:: TCMUG Newsletter Archive ::

Vol 4 Iss 6 June 2005
*June Meeting
*Web Site Links and News of Interest
*Shareware Features - TextWrangler (Actually Freeware!)
*The MUG Center Store - Free Freight To Members
*Tip of the Month - Macintosh Tutorials
*OS X Tip of the Month - iTunes & iPhoto Tips
*Mac Software Spotlight - Study Card Studio 2.4
*Conference/Expo News - ADHOC in Detroit
*TCMUG Membership Structure for 2005 - JOIN TODAY!

========== JUNE MEETING ==========
The June meeting is being held on Saturday the 19th from 2:00PM - 4:00PM.
We will be meeting at the TCH Educational Service Center in New Philadelphia.

========== WEB SITE LINKS AND NEWS OF INTEREST ==========
Surfin Safari, Safari news and updates blog: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/index.html
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What the Apple Plan To Switch to Intel Chips Means for Consumers
http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20050609.html
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The National Do Not Call Registry is open for business, putting consumers in charge of the telemarketing calls they get at home. The Federal government created the national registry to make it easier and more efficient for you to stop getting telemarketing calls you don’t want. You can register online at http://www.donotcall.gov or call toll-free, 1-888-382-1222 (TTY 1-866-290-4236), from the number you wish to register. Registration is free.
The Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the states are enforcing the National Do Not Call Registry. Placing your number on the registry will stop most, but not all, telemarketing calls. http://www.ftc.gov/donotcall/
This site has information for you – whether you’re a consumer interested in signing up for the National Do Not Call Registry, or a telemarketer or seller interested in learning more about your responsibilities related to the Telemarketing Sales Rule. The National Do Not Call Registry Accepts Both Cell Phone and Home Phone Numbers.
You can get a wealth of more detailed information on the cell phone directory issue at the following URL: http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/cell411.asp
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BATTERY RECALL: Communication for iBook G4 and PowerBook G4 Battery Exchange Program (May 2005)
Apple is voluntarily recalling certain lithium-ion rechargeable batteries that were sold worldwide, in systems and separately, from October 2004 through May 2005 for use with the following computers: 12-inch iBook G4, 12-inch PowerBook G4, 15-inch PowerBook G4. This program is being conducted in cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and other international safety authorities. Apple has initiated a worldwide exchange program and will provide you with a new replacement battery, free of charge.
Because customer safety is Apple's highest concern, the company is recalling the batteries. The affected batteries could overheat, posing a fire hazard. Apple received six consumer reports of these batteries overheating. Apple urges consumers to stop using these batteries and to order replacements immediately.
The recalled batteries include those with model numbers A1061, A1078, and A1079 and serial numbers that begin with HQ441 through HQ507 and 3X446 through 3X510 . To view the model and serial numbers labeled on the bottom of the battery, you must remove the battery from the computer. The battery serial number is printed in black or dark-grey lettering beneath a bar code. If a battery's serial number does not match the requirements listed below, the consumer does not have to exchange their battery.
Apple will replace the battery, free of charge. To begin the battery exchange process, direct your customers to the following website: http://www.apple.com/support/batteryexchange.
Consumers will be asked for the serial number of their computer, the serial number of their battery and a ship-to address. After serial number verification, a new battery will be shipped to the consumer, free of charge. When a consumer receives the replacement battery, they should use the same shipping packaging and the included prepaid shipping label to return the recalled battery to Apple. If a consumer does not have access to the website listed above, please have them call Apple at 800-275-2273 between 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m., CST, seven days a week, for further assistance.
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Macintouch Special Reports on the products listed below have all been recently updated for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, either to fix bugs, improve compatibility, or add enhancements. Most updates also include other changes and fixes, beyond those for Tiger.
Many products will not require Tiger-specific updates, so the absence of a product from this list does not mean that it won't work. When in doubt, check with the manufacturer.
http://www.macintouch.com/tigercompat.html
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20 Cool Tiger Features You Might Not Have Heard About - Heard anything about Tiger lately? Unless you've been living behind soundproof Windows for the past few months, you know that Apple has just shipped Mac OS X 10.4, better known as Tiger. And, of course, Apple didn't simply toss Tiger out into a silent void. No doubt you've heard about the major features in Tiger: searching with Spotlight, Dashboard widgets, Safari with RSS, and so on.
But that's not all there is to Tiger. The major features have nuances that haven't gotten much press, and there are a zillion minor tweaks to discuss. My goal in this article is to explore 20 new Tiger tips that you probably haven't heard about before. Even if you've had the opportunity to play with Tiger yourself, I bet you'll discover some new tricks herein.
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/05/13/tiger_tips.html
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Tiger and Carbon Copy Cloner : http://www.tuaw.com/2005/04/25/tiger-and-carbon-copy-cloner/. For those of you, who, as I do, know the joy of backing up your digital life with Carbon Copy Cloner http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html , I've spotted some news that bears some consideration before upgrading to Tiger. In this discussion thread http://forums.bombich.com/viewtopic.php?t=5078=tiger , Mike Bombich, the creator of Carbon Copy Cloner (or CCC for short), notes: "Apple has broken all of my apps under Tiger. Its a really stupid, simple little bug that affects authentication. I'll fix my apps as soon as possible but I'm hoping Apple will fix the bug."
So, you can still create a fully bootable copy of your current set up on an external drive using CCC before you update to Tiger, and if you hate Tiger, you can boot from that external drive and reclone your pre-Tiger drive back over to your primary drive; however, once you've upgraded, you're going to be stuck without your most beloved backup solution until either Apple or Bombich get around to fixing this authentication bug.
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Apple announced a free recycling program for iPod, the world's most popular digital music player. Customers can bring iPods they no longer want to any of Apple's 100 retail stores in the US for free environmentally friendly disposal, and those who drop off an iPod, iPod mini or iPod photo will receive a 10 percent discount on the purchase of a new iPod that day.
iPods received for recycling in the US are processed domestically and no hazardous material is shipped overseas. More details of Apple's worldwide recycling programs are available at http://www.apple.com/environment

========== SHAREWARE FEATURES - TEXTWRANGLER ==========
TextWrangler for MacOS X (10.3.5) improves upon the built-in TextEdit program by including highlighting for web page HTML code, support for several programming languages, built-in spell checking, custom hot keys, and powerful document comparison/merge changes tools.
TextWrangler 2 is the powerful general purpose text editor, and Unix and server administrator's tool. At its most basic, a text editor is a tool for simply editing text. You can use a text editor for a wide variety of tasks from cleaning up data, to editing configuration files on your Mac or server, to writing HTML or coding.
TextWrangler is a...
- General Purpose Text Editor
- Programmer's Text Editor
- Unix And Server Administrator's Tool
- Powerful Text Transformer And Manipulator
- Good Mac OS Citizen
- Powerfully Useful Tool
Download TextWrangler here . It's free! TextWrangler is only available as an electronic download.
http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/index.shtml

========== MUG CENTER STORE ==========
Is there something the MUG store can do to help your group?
Just let us know. Our Tuscarawas County Mac Users Group gets 1 percent back on everything members purchase, so we encourage our members to buy from the MUG store where you can get everything from software to new computers for your club for FREE.
The MUG store has free freight to members, RAM rebates, aggressive pricing on new (and reconditioned) Macs and the largest selection of pre-owned Macs on the planet.
March 31, 2005 to June 30, 2005 - User ID: / Password: - See the TCMUG members web site. Place your orders at http://www.applemugstore.com

========== TIP OF THE MONTH - MACINTOSH TUTORIALS ==========
Whether you are a newbie to the Macintosh platform, a seasoned expert, or somewhere in between you are sure to find the help you need in our library of thousands of tutorials on dozens of applications that are designed for the Macintosh.
Atomic Learning - http://www.atomiclearning.com/macintosh
Tutorial Find - http://www.tutorialfind.com/tutorials/operatingsystems/macintosh/
Tutorial Guide - http://www.tutorialguide.net/operating_systems/mac_os/
OS X FAQ - http://www.osxfaq.com/Tutorials/
MacAcademy - http://www.macacademy.com/indexmac.html
The Graphic Reporter - http://www.graphicreporter.com/tutorials/default.htm
.Mac Learning Center - http://www.mac.com/1/learningcenter/
These tutorials offer detailed instruction on how to accomplish some common integration tasks in a cross-platform context. http://www.apple.com/business/mac_pc/tutorials.html

========== OS X TIP OF THE MONTH - iTUNES & iPHOTO ==========
Lethargic Launching
You can speed up the launch of iTunes by reducing the number of smart playlists that have the Live Updating option enabled. To test this fix, I created a dozen smart playlists on a 933MHz Power Mac G4 with the Live Updating option enabled, and then I quit iTunes. On relaunch it took the program about eight seconds to display the main iTunes window. When I disabled the Live Updating option in all the smart playlists and relaunched the program, the main window appeared in five seconds.
iPhoto's smart albums don't appear to impede that program's launch--in my tests, iPhoto launched in a relatively slow fashion regardless of the existence of smart albums. In this case, it's simply a matter of distinguishing a sluggish application from one that acts sluggishly. It is just in iPhoto's nature to launch slowly. You can lessen the impact of this slow launching by scaling thumbnails to their smallest size before quitting the program. When you quit iPhoto with thumbnails scaled all the way up (so one image takes up the entire iPhoto window), you have to wait a few extra seconds on relaunch for iPhoto to shift from the blurry overview image to the high-resolution image.

========== MAC SOFTWARE SPOTLIGHT - STUDYCARD STUDIO ==========
Digital Meadow today announced the release of Studycard Studio 2.4, the latest update to its multimedia flashcard application for Mac OS. Studycard Studio 2.4 becomes the first and only product in its class to offer a companion study application for the Palm OS(R) platform. The software allows students and educators to create flashcards or quizzes on Mac OS, then study them on Palm Powered(TM) handhelds.
With Studycard Studio and the mobility offered by a handheld, users can study while walking to class, riding the bus, exercising, or lying in bed. The on-screen buttons map to the device's physical buttons, allowing users to study flashcards without a stylus, using one hand. Using the timed study options, interaction is unnecessary.
Users can study on Palm OS using the same study methods and options available on Mac OS. The application supports Flip, Quiz, and Slide Show study methods. Users can customize the methods with options to skip learned cards, show answer previews, learn groups of cards at a time, use time limits, shuffled or sequential order, and swapped questions and answers. Users classify cards by category and difficulty levels and then study only the cards they want to study. Studycard Studio includes features shown to reduce study time and improve retention, including automatic daily scheduling based on the Leitner cardfile system.
With fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice, multiple answer, and true/false questions, users can create quizzes for a variety of material. Users can create tutorials by adding informative explanations to follow wrong or correct answers.
Cards can include an unlimited number of images and fonts in any language, style or color without the user installing additional fonts on their handheld. However, sound, video, speech, and transition effects are featured only on Mac OS.
Studycard Studio offers a unique way to specify questions and answers allowing flexible card design. Sentences can include a fill-in-the-blank directly within the sentence itself. Multiple choice answers can be arranged in rows, columns, or positioned around a picture.
Free Lite Version Available - Studycard Studio Lite 2.4 is available immediately as a free download at www.digitalmeadow.com. In addition to Studycard Studio Lite for Mac OS which supports the Quiz study method with fewer features, the download includes the full Studycard Studio Palm OS companion application.
Pricing and Availability - Studycard Studio 2.4 is immediately available through Digital Meadow's web site (http://www.digitalmeadow.com), for $29. A site license is $299. Registered users can download the 2.4 updater for free at the web site. Minimum system requirements include Mac OS X 10.1 or later, or Mac OS 9 with CarbonLib 1.6 or later. The complementary Palm OS companion application requires Palm OS 3.0 or later, including Palm OS Cobalt.

========== CONFERENCE UPDATE - ADHOC IN DETROIT ==========
I'm sending this message to announce this year's iteration of ADHOC, the Apple-focused Advanced Developers Hands On Conference . I'm pretty certain there are Macintosh developers hidden in most Macintosh user groups, and we're looking for developers who are experts at everything from kernel hacking & driver development to novices just figuring out the basics of Cocoa.
ADHOC (a.k.a. MacHack) has been going for 20 years now, and this year it will be happening from July 27th through July 31st out in Dearborn, Michigan (on a pleasant boundry of Detroit). While it's a great companion to WWDC (we usually schedule a month or two after Apple's conference), it's also a perfect standalone conference to attend as you'll actually get to listen to and interact with other engineers who are actually using the latest & greatest cutting edge technology and techniques.
A typical day goes like this: It all starts at midnight with an awesome keynote speaker, or you could be collaborating (it's a Hands-On conference, after all!) with a peer on some sick/twisted/great project to show off at the showcase. During the daylight hours there are sessions that focus on things like open source software, how to make use of the latest technologies that will be delivered with TIger, debugging and optimization techniques. You name it, we may have a session on it.
And since this is a conference by developers, for developers, we need developer interaction. If you're working on something you'd like to share with your fellow engineers, or if you have a topic that you think needs to be explored more and you can talk about it, present a session! Here's a web page that talks about how to get involved: http://www.adhocconference.com/sessions.
We also have a contest for best technical papers, and folks who write and present a paper (to be judged by their peers) get to attend for free! (more info and past papers can be found at http://www.adhocconference.com/Papers.
Check out the conference website at http://www.adhocconference.com and please share this with your user group membership. We can only continue to be a success only with your help!
Thanks so much,
Michael Dautermann
Publicity Chair

========== TCMUG MEMBERSHIP FOR 2005 - TIME TO JOIN! ==========
We are working very hard to make it another exciting year for all local Mac users. We had a small dues structure for 2004. Membership in the TCMUG will cost $20.00 annually for a regular membership and will include a monthly newsletter, a special "members only" section of the web site, monthly meetings, a lending library, discounts on software, hardware and books and much, much more! You can visit our web site to get all of the features and benefits at http://www.tcmug.org/aboutus.html
We are offering three membership levels for 2005. There will be a regular membership at $20 per year and we will have student membership (K-12 & College) at $15 per year and a senior citizen (60+ years old) at $15 per year. All levels of membership will enjoy the benefits of belonging to the TCMUG.
Please contact any of the officers if you would have any questions regarding membership and the associated dues. http://www.tcmug.org/contactus.html
We have an online membership form that you are able to download. You can download the form at: http://www.tcmug.org/tcmug_memberapp.pdf

========== SUBMITTING INFORMATION ==========
Have a software tidbit to share, a Mac related web site to suggest or a news piece to submit? Email me with all the information at kwarrene@mac.com
To unsubscribe from this newsletter: Reply to this email with the subject line of REMOVE.
Forward this message to all of your family, friends and associates so that they can join the TCMUG and receive the monthly newsletter. Get all of the details at http://www.tcmug.org/aboutus.html
If you have any comments or suggestions please feel free to contact any of the officers at http://www.tcmug.org/contactus.html