Hi All! Here are the meeting notes from the Feb meeting.
* We started with the Q&A questions. * Martin Hill then showed off some of the features of QuickTime and the iLecture system. QuickTime Player allows you to play movies. When you register to Pro version you have the ability to do some "basic" editing features with it. You can trim the clip, crop it down for size. You can also paste clips together. You can also mix tracks together overtop of each other, then have them play side by side all the tracks. So you can take 3 tracks together and mix them all in one window to play. All very easily! You can also then add in slides as well, which sit there beside the movie as it's playing. When you finish with the "movie" and save it you find it doesn't increase the file size as each portion is szved individually. You also can save trailers and web movies direct off the web with QuickTime Pro, as well as play QuickTime movies or trailers full screen as well. So makes the upgrade price fairly worthwhile. (Approx $50 AUD). Curtin iLecture is a Mac based system. It allows a lecture to deliver the lecture and once finished it automatically appears on the web (without any human inter-action). The system does all the work, including creating the pages. The students can then go to the web site and listen to the Lecture and listen to it, as well as pause, fast forward through it. They can also add in PowerPoints slides and things as well. If they write on the Over Head Projector slides, then it can also be viewed on the web as well, so the student can get a full feature of the Lecture without being there. They then get the audio and the video part as well. As the presenter is writing everything on the slides, it then gets added it to the footage and all saved to be viewed on the web. The next step above this is that a lecture which is filmed, then has the whole Lecture showing all the "rich" content, including slides that are shown, the audio contect, as well as the presenter doing the whole lecture as well! Very impressive! All run and designed and working with a Mac! It's also about to be demo-ed in the US! Not bad for a WA "invention"! You can also upload it to the phone and use 3GPP to view the lecture on their phone!! (As Martin showed us how it took it from his PowerBook to his phone via Bluetooth so he could view it on his phone!) Here in WA we have 30 iLectures at UWA and 6 at Curtin all working well. You can view all of this at: <http://ilectures.curtin.edu.au> and see examples of this technology. * iPod Shuffle I then showed off the new iPod shuffle. Apple introduced at MacWorld the latest member to the iPod, the iPod shuffle. A tiny version of the iPod. They come in two sizes (512Mb and 1GB). On this little USB device you can have your music and your files. It simply syncs with iTunes for you to transfer your music and acts as a "thumb" drive to store your files on. Very useful. They sell for $149 for the 512Mb and $229 for the 1GB. Supplied with it is a cable to hang it around your neck and headphones. With a standard headphone jack you can add just about any type of speaker or headphone or connect it to most things. They sound great and work well! For more info have a look at <http://www.apple.com.au/ipodshuffle/> * Matt then spoke about some of the other new products released at MacWorld. Matt then spoke about iWork. A new package that has Keynote 2 and Pages. Pages is a very good word processor and handles graphics very well. A good alternative to Word. It has all the same things that a Word Processor does. It just works! It has some fantastic templates. You can very easily take a template and bring in your own text. IT ties in with all the other iApps, so you can add in Photos and Movies and Sounds. It handles pictures a lot better than Word, and if you keep adding pictures it just keeps working! If you've used to Publisher on Windows, then you'd be very impressed with it! You can export the finished product into different versions, so if it's going to Word for Windows, then it'll keep working for them! (Other file formats to save as are pdf, html, rtf.) Keynote 2 was then shown (as a presentation). A few changes and updates over Keynote 1. Matt showed this off by showing picture of his trip to MacWorld. Very cool pictures and very cool effects, transitions and changes. For more info have a look at <http://www.apple.com.au/keynote> * Finished the night off with some giveaways and some tea, coffee and biscuits. Thanks again all for coming. I hope you all enjoyed it!! See you at the next meeting!! Enjoy! Kind Regards Daniel Kerr
