April 2007 General Meeting: A Meeting of Kings
© Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 29, no. 4, July-August 2007, pp. 36-37.
April’s General Meeting missed the April showers as the skies cycled through different shades of gray and blue, never quite making it to a threatening dark gray. Inside Luther Jackson Middle School in Falls Church, Virginia, all was sunny – except for one teacher, sternly reminding us to clean up after ourselves. It has been many years since most of us were reproached by a middle school teacher, especially for what we hadn’t done and were not, in fact, likely to do…
Renowned graphics wizard Lesa Snider King was the scheduled guest, but a few days before the meeting a second royal visitor was added: her spouse, Mac Internet radio pioneer Shawn King. Oddly, the Washington Post and other news outlets seemed more interested in the May 3 visit of Queen Elizabeth to Virginia than the April 28 visit of not one but two Kings to the Pi.
Questions? Answers!
Before the main event, the opening Question & Answer session was the usual assortment of wide-ranging topics. Session leader Lawrence Charters asked how many people were using something prior to Mac OS X, and only one soul admitted to using Mac OS 8.6. This individual quickly added that they were going to move to a new machine and operating system in October, when Mac OS X 10.5 is scheduled for release. Lawrence strongly recommended that everyone using something earlier than Mac OS X 10.4 move to at least 10.4 in the next couple of months, as Apple very likely will drop all updates for Mac OS X 10.3 and earlier, including security updates.
One of the more interesting questions dealt with how to get pictures to show up in the Mac OS X slideshow screen saver without having the pictures clipped. The answer is to de-select “Crop slides to fit screen” in Screen Saver Options. Given the number of follow-up questions after the Q&A session, it seems clear many users didn’t know there were options, and others had never discovered the Screen Saver in System Preferences.
Elections and Fillings
Two business items were covered before the main presentation. Richard Rucker, chair of the Election Committee, reminded people to vote for the May Pi Election. Voting is online, with a link from the Pi Web site, www.wap.org, to the Pi’s custom voting system, vote.wap.org. Pat Fauquet followed with coverage of the April monthly Pi Fillings CD-ROM. You can see all the Pi Fillings CD-ROMs at http://store.wap.org/.
Your Mac Life
Our first presentation was by Shawn King of “Your Mac Life.” Shawn has been doing “Internet radio” since before it was reborn as “podcasting,” and offered an extemporaneous slideshow on things that he’s been doing over the past year. Being a Mac geek, this consisted of attending a lot of Mac shows, visiting Mac stores (including the “glass cube” store in Manhattan), and flying over Nashville, Tennessee, in a small airplane (not clearly Mac related, but the photos were interesting), all illustrated by slides presented in Keynote. Shawn is now the clear record holder for a number of slides shown in a single Washington Apple Pi meeting, with an average of one every five seconds or so for an hour, all triggered by a Keyspan Presentation Remote. Keep him away from the Pentagon! The PowerPoint Rangers might get ideas!
One of the more interesting topics was a wedding held at the 2006 Macworld San Francisco. Macworld was once an excuse for parties, but over the years the parties have faded away, so several years ago Shawn decided to hold his own annual party under the sponsorship of his Your Mac Life show. And since he needed to rent a room for the party, it was only logical to use it for other purposes, such as: his wedding to Lesa Snider. They first met at a Macworld, so why not get married at a Macworld – by Chicago Sun-Times Mac columnist Andy Ihnatko? Ihnatko received a special license from the city of San Francisco, making him a deputy marriage commissioner for the event.
Shawn’s presentation ranks as one of the Pi’s stranger events: a tall Canadian with a booming voice, wearing a hockey jersey, showing slides of his marriage to a Mac graphics guru, with the ceremony attended and performed by a bunch of Mac nerds. In contrast –
Effortless Graphics Mastery
In contrast, where Shawn is tall, his bride, Lesa Snider King, is not. Where Shawn is booming, Lesa has a soft, quiet voice, with a Texas drawl. Where Shawn is spontaneous and cheerfully unfocused, Lesa is precise and gives a sense of quiet mastery. She is an acclaimed graphics wizard, and it was easy to see why.
She currently serves as a spokeswoman for iStockphoto, an online stock photo company, so she explained the company’s method of operation (it is a membership-based photo exchange, with a free membership, no subscriptions, and far less fine print than most stock houses) and gave a brief tour of their Web site. The pricing is reasonable, and she used a number of their photos in her main presentation. She also distributed iStock “bookmarks” that include five free credits on the site.
Given her heavyweight credentials as a graphics maven, her demo tool of choice was a surprise: Adobe Photoshop Elements, the low-cost cousin of Photoshop. Whereas Photoshop weighs in at just under $700 and includes enough features to occupy a graduate course at a fine arts university, Photoshop Elements is roughly a tenth the price, and with a feature set more in keeping with the average user. Yet in Lesa’s hands, Photoshop Elements proved to be formidable. More than one person was startled to say, “Dang! I should be taking notes!” [Ed. note: The “Dang!” is not a direct quote.]
Lesa speculated, accurately, that most users of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements use these packages mostly for browsing, cropping, and minor adjustments. People don’t try more advanced editing either because they don’t know how or it never occurs to them that such things are possible. So, using nothing more than Photoshop Elements, she quickly demonstrated how to use it to, among other things, create a mask (something Photoshop Elements allegedly can’t even do). She then showed how to use “Magic Extractor” to quickly “knock out” an image from one photo to insert it into another, followed by showing how to make custom frames for photos, followed by – many other topics. URLs to many of her online tutorials are included at the end of this article.
You couldn’t help but be impressed with Photoshop Elements after her presentation. She never appeared the least bit rushed or hurried, yet the audience was washed away with a fire hose of useful, practical information. My personal favorite: creating custom picture packages. In a never-ending effort to be frugal, this mini-tutorial explained how to mix in different photos on the same photo package page, minimizing wasted inkjet ink and photo paper. This tip alone was worth the price of admission. Assuming the Pi charged for admission.
The end of the meeting drawing had a number of nice prizes, plus pounds and pounds of free goodies provided by King and King. They brought boxes of “Missing Manual” series books to give away, each signed by series editor David Pogue. They also had a full copy of Photoshop Elements 4.0 for the Mac, provided by Adobe. It was a joyful feeding frenzy.
Resources:
Photos of Shawn King and Lesa Snider’s wedding at Macworld San Francisco:
http://maceditionradio.com/modules/gallery/MacWorldSF1_06
Your Mac Life Web site:
http://www.yourmaclifeshow.com/
Keyspan Presentation Remote:
http://www.keyspan.com/products/usb/presentationremote/
iStockphoto
http://istockphoto.com/
Lesa Snider King’s writings are found on the Internet under Lesa Snider:
http://www.flyingfingers.com/
http://www.graphicreporter.com/
Custom photo frame tutorial:
http://www.graphicreporter.com/tutorials/elements_shapeframe.html
Magic Extractor for knock-out tutorial:
http://www.graphicreporter.com/tutorials/elements_magicextractor.html
Place text behind objects tutorial:
http://www.graphicreporter.com/tutorials/elements_textbehind.html
Colorizing tutorial:
http://www.graphicreporter.com/tutorials/elements_colorize.html
Custom print package tutorial:
http://www.graphicreporter.com/tutorials/elements_picturepackage.html
Captions:
crowd.tif
A large crowd turned out for the April General Meeting. Photo by David Harris, taken with a Minolta DiMAGE X digital camera.
schoolhall.tif
How long has it been since you’ve seen this? The long halls of lockers brought back flashbacks… Photo by David Harris, taken with a Minolta DiMAGE X digital camera.