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BRMUG BRMUG September 1998 Newsletter This is the index of the September 1998 BRMUG Newsletter: Features: Tidbits: File Formats Regular Columns: Front Page News by Isaac Traxler September Meeting August Meeting BRMUG Picnic! Apple Stock iMac Recycle Floppies Want a JOB? Graphic Utility of the Month (Kai Power Goo) by Glenn Matherne Web Page of the Month (http://www.macvirus .com/)by Isaac Traxler Nonessentials (HyperGASP 3.0) by Glenn Matherne Cartoon by Pete Steinfeld Return to BRMUG Newsletter Index Front Page News September Meeting The September meeting will be held at the Bluebonnet Library on September 17th, the 3rd Thursday of the month, at 6:30 P.M. This month's meeting will be about graphics. Isaac Traxler will do a short Introduction to Draw and Paint Graphics. Glenn Matherne will then demonstarte Canvas. The meeting will start at 6:30 P.M. with the presentation starting shortly afterward. At 7:30 P.M., we will begin the Question and Answer session. Meeting will end at 8:30 P.M. so that we can clean up and leave prior to the 9:00 P.M. closing time. Don't forget the get together at Brewbacher's after the meeting! The August Meeting Recap: Retro-gaming was the topic of the Month. We demonstrated several different ways of recapturing the past. Glenn demonstarted an Apple II emulator and several vintage games. Isaac demonstrated MacMame - arcade emulator for the Macintosh. Don showed an Intellivision emulator. The meeting was made special thanks to Don Ballard who brought a 6100 with a G3 upgrade and a beautiful projection system. It looked great Don! BRMUG Picnic! It's time for the BRMUG Annual Picnic and Volleyball Exhibition. The picnic will be September 19th (two days after our next meeting) at 2:00 P.M. at the North East corner of Highland Road and South Stadium Drive (at the LSU campus). The menu will be barbeque chicken, hotdogs, rolls, potato salad, baked beans, and colas. The price per person will be $3.50 ($2.00 per child). We will also have a volleyball to work off all the good food. Everyone is invited (bring the family). We already have volunteers to make potato salad, and baked beans. We have one charcoal grill. We need a second grill and at least two cooks to volunteer. Other help could also be used. If you would like to volunteer to help with the picnic, please send e-mail to volunteer@brmug.org. If you are planning to attend the picnic please send e-mail to picnic@brmug.org (we need to get a count to decide how much food to make). The picnic is a lot of fun and a great way to get meet and get to know other Macintosh users. Be there and enjoy! Return to Top of Page Apple's Stock Apple has had a stable strong month in the Stock Market. Their value has varied from 32 to just under 40 the last week or so. Average volume is almost 4 million shares. The price has been hovering around $37.5. Return to Top of Page iMac The iMac has been selling as fast as they can be produced. Despite a few hitches, the launch has been a success. We have added an iMac section to our web site, visit http://www.brmug. org/macintosh.html#imac. Return to Top of Page Recycle Floppies The National Waste Prevention Coalition has a Floppies for Kiddies program that collects old diskettes (formatted or not), erases them, and distributes them to needy schools around the country. Send all those old, demo and AOL floppies to: USA CityLink Project Floppies for Kiddies 20349 Highway 36 Covington, LA 70433 Return to Top of Page Want a JOB!!? Higher Ed (represents Apple to institutions of higher education) is looking for a representative to handle the Louisiana area. Here is their advertisement for the position: Education sales agent for Apple Computers seeks representative for Louisiana territory (universities) Travel required. Degree preferred, knowledge of Apple systems and good sales and technical skills required. Draw plus commission, $35-$45K. Fax resume to 972.437.1317 or email leslie@hied.com Return to Top of Page Graphic Utility of the Month by Glenn Matherne This month's graphic utility is kind of a walk on the silly side. For some of you this progam is a nonessential, but for others it will provide hours of entertainment. The program I am speaking of is the wonderfully fun, Kai's Power Goo. Kai Krause of Metacreation once again surprises us with a program with shall we say unique features such as stretching, spiking and fusing. Kai's Powergoo is a photo morphing and distorting program. For the uninitiated, morphing is the altering of a person's physical appearance, like man's head on a lion or giving a woman dred locks and a full beard. Morphing is also used by forensic experts to age people's photographs for indentifying missing persons. Well, Kai's Powergoo is not quite as serious as all that. It also is not as powerful or as expensive as these professional programs. Instead it is a toy for people who like to do silly stuff on a computer like children. Kai's Powergoo is now only $19. It comes on a CD with a library of cool pictures or you can import your own images. You can distort images in the goo room or fuse features from two pictures in the fusion room. By connecting a series of Goo pictures you can make a Goovie movie or a Quicktime movie. So if you're bored and have a few dollars to blow, give Kai's PowerGoo a try. If you have a few more dollars, try Kai's new program Kai's Supergoo. I've been have a blast mixing and matching the features of the politicians supplied on the image library. Now if I could only get the pictures of those guys who picked on me in Junior High. Return to Top of Page Web Page of the Month by Isaac Traxler The virus picture in the Macintosh world used to be very nice - we had a few viruses, but we had Disinfectant from John Norstad of NorthWestern University. Then along came HyperCard viruses, Word Macro viruses and AutoStart Worms. John Norstad has retired Disinfectant. Now what do we do? For starters, http://www.macvirus .com/ is a good resource. This web site has become a central site for keeping up with the virus situation in the Macintosh world. This site includes several sections: Daily News, News Archive, Help Section, Software Section and a Reference Section. The Daily News section is basically a daily updated area with the latest information about viruses and the Macintosh. If you are looking for the latest information about viruses - check here. The archive Contains past articles. The Help Section includes links to many virus resources. It includes links to sites about Dr. Solomon's Virex, Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit, McAfee VirusScan, Norton AntiVirus for Macintosh and Symantec AntiVirus for the Macintosh. It also has links to Newsgroups and other places to get help. The Software section covers free and commercial products. It provides links to download free products and links for the latest updates for commercial packages. The Reference Section is a collection of links to all kinds of virus-related pages. You can find just about anything you would need here (if it is virus related). This web site is another example of excellence in the Macintosh world. Everything you could want that is virus-related is collected into one, easy to use and concise location. Thanks to the site administrators. Return to Top of Page Nonessentials by Glenn Matherne Most of us these days hear a lot of chic high tech terms like multimedia, hi res graphics, digital audio, digital video and scripting. Well not so long ago, it was rather difficult for non-programmers to do these neat effects on a Macintosh. That is until 1987 when the concept of multimedia authoring was made possible by Bill Atkinson at Apple. His creation was the scriptable authoring program, Hypercard. Hypercard was originally a black and white program that allowed users to make their own software to do what ever they wanted to do, such as databases, mailing lists, digital books, etc. By version 2.0, Hyperstudio allowed audio and pasting color pictures. Version 2.2 started to allow the use of color. Version 2.3 added importing of Quicktime movies. Unfortunately, several years lapsed between versions 2.3 and 2.4. Hyperstudio had replaced Hypercard as the preferred multimedia authoring for amateurs and Macromedia Director andMacromedia Authorware became the programs used by professionals. The main reason is that Apple never put color painting tools, easy importing, stereo audio or animation tools into Hyperstudio. The program allows you to do these neat effects, but you need a third party add on to do this. HyperGASP 3.0 by Caliban Mindware (http://www.CalibanMW.com) adds color tools, stereo audio, easy graphic importing and many other features to Hyperstudio. Once you add these features to Hyperstudio, it is a really powerful program with an easy to use scripting language. The various effects such as transitions, audio and video really do work better in Hypercard than other programs. Best of all Hypercard works with incredibly low amounts of ram (4 megabytes or more). Hypercard 2.4.1 is free update for Hypercard 2.3 or higher owners. The full version of Hyopercard 2.4.1 costs $125 from Apple. I recommend that you add HyperGASP 3.O for $69 from Caliban Mindware to complete the package. I also recommend The Complete Hypercard 2.2 Handbook by Danny Goodman. It is now back in print. Hopefully, Apple will do a much better update to this venerable classic. It really is the only multimedia authoring program that has an easy to understand programming language and it allows you to use AppleScript. Other programming languages such as Director's Lingo script and Hyperstudio's Hyperlogo are less powerful and much harder to master and neither program allows the use of AppleScript. Return to Top of Page