July 6, 2009 Cooliris
Relax from the heat of the July 4th weekend with
the coolest of cool apps. Come and see how Cooliris is revolutionizing the
way we discover and interact with content on the web.
Cooliris advances visual navigation for the Web, Desktop, and Mobile. Its flagship
product is the Cooliris 3D Wall, which is designed to help users consume the
overabundance of rich media on the Web and discover great content. Cooliris
enables a faster and more intuitive browsing experience for images, videos,
news, games, and social networking websites.
Cooliris is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. For more information, visit www.cooliris.com.
June 1, 2009 Fastmac
Mac upgrades, battery chargers, extended life
batteries for your laptop and iPod, processor upgrades, new optical drives,
etc, etc., even T shirts, fastmac will be
here to demo them all.
May 4, 2009 Avery
Kathy Garrigan presents Avery DesignPro for Mac,
software that lets you print on Avery products on your Macintosh. Like business
cards, label sheets, greeting cards, iron-ons, and so on. Both Lorrie & Dave
have used the CD. The business card
template and labels are very easy to use. Lorrie hopes to have some samples of
the things that she has used the Avery templates for - cards, T-shirts and wine
labels. Not only is this app very versatile - it's free!
April 6, 2009 MacSpeech & Drobo
Voice recognition/Dictation software for
the Mac has made great strides in recent years, led by the MacSpeech,
which brought the clumsy MacSpeech Dictate into what pundits (and numerous
reviewers on Amazon.com) refer to as "prime time".
It's over a year since I saw David Pogue give an impressive demo
of this software at MacWorld and it has now moved up to version 1.3.
Jay Gonzales is Senior Product/Marketing Manager at MacSpeech and has
15 years of experience working on award-winning Macintosh software. He'll
be here to demo why MacSpeech Dictate is the premier speech recognition
solution for the Macintosh. MacSpeech Dictate provides a whole new way
to interact with your Mac. Instead of typing, use your voice to input text;
rather than clicking your mouse, just speak commands.
MacSpeech Dictate provides amazing speech recognition accuracy and easily works with the applications you already have, including Apple apps like Mail, iChat, iPhoto, and more. MacSpeech Dictate even controls your Mac; just speak a command and MacSpeech Dictate executes it for you. MacSpeech Dictate requires a minimal amount of training and is as fun, productive, and intuitive to use as the Mac itself.
We've had various backup demonstrations in the recent past,
which hopefully has encouraged you to do some kind of back up of your computer
files. Drobo has a solution that they say finally provides reliable and automated
storage for your rapidly growing data and image library. I do know someone
who swears by it, and if you take a belt & suspenders approach to preserving
your digital world then Drobo is definitely the solution for you.
Get peace of mind, knowing your irreplaceable digital assets are safe. With
the convenience of both FireWire 800 and USB 2.0, the award-winning Drobo
storage solution can replace your stack of hard drives and protect your data
against a hard drive failure. And as your data library grows, don’t
worry about running out of storage space - simply increase the capacity by
adding a larger drive on the fly!
Chris Black will be here to show how Drobo takes the stress out of storage.
You can learn more about the revolutionary Drobo and see how it can change
your feelings about primary storage and back-up by watching their short Drobo
Demo Video Tour.
Also this month, Shareware will look at some of your options for exploring the hidden options of MacOS X and its Applications. We'll cover some GUI utilities (eg TinkerTool, Property List Editor), command-line tools such as defaults and plutil and take a look at the wonders of AppleScript. Plus, of course, there'll be a cornucopia of goodies to give away in our raffle.
March 2, 2009 Vincent Isola on Digital Photography
Genesis
Photography has been at its present
location producing breathtaking images for discriminating clientele since
1986. Conveniently located in downtown Mountain View, the studio is a state
of the art photographic facility, second to none in the bay area.
They have been capturing images digitally since 1998. This process provides instant feedback and allows their clients to help shape the general direction of the photo session real time, making it a very collaborative and fun experience for everyone!
The principal, Vincent Isola, has managed the studio and it's photographers since its inception. He has won numerous awards for his work and teaches digital and lighting techniques to photographers throughout the country.
Vin's work and articles have been featured in many publications, including; Architecture Digest, Modern Bride, Martha Stewart Weddings, Designer's Illustrated, The Professional Photographer, Studio Photography, Brides.com, Wedding's West, Pennisula Magazine, Shutterbug and Loan Collections Books.
His corporate clients include Adobe Systems, Apple Computer, Bank of America, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, KPMG, Laser-card Systems, Microsoft, Motorola, National Semiconductor, Oracle, Pottery Barn, 3 Ware, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, Stanford University, Velodyne Acoustics, and Xerox
Recently Vin has been selected to participate in Canon's "Printmaster's Program", along with a handful of photographers in North America. According to Canon, "Printmasters are among some of the top photographers in the world working in diverse photographic disciplines such as journalism, nature, fashion, fine-art, portrait and commercial photography"
If you are inspired by Vin's talk, we have a pile of Digital Photography books to give away in our raffle, courtesy of O'Reilly, from the Derrick Story's portable Photoshop tips to detailed help on how to make the most of Photoshop CS4's Channels and Masks.
February 2, 2009 Storyist
Steve Shepard, the developer of Storyist, whom
you may remember from a brief appearance last year and/or visiting his booth
at MacWorld, will be here to show off the features of the upcoming Storyist
2.
Storyist is a powerful story development tool for novelists and screenwriters.
With an intuitive interface that puts you in control, it provides:
• A word processor with a page layout view and support for headers,
footers, and style sheets so you can produce submission-ready manuscripts
and scripts.
• A storyboard with customizable story sheets so you can track your
plot, characters, and settings.
• A project manager with fast, project-wide search capabilities so you
can keep your writing organized and accessible.
At one time it was employed mainly by budding novelists, but more and more users are hopeful screenwriters who have discovered this tool along with the Mac. You can find more details at Storyist.com - get a big discount if you buy online using coupon code SMUG2009.
January 2009 MacWorld Expo
Nico Bellamy mans the SMUG booth on Tuesday morning
More pictures from MacWorld
on the News Page»
There is no SMUG meeting in
January - instead we
are at MacWorld on Tuesday January 6 - visit us at our own booth in
the main hall - booths 226-230 (far left corner from where you enter)!
For those of you suffering from meeting withdrawal, we have been invited
to the Silicon Valley User Group meeting on Monday January 12th at Apple
HQ in Cupertino (get information on how to get there and more details at www.svmug.org)
where Slife Labs from
Georgia will be presenting direct from MacWorld Expo.
