BRMUG

BRMUG December 1998 Newsletter

This is the index of the December 1998 BRMUG Newsletter:
• Regular Columns:
  • Front Page News by Isaac Traxler
    • December Meeting
    • November Meeting
    • iMac is Hot!
    • Macintosh and Hollywood
    • eNews
    • 8.5.1 Now Available
    • IBM
    • Thanks
    • For Sale
  • Essentials - Magazines by Isaac Traxler
  • Graphic Utility of the Month by Glenn Matherne
  • Nonessentials by Glenn Matherne
  • Web Page of the Month - Mac Gamer's Ledge by Isaac Traxler
  • Cartoon by Pete Steinfeld
  

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Front Page News

The December meeting will be replaced by our annual Christmas Party! The party will be at Brewbachers on Bluebonnet at 6:30 P.M.on December 17th. In January we will return to the Bluebonnet Library for the meeting. Please come by Brewbachers this Thursday for the party. THis is a chance for the BRMUG members to get to know each other. Hope to see you there!

Thanks to all who presented games! I hope everyone enjoyed the presentation. Unfortunately, many of the great games for the Macintosh were not demonstrated. The Macintosh really is a great gaming platform. Rumors have it that in the next year, the Macintosh will gain significantly in the game market. I can't wait!

iMac was named the hottest desktop computer of 1998 today by Computer Retail Week (CRW). iMac was far and away the leading desktop chosen by our sales associate readership, the key influencers in retail stores, said Mark Harrington, CRW's editor. The win is especially impressive considering iMac has only been available to consumers since mid-August. It's a real tribute to Apple's efforts.]

Personal computers running Windows may far outnumber Macintoshes in homes and offices, but you d never guess that from watching TV. Ally McBeal, Felicity and Buffy the Vampire Slayer have all featured Apple s new curvaceous iMacs. It s not just a chick thing, either. The Drew Carey Show, Dawson's Creek and Home Improvement show off Apple products, too. Who cares what they think on Main Street, or even Wall Street? In Hollywood, Apple is the king of cool. Macintoshes and PowerBooks have shown up on 34 network TV shows this year and 120 films.

Apple has announced eNews, a free, biweekly, electronic publication from Apple that contains the latest news and information about iMac, Mac OS 8.5, PowerBook G3, AppleWorks, Sherlock, Apple programs, promotions, seminars, and lots more. To sign up, visit http://www.apple.com/usignmeup.

Mac OS 8.5.1, an update to Mac OS 8.5, fixes several bugs and adds new Sherlock plug-ins for Internet sites. It's available immediately for free download at http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n26165.

This one takes the cake! Check out this article, by IBM, on their Web Team, a group of big blue'ers who definitely think differently . . . on Macs! Check out this site for more details: http://www.austin360.com/biz/12dec/07/7ibmweb team.htm.

I would like to say thank you to all of the BRMUG members. BRMUG has changed a lot over the last several years. We have evolved to embrace the Interent (many other user groups died as the Internet grew or they are still trying to adapt). BRMUG has been made better and stronger by the Internet.

Many of you have been around and watched people come and go. I am sorry to see anyone go. We have lost many people to other cities and states. We have lost many to pressures that life brings. We have lost some because BRMUG could not provide what they needed. I miss all of these people.

As an individual, I have tried over the years to make BRMUG better. My personal life over the last several months has limited what I could offer BRMUG. I apologize and hope that I have not hurt BRMUG. Apple is making a comeback and the Macintosh is stronger than ever. I hope that 1999 can be a strong year for BRMUG.

G3 233 Minitower, 64 Mb RAM, Apple MultipleScan 720 (17" Monitor), Microsoft Office and Quicken. System purchased in August. $1600 OBO. zachary@bit.csc.lsu.edu.

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This month is December, and of course with precious few shopping days left until Christmas, no stocking would be complete without a few cool graphic tools and utilities. So this month, I decide to to make a top ten shopping list of neat toys that any person should have to make their Christmas a little bit merrier.

• Iomega Zip 100 Meg Drive
  After creating all of those really cool graphics, you'll probably want to share them with friends. The Zip drive is the removable of choice for most people. It comes in several flavors, External SCSI $119.995, Parallel $89.95, Atapi Internal $89.95, Zip Plus $169 and USB $149 for Imacs. Zip disks go for $13 each to $10 in packs of 10 or more.

• Iomega Jazz 2G Drive
  Great for backing up your hard drive or really large multimedia presentations. At $399 for External SCSI Jaz drives, $350 for Internal Jaz drives and $99 for Jaz 2G cartridges, it's a rather expensive toy for most people, but essential for graphic professionals.

• MetaCreations Art Dabbler 2.1
  My favorite light duty paint program. Besides having really cool sound effects, the paint tools really work like real crayons, paint brushes, pensils, etc. At $49 or less, it's the next best way to go back to kindergarten.

• MetaCreations SuperGoo
  A real cool morphing program for idealing away those hours before one has to go back to work after the holidays. You can even make movies of your warped creations. It's a steal at $49 or less.

• Graphic Converter 3.2
  The latest version of the most essential graphic utility I own. It converts over 40 graphic formats. Real handy when swapping those candid Christmas Party pics at the office. It's still the best bargain in town at $25.

• UMAX Astra 1220 Scanner
  After taking all of those family pictures for the Holidays, you'll want to send them to relatives near and far over the internet. This scanner is really accurate and easy to use. Beat of all it's very cheap. Bundled software includes Presto PageManager, Vista Scan, Adobe PhotoDeluxe 2.0 and my favorite, Copier. Copier turns your computer, scanner and printer into a photocopier. The Astra 1220 is available as SCSI $189, Parallel $149 and USB $169 for iMacs.

• CD Recorders
  This year recording your own compact disks has become really easy. They come in two flavors, CD-R, a disk that one records once and CD-RW, a disk that can be recorded over 1000 times. CD-R recorders or burners range in price from $250 to $700. CD-R disks go from $2 to being free with rebates. CD-RW drives go for $300 to $700. CD-RW disks are about $30. Most drives come with a utilty called Toast and CD audio software. A word of caution CD-RW disks will not work in CD-Rom drives, but will work in DVD drives.

• Adobe PhotoDeluxe
  Now available in version 3.0. It is still the best image editing program in town for $49. Not only is it great for touching up pictures, you can use it to make web page graphics and even to control your scanner.

• Deneba Canvas 6.0
  Still the cheapest complete desktop publishing powerhouse at $169. it does everything you'd ever need to make a newletter, a brochure, a resume or even Christmas cards.

• Stuffit Deluxe 4.5
  The essential tool for comnpressing and decompressing those holiday graphics you'll share with friends and relatives over the internet. At $100 it's well worth it for saving space on floppy disks and hard drives. Warning, avoid the latest version 5.0 for now due to a bugs and incompatibilities with previous versions of Stuffit. If you're like me and you like to work on the cheap, try downloading DropStuff 4.0 and Stuffit Expander 4.0 with Stuffit Engine 4.0. At $15 each, they get the job done.

Happy Holidays and get busy on those Christmas projects.

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This month's essential is neither free nor a single item. Over the years, I have found magazines to be a vary valuable resource. TImes have changed. I look to the Internet for daily informaton. I look to the Internet for archive type information. But I still look to magazines to enhance my knowledge of the Macintosh.

The Internet has the advantage of being immediate and having up-to-the-minute information. The Internet is much easier to search than large stacks of information. Magazines provide consistent perspectives over a long period of time. Magazines have spent years evolving as a medium. This provides consistency. It also minimizes the bias of an article. With many articles on the web, yoiu don't know how biased it is.

The Macintosh is featured in several magazines. MacUser and MacWorld consolidated to MacWorld. This is still a very good magazine and might well be considered the backbone. It is currently about 200 pages each month. I find the articles in MacWorld very good and reasonably fair. MacWorld is stalwart of the Macintosh print world.

MacAddict is a different type of magazine. It is published monthly. A subscription includes both print and a CD - the best of both worlds. The magazine provides great articles and stories. The CD acts as an electronic resource supporting the paper magazine. The CD includes demos (of software written about in the magazine), the latest Apple updates, and many other interesting things. Internet publications have the advantages of adding links to demos right in the middle of the article. MacAddict can put the demo on the CD without having to interrupt the flow of the story while you stop to download the demo. MacAddict is different in another respect. It has a much younger focus. Much of the publication is game and graphic oriented. Games and graphic tools are the focus of this magazine. If you have never looked at this magazine, go to the newstand and buy a copy.

MacHome is a publication that is trying to target the home user of the Macintosh. It is a very good magazine with lots to offer. Give this one a shot also.

I really enjoy reading magazines. They provide a chance to learn about things when I have time regardless of where I am. They provide an understood relationship - I pay for shipping and the advertisers pay for the magazine (the printing, the salaries of the writers...). Unlike other people, I enjoy reading the advertisements. They tell me who is spending money in the Macintosh market, what those vendors think that we want, and they clue me in on the latest in prices.

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The Christmas holiday season is upon us once again and no home is complete without festive items such as trees, lights, snow men, presents, and of course Santa. This month, I'll focus on a few ways to make your Macintosh experience begin to look like Christmas. So, dig out your old Bing Crosby records, microwave a cup of egg nog and fire up that videotape of a roaring fire.

Every year, many of us trek out to our favorite bookstore to look for the perfect card to send to friends and relatives during the holiday season. This year, why not try something different. Try emailing an electronic greeting card to a friend or relative. Most of these electronic cards are available free on the internet. For something unusual, try out the Think Different cards at Apple.

Most of us also spend hours setting up lights and putting ornaments on Christmas trees that we have to sadly discard after New Year's Day. This years why not bring a little of that sentiment to your Macintosh at home or at work. Try Tiger Tech's Holiday Lights. Holiday Lights is a combination Screensaver, Desktop Background and MusicBox. This program allows you to have all the benefits of the holiday season and none of the unpleasanties such as shovelling snow, vacuuming up pine needles, changing bulbs and picking up wrapping paper. Best of all you can play it anytime you want. Holiday Lights is now available for Windows 95 for those of you who have to at work. You can download Holiday Lights at Tiger Tech for $25.

For the kid in all of us, no Christmas is complete without the toys with fancy bells and whistles. Well, have no fear, Clixsounds is again giving away free holiday sounds to add to your Macintosh to make it chime, startup cool or to give your email program a jolly way to say,You've got mail. They offer several different sounds to add to your Macintosh Clock to make it chime or sing Christmas Carols. You can also add Clixsound's Holiday Startup sound to your Startup folder in your System Folder. The Holiday email sounds can be added to AOL or emailing programs by using Clixsound's Audio Agent program. There are also sound effects that you can place in your System Suitcase folder to change your alarm sounds. Some of these are a little unusual or annoying. This might not make a great office prank. A work of caution, adding startup sounds increases your system memory, so make sure you have plenty of free memory before placing these sounds in your Startup folder. To download these sounds go to Clixsounds.

Merry Christmas and keeping on using these non-essential things to make your Macintosh make more user-friendly.

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Web Page of the Month - Mac Gamer's Ledge

Apple has put a new emphasis on games. The Macintosh world has long appreciated games. The Mac Gamer's Ledge is a web site dedicated to gaming on the Macintosh. Please don't try and tell these people that the Macintosh can't play games!

This site has lots of neat stuff: News, Reviews, Download area, a Search tool and lots more. The main page provides an index to the site and headlines for the news section.

The News section covers everything related to gaming. Find out about the latest releases and demos. Know when the games are really going to be available. Read interviews with the important people in the gaming industry.

Have you been wondering if Lode Runner II was worth getting? Wondering about Future Cop? The review section is for you. Find out what people who play games all the time have to say about that package you are thinking about getting. By the way, Nascar Racing got an 8.3 out of 10 rating when it was reviewed and Lode Runner II got a 4.1 out of 5. These reviews are really nice. They provide a few nice tables listing lots of useful information such as: minimum requirements, publisher, and price. Then the reviewer lists what they believe the requirements should be to enjoy the game along with what hardware they reviewed the game on. Real nice review format!

The Download Section offers exactly what you would expect - downloads. They have a page dedicated to Marathon-related downloads. They also have another page listing Easter Eggs (neat little extras in various games). And of course they have a link to the MIT HyperArchive so you can search for and download your favorite freeware and shareware games.

They also have a Top Ten page. On the Top Ten page you can vote for your favorite game and see the current Top Ten.

The Mac Gamer's Ledge is a great resource for Macintosh users who have a hankering for games. Don't skip this site.

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