[DM-MUG] March Madness

[Bailey Ford]

Greetings fellow macnauts,

I wanted to post a little information about what is going on during the 
meeting.

The first order of business concerned our ongoing efforts to 
incorporate as a nonprofit. We are actually making real progress on 
this (for a change). Bryan went through the boilerplate articles of 
incorporation and we filled in all of the specifics for the group. I 
dropped by the post office and got a box for the group to handle all of 
our group mailings. So, we are getting close to submitting the articles 
to the state. The next steps are for Bryan to get a lawyer friend to 
glance over the document and then to submit the paperwork to the state 
with a $20 payment.

We made a general call for topics of interest so that we could schedule 
some good meetings for the next few months. We discussed doing a 
session on the dot mac service, doing a gaming roundup where people 
brought in whatever they were playing, and Allan offered to do a 
session on iPods.

Near the end of the meeting I asked about dues, and it looks like they 
will be a whoppin' $10 per year, so get your check books ready.

Allen gave a lovely presentation all about the soon-to-be-released Mac 
OS X 10.4 (aka Tiger). Most of the features can be discovered easily on 
Apple's website. The main highlights are as follows:

Spotlight - system wide searching of anything and everything with very 
broad support for metadata. Apparently, this feature can not be turned 
off completely (which might be annoying since it requires hard drive 
space and computer time to create and maintain the indexes). On the up 
side, it should make finding everything easier and it enables features 
like the Finder's new Smart Folders. Also, after the initial indexing 
of your drive, all of the other index maintenance should present 
minimal inconvenience as they are handled whenever you save a file.

Smart Folders - Basically this is just like a smart playlist in iTunes. 
You combine a search with a folder and the mac fills that folder with 
the results of the search - and updates this on the fly all the time. 
So, you could have a folder of everything on your drive that has to do 
with Soccer, or a folder that always held all of your Word files or 
whatever. The files themselves could be located anywhere on your drive, 
but if they were relevant, they would also show up in the smart folder.

Mail - The email application has been updated with an improved search 
feature like Smart Folders or Smart Playlists. It also supports better 
HTML based email creation.

iChat - This is Allen's favorite! iChat will now support 10 people 
doing an audio chat at once and/or up to 4 people video chatting at 
once. Also, the quality of the video is really much much better. I 
hadn't seen a side-by-side comparison of our current video quality 
(using h.263) next to the quality we will see in Tiger (using h.264). 
With the same equipment, there is a huge difference in detail and 
sharpness in the video conferencing.

Quicktime 7 - The updated quicktime will require a new license for the 
'pro' version, and includes all of that h.264 stuff that will make 
iChat so much nicer looking. Also, this h.264 video stuff has already 
been adopted for the video format of BOTH of the competing standards 
that will replace the DVD. The nifty thing about this codec is that it 
scales well. So, on the screen, when you scale a movie, it will look 
beautiful while you are changing the window size (and movies will 
continue to play). The same source files can also be used to scale 
content from HD video all the way down to small files that play on cell 
phones.

Core Image & Core Video - This is my favorite feature! This is a new 
set of code that Apple is making available to developers that greatly 
improves both the quality and speed of most of the common things we do 
with images and video. Blurs, Text effects, layering, and loads more 
are all handled at a deep level in the system.

64-Bit support - The G5 chip is a 64 bit chip, but the current version 
of OS X doesn't take great advantage of this. Tiger will improve on 
this, allowing a theoretical access to 16 exabytes of RAM. That's 16 
billion gigabytes people.

There's tons more in there, and the consensus at the meeting was that 
we would hear some kind of  announcement from Apple in April.

your faithful secretary,
bailey


PS sorry for the change of tense - I started this during the meeting 
and finished it up this morning. so, sic.