June 2000 Meeting summary
A summary of June's FinMUG meeting.
iMovie & Sherlock for 5, Please
June 27th FinMUG Meeting
By Keith Cooper
"FinMUG, party of five." Well, there were just a few of us in attendance Tuesday, for June's meeting
but we had a couple of great demos. The atmosphere was casual and we all enjoyed
Creamsicles to cool off -- complements of the Barfoots.
I had come prepared for a demo of Sherlock2 – the latest version of Apple's great
search tool. I rigged up my wife's (thanks again, honey, for the loan) iBook with
an AOL dial up. While generally I dislike America Online (understatement), it makes
a suitable connection in a pinch. While getting it up and running I figured out the
problem with last month1s Airport demo. Dialing out of the community room requires
a prefix of 9. Simple adjustment but annoying when you miss it. My apologies to Servtech
for cursing their service that night.
Anyway, while I was working out AOL link IP problems Wade Irmischer gave an impromptu
demo of iMovie on his Powerbook – a bronze G3 with an add-on FireWire card. If you
haven1t had the chance to witness a demo of iMovie
it's a great video editing software Apple released with it1s DV iMacs last fall.
What iMovie lacks in special effect and transition filters it more than makes up
with the simplicity of its interface. It is digital video editing for the rest of
us. And if you have a Firewire equipped Macintosh you can download the software for
free from Apple's website. This is great
news for those of us who thought you had to by a DV iMac to get it.
After a few minutes of idle chat and rumors of what Macworld New
York has in store for us Mac enthusiasts it was on to Sherlock. We went over Sherlock's
approach to disk search -- the way it replaces the finder's Find File function. We
discussed the beauty of the Find-By-Content feature of Sherlock – how the (incredibly
time-consuming) indexing feature takes inventory of the first 1,000 words of every
document and then stores that data for future searches. This allows you to search
for words you use in specific documents that you might not remember by file name.
Looking for a letter to Aunt Millie you wrote a year ago? Just type in "Millie"
and Sherlock pulls up a list of all files containing that word.
We moved on to Sherlock1s Internet search capabilities. How it searches several search
engines and returns results organized by relevance and gives you a list that you
can peruse before launching your browser. Now came abilities only found in Sherlock
version 2. We bounced from channel to channel checking out its people, shopping and
research capabilities then focused on Apple1s Macintosh Product Guide. The guide
is a great resource for finding products made for the Mac. It's available on CD (you
can pick one up at most Apple-sponsored events like seminars), or at Apple's website
http://www.apple.com and it has a plug-in under the Apple channel in Sherlock. It's a searchable
database of about 16,000 known products that will work with your Mac. It's a great
source to find hardware and software to make your Mac happier and more productive.
We also discussed our favorite search engines. Earl Barfoot recommended one called
"All The Web" http://www.alltheweb.com (their OS 8.1 system does not support Sherlock), Kathy, Wade and I were
firm Sherlock users.
We rounded out the evening with a site Wade recommended:
http://www.nextag.com this site is a great resource for price shopping. Armed with a product
name you found on the Macintosh Product Guide (or any other source) you can search
for the best possible price in minutes (even on a dog-slow AOL connection).
Thanks to all in attendance, thanks to the Barfoots and Bethany for the hospitality
(and cold treats), and thanks to Apple for producing great technology. See you all
next month.
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