalvage will probably be undeleting files immediately after
you delete them. I’m sure we have all experienced that sick
sinking feeling of looking for an important file or folder that
was right there on the Desktop a few minutes ago but which is
nowhere to be found. The event usually occurs right after you
empty the Trash.
When you choose to Undelete with FileSalvage 5.1 you will be
shown the window at right and asked to click on the green Undelete check mark to confirm your intentions. The program
will ignore the information in the drive directory and search
the drive itself for documents of the file types you have selected.
The sooner you use a data recovery program the better it will
work for you. FileSalvage cannot recover deleted files that
have been overwritten by new data on the recovery location.
Having said this, due to the way in which data is distributed
across file systems when being copied, there is often a decent
chance that recently deleted files will not yet have been overwritten, though there are no guarantees. As you have seen from
my demonstration last year of Prosoft Picture Rescue and
Prosoft Data Rescue II, files can often be recovered from a
drive in amazing numbers even if the drive has been copied to
on multiple occasions and files deleted in large numbers. Deleting documents by putting them into the Trash and emptying
the Trash does not actually erase the documents: it only changes the drive directory information to indicate that the data at
that location is no longer needed and the sectors it occupied are
available to be written to as new data is saved.
FileSalvage doesn’t, and won’t ever, allow the user to write
data to the same volume as the data that is being recovered
from. This flies in the face of the whole notion of recovery,
when the recovering files may well
overwrite data that is in line to be recovered. To operate most efficiently, it
is necessary that the user recover files
to an external device or secondary drive
in the computer.
To test out this program I took afresh
100 Meg blank Zip disk and loaded it
up with eight 11.5-megabyte folders
with 30 pictures in each, for a total of
240 pictures and just over 90 Megabytes of data. Then I deleted the pictures by dragging the files to the trash
and emptying the trash. Then I opened
Disk Utility and selected the Zip disk
and erased it.
Then I launched FileSalvage and selected to undelete the pictures. FileSalvage churned through the disk for a few minutes and
by time it was finished it had found and listed every
folder and picture that had been on the disk before I
deleted the files and erased the disk. At the click of a
button it created a folder on the desktop and put all
240 pictures in it. It was just that easy. This software
is so powerful and simple to use that its almost scary.
Just click on the green check marks to tell the pro-
gram what types of files to scan for and it does the
rest, showing a progress bar as it processes the disk
and adds up the files that finds. Using the green
check marks instead of a Preference panel is a simpler way to start the program digging out everything,
or just the movies, pictures documents or sound
files.
In Expert mode it opened a big set of three windows,
one window where it listed the different types of
files it could find, another where it listed all of the
files that could be theoretically salvaged, and a third
window where it showed a preview of each picture
as I clicked on it so I could pick and choose which
files to commit to saving.
SubRosaSoft.com is a software development firm
based in Union City, California. Founded in 2002,
SubRosaSoft specialized in privacy-related and system utilities. SubRosaSoft’s design philosophy revolves around easy-to-use yet extremely powerful
software. Their software range includes security, file
and device management, home security, forensics,
and data and device recovery. Their users range from
entry-level Mac users and hobbyists to system administrators, consultants, and forensics professionals. One of the most prolific Macintosh software developers, SubRosaSoft also licenses solutions to
other US software and hardware companies. Visit <
http://www.subrosasoft.com > to check out their
other products.
FileSalvage is device and file system independent,
which means that the user can recover files from a
normal Mac OS hard drive, USB key, PC disk, Linux
disk, FAT32 disk, FLASH card, scratched CD, Digital Cameras, iPods, and almost any other media or
file system that can be recognized in Mac OS X.
Mellel II
I found this program
purely by accident
while getting something else from VersionTracker. Sort of
like the Prince of Serendip, if you know
what I mean. The description of it reminded me of MarinerWrite, a program I used briefly a
few years ago but only because it was advertised and
offered up as an alternative to Microsoft Word, the
word processing part of Microsoft Orifice, a program
that I have heard about but have never actually used. I
never got to use MarinerWrite for very long because I
got Quark XPress 3 and some version of Quark became
my full-time, do everything word processor for me
right up until I got Adobe InDesign CS.
Anyway, to make a good story better, I stumbled upon
Mellel II and found that this program really is fantastic.
The promotional material claims; “Mellel is an advanced word processor for Mac OS X designed especially for scholars, creative and technical writers, and anyone seeking a feature-rich and reliable word processor.” Does this sound like too much for
every day use? Does this sound like overkill for Mac users who grew up on
ClarisWorks / AppleWorks or who use TextEdit or TextWrangler to create documents ?
Mellel II is a word processing program to grow into. It offers unbelievable value
for professional writers. As a scholar, educator or student, there are several features and qualities you value more than others in a word processor. If you’re
writing a novel, a long paper, a technical document or a guide you probably require your word processor to be stable, reliable, flexible, easy to work with, and
of course to have the features you need. With the first two, your choice is clear.
Mellel is the most stable and reliable word processor on the market today, for
either Mac OS X or any other platform. Mellel is also very flexible and easy to
work with. If you’re accustomed to working with MS Word or one of its clones,
you may find Mellel a bit difficult to figure at first. Mellel improved on MS
Word and co. and by that also changed the way some things are done. The
adjustment period will be short, we can assure you. It doesn’t take long to
adjust to a better method of working. Mellel offers many of the feature which
make long document writing both possible and easy. In fact, this is exactly
where Mellel excels.
You may not find it easy to get excited about word processing any more than
you can envision other people getting excited about spread sheets, but for
people who must organise a lot of data and present it clearly, and write for a
living, working with a program like Mellel II can make all the difference.
The right tools can make any job a pleasure. If using Mellel II means that
you don’t have to use a less stable and inferior product from another company the its worth the time you take to get comfortable with it. Nothing is
worse than having a large document lost when your text program crashes.
If you think you might be
interested in trying out
Mellel II you can download a demonstration copy
from the www.redlex.
com website and try it out
for a month. It will take
that long to find a lot of the features this program
has. Here is a partial list of the features Mellel II
boasts:
• Tables
• Bulleted and numbered lists
• Find and Replace
• Hyphenation
• Columns
• MS Word import and export
• RTF import and export
• Plain Text import and export
• Insert special characters
• Live document statistics (word count)
• Image placing and resizing
• Document setup and info
• Document navigation
• Text selection and navigation
• OS X services support
• Spelling
• Zoom in and out
• Smart Quotes supporting multiple languages
• Smart drag and drop
• Paragraph styles
• Character styles
• Page styles
• Rulers, margins and indents
• Headers and footers (unlimited number in each
document)
• Style variations (sub-styles)
• Replace Paragraph and Character Styles option
• Tabs and tab leads
• Copy special for character and
paragraph styles
• Export and import to RTF
• Export and import to .doc
• Full Unicode support
• Chinese, Japanese and Korean
input support
• Full Arabic and Persian support
• Full Hebrew support
• Full Greek and Coptic support
• Full support for Cyrillic languages
• Full Syriac support
• Special setup for writing in multiple languages
• Export using 21 different language encodings
(text)
• Import using 21 different language encodings
(text)
• Ancient language support (Thaana, Etruscan,
etc.)
The http://www.redlers.com/ website has testimonials from Mellel users, a list of books created with Mellel, downloadable documents (including a 232-page Mellel tutorial and a
333-page mellel II users guide), and, of course,
Mellel II for you to try out.
Special thanks to Ori Redler at
RedleX for donating a copy of
Mellel II for our January 24th
MaUsE Raffle.
IMPORTANT
NOTICE
The agenda of this month’s
MaUsE Meeting at the Whitby
Library will begin one half hour
earlier than usual
usual,, at 7:00 P.M.
on January 24th, 2007 instead of
at 7:30 P.M. We will have a full
agenda, including scathingly
brilliant presentations, another
huge MaUsE raffle, and lots
more !
Desktop Transporter 2
Desktop Transporter 2.0 requires Mac OS X
10.3.9 later and a fast LAN connection is
strongly recommended. It is immediately
available as a free download and it must be
purchased after the evaluation period of four
weeks is over. Desktop Transporter sells for
USD $29.95. Students and educators discounts are available.
Desktop Transporter is simple to use, especially if the two Macs are on the same local
ethernet network, but it also works over an
internet connection. It comes with a clean
user interface and is easy to install. The menu
extra gives you full access at any time right
from the menu bar. You don’t have to fuss
around with server and clients, port numbers,
etc. Bonjour does it all for you. Desktop
Transporter works with non-US keyboards.
It comes with non-lossy and fast compression and uses hardware acceleration and finally, it’s cheaper that the other advanced
solutions like Apple Remote. One license allows you to use it on up to two Macs.
Desktop Transporter 2 from DEVONtechnologies is a
program designed to work on more than one computer at
the same time. (You remember DEVONtech because they
generously donated several copies of DEVONagent and
several copies of DEVONthink Professional for our October and November MaUsE Raffles. Aaron reviewed them
in the DoubleClick.) Desktop Transporter 2 allows you to
control one Mac from the Desktop of another. Sounds peculiar and you may wonder why anyone would want to do To check out how easy this program is to use
I installed it on my iBook and on Irma’s G4
such a thing.
tower. Thats my iBook desktop (below) with
With this program you can connect to any Mac that shares the new 2007 GTS Vespa on it. Very pretty,
its screen, and control it from your desktop. Desktop isn’t it? I launched the program on both comTransporter shows the screen of the remote Mac either in puters and found that all I had to was set apa window or in full screen and allows the user to interact pearance prefs (colour depth) and I could acwith the other computer as if it were the local one.
You can switch between all Mac screens attached and
use copy/paste to transfer text and graphics between
the local and the remote machines. Bonjour support
makes it easy to discover shared machines on your
LAN, and password protection keeps your data away
from unauthorized eyes. You can share your Macs on
your local area network or over the Internet
cess my iBook Desktop from Irma’s computer
either in a window on her Desktop or at full screen
(above). The iBook Desktop appears greyscale because I set it that way in the Prefs.
There is a 60-page manual with the program and it
works just like its supposed to. I could open windows, launch programs, and work on documents on
both computers and copy/paste between open documents and applications as if I were running a second computer in my computer. I guess with Desktop Transporter 2 we do it because we can.
AKVIS Noise Buster 3.0
Those nice people at AKVIS have graciously sent us more of
their software for our MaUsE raffle. This time its the latest
version of their NoiseBuster plugin. This plugin is designed
to remove unwanted noise, or pixel artefacts, from your digital photos.
Digital Noise is anything visible in the captured image that was not present in the scene you originally
photographed. Noise can consist of random flecks of color that serve to degrade the smooth or transitional
color of an image. While digital noise can appear in many forms, it can be predominantly seen as grains
that compromise the smoothness of the photo. It is especially annoying on the skin as it makes it appear
uneven. This kind of noise is called luminance noise. There is chroma (color) noise, which is perceived as
random red and blue pixels spoiling the color accuracy of the image. Digital noise can be produced by a
number of factors: heating of the camera sensor, long exposure shooting, small
pixel size, high ISO settings, radiant light reflections, etc.
Like the rest of the AKVIS software, Noise Buster goes into the Plugins folder
of your photo-enhancing program and it is accessible from the Filters menu. I
installed my copy in Photoshop Elements 4.0. To test the ease of use and real
benefit of this, I’ll select a photo and zoom in on it. Although I don’t have any
really grainy pictures, I do have quite a few pictures of faces, and Noise Buster
is just the thing to smooth out the irregularities and wrinkles. There are some
nice tutorial shots on the AKVIS website that show how effective the new
Noise Buster is at smoothing out images but none are as effective as the ones
that show close up views of faces. In this example, I’ll open up a sharp high-res
picture of Marcel in Elements and use the Automatic Filtering button in the
Noise Buster filter to play with it. Noise Buster launches in its own window. By
zooming in on a small detail of the image, I can see that the image has been
smoothed out and by bopping back and forth between the Before and After
copies I can really how the texture and irregularities have been smoothed.
Again the MaUsE members wish to express our thanks to Kat Kharina and
the team at AKVIS who have been so generous in the past and continue to
provide us with Photoshop plugins for our MaUsE Raffle prizes. Sketch 2.0
and Noise Buster 3.0 will be featured in this month’s MaUsE raffle.
AKVIS Coloriage 4
In response to users
requests, AKVIS has
added the possibility
I demonstrated Coloriage 2.0 last year at
to change not only the
one of our meetings but this is a new imcolor of the object,
proved version of the plug-in and worthy
but its brightness as
of a second look. The newest version ofwell. By default the
fers yet more flexibility in manipulation of
program works as becolors on your photo. Now it is possible to
fore, but now you can
change not only the color of the object but
its brightness as well; it allows colorizing B&W activate the “Preview Brightness” Mode and see
photos in the colors you wish regardless of the how the chosen colors will look on the colorized
photo and change their brightness if you wish.
original brightness of the photo.
The list of the tool’s uses is practically endless.
Home users can apply it to colorize old B&W photos. Professional designers can use AKVIS Coloriage to try different
color schemes for interior and exterior design.
Anime and manga enthusiasts can apply it to
add color to hand sketch
drawings and comics.
You can use Coloriage
to recolor clothes on
your color photo or
change the color of the
hair, eyes, etc on a portrait. Selective desaturation and selective colorization of a color photo is made easy. Examples are
available at the AKVIS website.
Using Coloriage is still very easy: you take the
Pencil tool, select a color and draw a rough outline
within the area to be colorized; the program recognizes the borders and paints in the new color keeping the tone transitions. No layers manipulation, no
manual painting!
Operating as a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Corel Photo-Paint, Paint Shop
pro, Bodypaint, etc AKVIS Coloriage requires no
complicated techniques or special knowledge to
achieve beautiful results. Its easy to use and works
just like your other AKVIS filters.
AKVIS LLC offers a 10-day fully-functional trial
of AKVIS Coloriage. Registration costs USD
$97.00 for a home license and USD $246.00 for a
business license. To get more information about
Coloriage, go to: http://akvis.com/en/coloriage/index.php on the internet.
AKVIS is one of the sponsors of our January
2007 MaUsE Raffle. They have donated copies
of all four of the Photoshop plug-ins mentioned
in this issue.
AKVIS Decorator 1.1
The Decorator plug-in allows you to change the surface of an object in a realistic manner. You select a part of an image – like our Stan’s shirt, a car, a
piece of furniture, etc, and apply new textures to it. Stan can have his shirt
painted in new patterns, dotted or chequered, appear as if made of velvet or
satin, or even of wood or candies. There is a great variety of built-in patterns
to apply - from fabrics to stones and metal, from food to nature elements.
Unlike the “bucket-fill” feature in many photo editors, the plug-in follows
the underlying features of the object, the texture that already exists, and
makes the new color or texture look natural.
Applying a snake scale to a car’s surface can be fun, but of more practical use is to apply AKVIS Decorator for design purposes. With this
software you can quickly choose a suitable design for your apartment
by playing with different colors and patterns for furniture, walls, curtains, decorations, etc. It’s useful for designers to show the customers
the same room in different versions or for web-designers to represent
the same items in an online shop (china-ware, blankets, clothes, piece
of furniture, etc) in different colors/patterns.
By AKVIS tradition, the program has a simple interface, easy grasped
even for newbies. In the plug-in’s window you select a texture for the
object (you can adjust its color and frequency of the pattern), press the
Run button and get a wonderful result. If needed, you can adjust the
brightness and the angle of lighting.
The program applies a texture preserving the volume of an object, following its
folds and creases. The new pattern looks absolutely natural and makes you see
things differently. There are libraries with hundreds of textures and materials
with samples of each so you can change the design and colour of clothes, walls,
cars, and anything else you can isolate using the lasso tool in Photoshop.
AKVIS Decorator is another present to the MaUsE
club. It will be featured at
our January Raffle.
AKVIS Sketch 2
Here’s another updated plugin from
AKVIS. These plugins work with
all of the versions of Photoshop and
Photoshop Elements and GraphicConverter X. The AKVIS website
has some glorious examples of what can be done with this new version of Sketch in the Tutorial files on their website, including making animations out of movies, but lets see what we can do with our
Jim.
AKVIS Sketch is a plugin for conversion of photos into pencil sketches and
watercolor drawings. Change your photos into pictures with realistic color and
black & white drawings that imitate the technique of graphite and color pencil,
charcoal and watercolor. You can process the image with the default settings
and then touch up the drawing adding color or trying different techniques. It’s
a wonderful tool for those who have always wanted to draw but didn’t know
how. With Sketch you have two control pallets to play with: Effects and Strokes.
Effects controls the colour saturation of the final result and the extent to which
it will appear the product of charcoal sketching or water colour painting. Strokes
controls the length and angle of brush strokes and pencil lines.
It all sounds very simple but a quick visit to the AKVIS website will show you
that an impressive array of complex effects and subtle alterations can be
achieved quickly and easily by following the steps laid out with the many examples AKVIS provides. For example, below is a set of three pictures excerpted from one of the tutorials. If you want to be able to do this without lifting a
paint brush or mixing a single colour, visit the AKVIS website and download
and buy Sketch (only $72.00 US). Or you could come to the January 24th
MaUsE Meeting and grab a copy of Sketch in the MaUsE Raffle.
iWatermark 3.0.9
It has gotten cheaper to publish every year for the
past thousand years, and will continue to get cheaper to publish. Whether this is a curse or a blessing
is a matter of opinion. When it was necessary to kill
a sheep to get a few sheets of parchment to write on
and books had to be copied by hand by monks and
clerks every ninety years or so, there was a lot less
considered worthy of preserving. Movable type
and paper changed all that and immeasurably lowered the cost of publishing. Then it became possible
to preserve in print trash that never would have survived hand-copying. Eventually, printing, paper,
and publishing became so cheap that even the most
purile, insipid, worthless, pornographic, and just
plain bad writing could make it to print. Then came
the internet and the downward quality spiral accelerated wildly in direct ratio to the volume of output.
Whats worse, through the magic of copy/paste it
has become very easy to swipe entire pages of this
bad writing and propagate them everywhere.
iWatermark is an essential tool for anyone with a
digital camera, professionals and beginners or
graphic artist. iWatermark helps you protect and
secure your photos by watermarking artwork, digital photos and other images that you can
then put on the web or send via email. iWatermark can also create thumbnails.
iWatermark provides a simple and efficient
way to watermarking and creating thumbnails for images. It can process all the common image file formats. Also for the watermark you can use simple text or TIFF
or PNG (Portable Network Graphic) images with masks for that professional feel
and other supported images. No matter
what you choose to use as the watermark,
you have control over the
translucency of the watermark. To create thumbnails
all you need to do is to choose
the width and height and iWatermark will scale the image
When it comes to photography, it seems that any proportionally to fit within
picture worth viewing is worth stealing. If you those boundaries.
make any part of your living with a camera you
might want to consider getting a copy of iWater- To use the program open the
mark before publishing any of your photos to the iWatermark main window and select the
internet. iWatermark is the worlds most popular image (or folder full of images) that you
watermarking application for Mac and Windows. want to mark and tell the program where to
With iWatermark you can Copyright all your im- put them when they are done, like a speages in just minutes. iWatermark includes new ef- cific folder or onto the Desktop. Then open
fects like aqua and emboss. It is integrated to work the Editor window and chose the font,
with Photoshop, ACDSee, iPhoto, Cumulus, Port- transparency, location and general appearfolio, PhotoStation, iView and other photo organiz- ance of the watermark. Click Start Proers. You can select your pictures by the folder or cessing and the deed is done. Lots of feaindividually, and customise your watermark to ap- tures can be set and saved as examples to
pear in any size, in any font you have, in several create suitable watermarks for all types of
styles, and anywhere on the image. You have com- photos.
plete control over how intrusive it is.
Our thanks to Hannah Miller at Script Software
for sending us a copy of iWatermark to be used
as a prize in this month’s MaUsE Raffle.
2006 Executive Dinner
Although there are no planned MaUsE meetings in
December the MaUsE Executive did get together
on the evening of December 6th. As has been the
tradition, the members of the MaUsE Executive
and their spouses, where applicable, got together
one last time for a social evening. This took place
at Jack Astors Restaurant in Whitby. The event was
attended by the usual suspects. A good time was
has by all. Unfortunately most pictures from the
event were out of focus and unusable.
I was recently delighted to see that the Daystar Technology website has been updated with a
selection of wonderful selection of G4 processor upgrades. I have used Daystar computers and
processor upgrades for years without any problems. Check them out. The MaUsE DoubleClick
is probably the only newsletter on the planet that still uses Daystar computers. Great graphics
on the website and incredibly fast faster processors for your iMac, PowerBook, and G3 / G4
desktop Macintosh computers. If you are finding that your favourite Mac is bogging down a bit
under the demands of Panther or Tiger, consider upgrading your processor. Its a lot cheaper
than buying a new computer and you will get a few more years out of the machine and setup
you are already comfortable with. All these Daystar things do is make your Mac run faster.
FileXaminer
This issue of the DoubleClick
has everything in it but the
kitchen sink. A few of the
software requests I made before Christmas have come
through and the result is a
bunch of really cute little
utilities. Some of the cutest come from Gideon
Software.
When you do a get info from the Finder you get the
familiar OSX info box: thee really isn’t much to it.
When you use FileXaminer to do a get info on the
same application you get much more useful information and more control over it.
FileXaminer is an award winning “Get Info” application. FileXaminer allows you to modify file
and folder attributes that the Finder cannot, such as
type/creator info, UNIX permissions, and much
more. FileXaminer is powerful and easy to use –
making it the best “Get Info” application for Mac
OS X.
FileXaminer’s feature list includes:
• Works with Path Finder
• FileXaminer Hot Keys can be used with Path
Finder
• FileXaminer can be used as a Get Info helper
• Mac OS X Label Support
• Image Buddy - Easily resize/convert graphic
files.
• Edit text file as root - Easily edit files as the root
user - useful for configuration files.
• Authenticate as an Administrator to perform all
actions
• Create and delete system Groups (without using
NetInfo manager)
• Change UNIX permissions
• Delete files as administrator using FileXaminer
Super Delete
• Custom icon editing
• External icon editor support
• Change owner and group
• Unique privilege presets make easy work of locking down your files and folders; no UNIX experience necessary
• Change creation and modification dates
• Change Macintosh type and creator codes
• Lock and unlock files
• Set user ID, set group ID bits on files
• Set the sticky bit on folders
• Work on multiple files at the same time using
batch mode
• Change type/creator
• Permissions
• User and group
• Lock and unlock files
• Modify custom icons
• Change creation and modification dates
• Type and creator favorites
• Recursive owner, group, and permission settings
• Services support
• External hex editor support
• Dock Menu support
• Force empty trash
• Copy paths of Finder selection to clipboard
• Batch Get Info on Finder selection
• Get Info on Finder selection
• Finder Hot Key Support
• Copy paths of selected files to clipboard (Command-Option-C)
• Get Info on selection (Command-Option-I)
• Batch Get Info on selection (Command-OptionB)
• Unmatched Contextual Menu Support. FileXaminer adds the following commands to your Finder
contextual menus :
We are indebted to David Clark of Gideon Softworks, Inc. who has graciously donated a copy
of FileXaminer and a copy of Gideon Softworks
Software Bundle to be used as raffle prizes at
this month’s MaUsE Meeting on January 24th.
• Open in FileXaminer ( Perform Get Info on Finder Selection )
• Open in Batch FileXaminer ( Perform Batch Get
Info on Finder Selection )
• Super Delete (delete any file or folder as Administrator)
• Copy Path (copy path(s) of Finder selection to
clipboard)
PDFProtect 2.1
Everywhere you look on the internet or newspapers you will find references to a growing
concern with piracy and plagiarism. Many artists are finding their music, photos, movies and
written works freely distributed on the internet
and websites like YouTube are coming under
increasing scrutiny. For those of us with the
ability to create documents like this DoubleClick
there is a new program that helps us take and
keep control of what can be done with our .PDF
creations.
Portable Document Format (PDF) is an open
file format created and controlled by Adobe
Systems, for representing two-dimensional
documents in a device independent and resolution independent fixed-layout document format.
Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a 2D document (and, with the advent of
Acrobat 3D, embedded 3D documents) that includes the text, fonts, images, and 2D vector
graphics that compose the document.
PDFProtect 2.1 is a specialized software application that can change, add or remove security
level standards in the PDF documents. This is
a stand-alone application, which means that
Adobe Acrobat (or any other product) is not required. To change current document encryption
settings, simply select the PDF file or folder
with PDF files using the Source button, set new
protection options and push the “Start” button.
That’s all there is to it. The encryption level and
security settings are changed automatically. Once I
set protection on my .PDF using this program I can
make it so that it will refuse to open unless the password is known. Neither Acrobat nor Preview will
open it. And if I select to create restrictions as well
I can choose to make the document so that no one
who opens it can make changes to it, select and
copy text or graphics from it, or print it.
PDFProtect 2.1 features 40 and 128 bit encryption,
and recursive search for PDF documents. The program does not require any special knowledge or
training. It comes with a user-friendly interface
and clear instructions. PDFProtect is a stand-alone,
fully automatic software application that can
change, add, or remove security level standards in
the PDF documents. To change current document
encryption settings, simply select the PDF file or
folder with PDF files, set new protection options
and push the “Start” button. That’s all. The encryption level and security settings are changed automatically. This information is recorded in the “Get
Info” window for the document.
The following permissions can be set for crypted
PDF document:
• Permit low resolution printing
• Permit the PDF document to be modified
• Permit content to be copied
• Enable adding or modifying annotations
• Enable form filling
• Support screen reader devices for the visually impaired
• Permit assembling
• Permit high quality printing
PDFProtect is a part of Sybrex’s PDF modification
line of software products that also includes, PDFInfo and PDFFastWeb. Sybrex Systems has been
developing award-winning PDF creation, modification and developer’s library tools for over five
years. The company is a member of Adobe PDF
Ring and has been featured frequently in the industry media, including PDFZone.
Our thanks go out to Vadim M. Shakun at Sybrex Systems who has generously donated a
copy of PDFProtect 2.1 for our January MaUsE
Raffle. To find out more go to: < www.sybrex.
com > on the internet. Lots of interesting stuff
there.
Stuffit Deluxe 11
We have all been using Stuffit Expander for so long that we probably
don’t remember downloading our
first copies off the bulletin boards or
getting it on a 400k floppy at a computer show back in the late 1980s or
early 1990s. Stuffit Deluxe was the
preferred program for creating the
compressed archives and documents that Stuffit Expander opened.
Back then when computers came with 5, 10, or insanely huge 20 meg hard drives, file compression
was a necessary fact of life. Now that hard drive are
huge and storage has gotten cheap, and archiving to
CDs and DVDs has replaced floppy disks, there are
more and other compelling reasons to need file
compression software.
Thanks to Nisha Kapoor,
Public Relations Manager
at Smith Micro Software,
Inc., we have been given a
couple of copies of StuffIt
Deluxe 11 to be used as the
grand prizes in out January
and February 2007 MaUsE
Raffles.
compression product has been able to do
– reduce the size of JPEG photos and
images up to 30% with absolutely no
loss in image quality. This provides significant bandwidth savings for professionals, busi- Other features of Stuffit Deluxe 11 include:
nesses, hobbyists or anyone looking to share im- • Automatic Backups for Specific Files - Schedule
ages over the Internet or on the network.
a backup time for any folder, image, or document
on any network or local drive! Choose to have only
StuffIt Deluxe 11 comes with a Archive Manager recently changed files backed up!
application that makes it easier to search your hard
drive for archive documents. It can display all the
StuffIt, Zip, TAR, and RAR archives on your Mac.
Whether you’re looking for archives that you’ve
downloaded from the Web, received via email, copied from CDs and DVDs, or created yourself, Archive Manager makes it easier than ever to find
your archived photos and files. And you can preview thumbnails of the archived JPEG images
within your compressed archives without having to
decompress the data. Thats new in StuffIt 11.
StuffIt Deluxe 11 is now Universal Binary and
takes full advantage of multiple PPC processors
and Intel cores. StuffIt’s “Better” compression algorithm compress up to 20% faster with the same
compression results. It provides a suite of tools that
help you access, compress, manage, protect, send,
and backup all your important files and images.
The part of StuffIt that does the actual compression
has evolved and improved until it is now possible
to shrink some types of documents up to 98% of
their original size. One important new feature of
StuffIt Deluxe 11 that will make it an indispensable
tool for photographers is that StuffIt Deluxe can
now compress JPEG photos and images by up to Like earlier versions, StuffIt Deluxe 11 comes with
30%. With its revolutionary new image compres- StuffIt SEA Maker allows users to create self-exsion technology, StuffIt archives what no other tracting archives that open automatically on Mac
OS 10.3 and 10.4. Users can specify the directory
to which files in the archive will be expanded, and
can also choose to generate and display a splash
screen and text dialog during installation.
• Strong Encryption - Users now have to enter a password to view the contents of
an encrypted StuffIt X archive, but unlike previous “whole archive encryption”
implementations, once a password has been entered, the contents of encrypted
StuffIt X archives can be changed.
• Integrated CD & DVD Burning - StuffIt tells you where the archive is being created and puts the ability to burn CDs, DVDs, or any removable media of your
choice at your fingertips!
• Segment Files Across Disks - StuffIt will automatically split your archives across
multiple disks.
• Protect Your Secrets - Super-strong 512-bit encryption and password protection
ensures your data’s privacy. Now a password is required to browse the contents of
an archive.
• Automate FTP & Email - Point and click your way to instant automation. Eliminate routine tasks and simplify your life.
• Safe & Secure - StuffIt self-repairs archived data, keeping it safe from transmission and media errors.
StuffIt + Spotlight lets you search archives for compressed files even when the archives they’re stored in are located on CDs, DVDs, networks, external hard drives
or other “offline” locations. You can take advantage of Apple’s latest search and
scripting tools to search for individual files inside StuffIt, Zip, TAR, and RAR archives with Spotlight. As you can see in these pictures below I have done a search
for “Greaves” and Spotlight has found that there is a file (a JPEG, actually) with
that name compressed inside a ZIP archive and another inside a SITX archive. The rest of the compressed images and documents are also named.
Stuffit Deluxe 11 and Spotlight together is a wonderful tool for digging out
pictures that you have compressed and can’t remember which archive they
are in. Using the Extract tool it is possible to remove the Greaves picture
from either of the compressed folders and expand it on the Desktop or to
any other location without affecting the other documents in the archive.
Other programs may be able to decompress files but nothing else has the
full range of useful utilities that StuffIt Deluxe 11 has. Its the ultimate file
and archive tool and every serious Mac user should have a copy.
November Raffle was a HUGE Success
In all there was over $500.00 worth of software up for grabs in the last MaUsE raffle.
These were not “door prizes.” MaUsE policy is that MaUsE Raffle tickets are only
handed out to the paid-up members who physically attend the meeting. Our meetings
are open to the public but the MaUsE Raffle is a “Members Only” event and constitutes just one of the many privileges of belonging to the most excellent Macintosh
Users Group, possibly the best of all possible Mac User Groups. Also, we went back
to the way we used to do MaUsE raffles. I briefly described the items being raffled
and then each ticket drawn won the ticket holder his choice from among all prizes in
order of drawing. The first ticket drawn has first pick and all subsequent tickets have
a shot at the remaining prizes until all prizes have been taken. I hope that this method
increases the chances that people will win software they will actually use.
There was no MaUsE Meeting at the Whitby Library in December so there was no
December raffle, but January is here and Santa Claus was very good to the MaUsE
Club. Our January 2007 MaUsE raffle will include almost all of the software mentioned in this issue. Make sure you see Chris or Penny for your raffle ticket and then
get ready to be a big winner.
Agenda for January 24th MaUsE Meeting
Aaron Vegh will perform his usual duties as Master of Ceremonies
• 7.00 p.m. Welcome – Michael Shaw
• 7.10 p.m. Treasurer’s report – John Kettle
• 7.15 p.m. Web Site Delights - Marcel Dufresne
• 7.25 p.m. Apple News - Aaron Vegh
• 7.35 p.m. ‘Macs for Kids’ - Brian Elston (Tentative, Aaron to confirm)
• 7.45 p.m. Software presentation plus raffle overview- Michael Shaw
Featured software: Alsoft DiskWarrior & Micromat DiskStudio DVD
• 8.15 p.m. Coffee Break
• 8.30 p.m. Feature presentation – Aaron Vegh
Feature Presentation: Trouble shooting your Mac & installing/deleting programs
• 9.15 p.m. Raffle
Here’s a few more photos from the MaUsE Executive dinner at Jack
Astors restaurant in
Whitby in December
2006. I passed my Kodak
DX7590 digital camera
around the table and everyone took shots with it
but I suspect that most
people did not wait for
the green light indicating that the auto-focus
had kicked in when they
took the pictures. As a
result most of the pictures were out of focus
and blurred totally beyond use and lost to posterity forever. This event
is not paid for by MaUsE
funds.
LoJack® for Laptops
Thanks to Tara Lucas at Computrace
for providing a copy of LoJack for
Laptops for the DoubleClick to review and to be used as a raffle prize at
our MaUsE Raffle in November.
For those of us who were present at the November
2006 MaUsE meeting and participated in the raffle
there was one prize offered that was of particular
interest to the iBook - carrying crowd: Computrace
LoJack for Laptops. I described how the software
works and one lucky MaUsEr won a copy of the
program and a one-year subscription to the ser- Computrace. They can remotely activate the software in your computer. When your stolen computer
vice.
contacts the Computrace Monitoring Center, it is
Computrace® LoJack® for Laptops is a theft pro- placed on high-alert and starts calling in every 15
tection service that tracks, locates and recovers sto- minutes, allowing a Computrace Recovery Team to
len laptop and desktop computers. Invisible soft- closely track your computer’s location. The Recovware installed on your computer works behind the ery Team provides law enforcement with tracking
scenes to silently and securely contact the Compu- information and documentation essential for proTrace Monitoring Center, and if stolen, reports its curing search warrants and leading them to the lolocation using any Internet connection. The Com- cation of your computer. The police recover your
puTrace Recovery Team then tracks your comput- computer and return it to you!
er’s location and partners with local law enforceThe Computrace Recovery Team is staffed by forment to get your computer back.
mer police officers and seasoned security profesLosing your computer is costly, even potentially sionals, and works directly with local law enforcement and Internet Service
devastating when you consider the
Providers to obtain subpoenas
priceless photos, files and personal
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er three out of four stolen computers
because they know how law enthat have LoJack installed on them.
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When you use their product you
have at least some assurance that
If your computer is not recovered
you might get your computer back
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within a very short period of time,
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possibly even before your files are
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over-written if deleted..
If your computer is ever stolen you
file a police report and then notify
Notice to
Double Click Readers
Who Are NOT
MaUsE Members
If you are living in or near the Durham Region
of Southern Ontario and using a Macintosh
computer and are not yet a member of MaUsE
you can use the information found on the second
page of this newsletter to get meeting info and
to get in touch with a member of our executive
to find out how to join.
If you just want to attend a few of our monthly
meetings please feel free to join us at the new
central Whitby Library at 7:00 P.M. on the fourth
Wednesday of the month. Meetings are open to
the public and admission is free but eligibility
for winning valuable MaUsE Raffle prizes at
our monthly MaUsE Meetings and receiving
technical assistance are available only to paidup MaUsE club members.
Other privileges of membership are listed on our
www.mause.ca website and include the right to
borrow from the extensive MaUsE Club Library
and to submit articles for publication in this excellent newsletter.
Michael Shaw
MaUsE President
Editor, MaUsE DoubleClick
FREE* Software
For MaUsE Members Only
Have you noticed that the software reviewed in the DoubleClick invariably shows up as raffle prizes at our monthly MaUsE meetings? Software programs are expensive. Where do they come from?
Most of them come from my replies to press releases sent to me by software companies or from requests that I make directly to the software
companies on behalf of the MaUsE DoubleClick that they send me two
free copies of whatever tickles my fancy: one copy for me to review and
one for the MaUsE raffle. So of course I ask for stuff that interests me. I
know what tickles my fancy but not what tickles yours.
If you would like to have me ask for something for you to review in the
DoubleClick, let me know. The catch is that you MUST review the program in order to get a free copy for yourself. See the software reviews
in this and other recent issues. If you think you could produce software
review composed of a page or two of text and pictures in exchange for
a free copy of the program you review then you are ready to contribute
to the DoubleClick.
Of course there is no guarantee that you will get what you ask for. Some
companies are very obliging but others either don’t answer my request
at all or they answer to say that they don’t send out review materials.
But, if they do send it, and you do write about it, its yours to keep.
All answers can be found in this issue of the MaUsE Doubleclick. The
SOL ROBOTS Crossword Forge software that Marcel Dufresne used
to create this crossword puzzle will be awarded at the January 2007
MaUsE Meeting to the first person who completes the puzzle correctly
and sends the solution to: < mause.doubleclick@gmail.com >. If there
are no correct submissions the Crossword Forge will be added to the
already impressive list of January 2007 MaUsE raffle prizes.
Like the other privileges of membership, the access to software titles to
review is only available to paid-up MaUsErs, but you only have to win
one MaUsE Raffle item or get one program to review to re-coup your
year’s $45.00 membership fee.
Email: < mause.doubleclick@gmail.com > for details.
*Some conditions apply.