Past Meetings
08 - 21 - 2003
The third meeting of the MacOS_Users_Group in Hammondsport, New York, was attended by seven people (Tom B, Karl K, Jack H, Larry T, Gene T, Jim T and Frances T).
After introductions and discussions of favorite applications, some interesting points were made about local stores that carry Mac computers and software (CompUSA and Computer Renaissance- both in Rochester opposite Southtown Plaza). CompUSA has a very nice display of latest Macs and software plus knowledgeable assistants. Computer Renaissance has lots of used Macs, monitors and accessories.
Tom explained and demonstrated some basic maintenance procedures to keep your Mac running smoothly, including Rebuilding Desktop, Zapping PRAM and Defragmenting.
Next, demonstrations were given showing how to customize the desktop with your own photos, how to reformat floppy disks from PC to Mac, and how to compress files using DropStuff. Tom compressed a folder full of Free Tools (1.5MB) to a self-extracting file of 750k.
Finally, a demo on using Adobe Photoshop to retouch a photo flaw. In this case it was the digital removal of a yellow fire hydrant in a picture of St. James' Church. The result was an aesthetically-pleasing picture of the church, though some consternation might result for neighborhood dogs.
A repeat demo of using the Clip2Gif freeware to convert Pict files (from Command-Shift-4) into small JPEGS was more successful than the previous meeting. (The memory allocated to the Clip2Gif application was doubled and all worked smoothly this time.)
Karl brought some very tiny (but interesting) free applications to share- PICTshow, Retriever and VectorPlasma. Unfortunately Tom forgot to share them with the group, but will do so next time.
Next meeting will be September 18. Let your friends know about it. We still have a few seats left (as they say in church). Feel free to share the website link:
www(dot)hportmug(dot)com
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