The Retired SIG met at the Pi office as usual for its October meeting. The topic was Apple's Keynote application. The topic derived from the group being treated to the previous month's presentation done in that program and the capabilities of it amazed us. We simply wanted a closer look under the hood.
Len Adler, the Retired SIG's leader, started the meeting by asking the seven
other attendees to introduce themselves and tell the group what their future
plans were for using their Mac. We had a PC user guest in the group who wanted
to sit in to help her decide whether her next computer should be a Mac. We
did our level best to be unbiased and fair, but we definitely touted the
advantages of a Mac.
With the room darkened and the projection screen lit up, Bob Jarecke, our
President, gave a demonstration of the iWork package, of which Keynote is a part. We watched as he played an iPod presentation done in Keynote that he had built for a previous meeting. He also toured a couple of blog
pages to quickly demonstrate their purpose and content.
Finally, we dove into the main event. Bob opened Keynote and then as a group we proceeded to work our way through choosing a template theme and building the first slide. With relative ease we evolved into creating a slide that we will use to advertise and promote our SIG. We titled the slide appropriately and added follow on text regarding our regular meeting day and time. Then it got creative! We downloaded a photo taken of our previous meeting by Richard Sanderson. It was easy to obtain from the Pi's .Mac Public Folder. We played with various aspects of the photo, added a bubble comment, changed the slide theme in mid-stream as well as moved text and the graphic to get the best presentation. In a matter of minutes, we had created a slide for our SIG to be displayed on the Web. Now that was fun! Keynote can export presentations as PDF files, and we've included a 408K copy of our November meeting notice.
In our conversations leading up to the principal demonstration, several good ideas for future meeting topics emerged. One interesting topic was to review language programs, so in the weeks before our next meeting, we will check out the language program Rosetta. Perhaps we can get a demonstration of that!
As for the next meeting in November, it will feature a presentation on the value of backing up data on a regular basis. Do you already do it? How do you do it? Nancy Little will show us how she uses Apple's Backup program and Len Adler will show how to back up your data to an external hard drive.
Note: Our usual meeting date is the fourth Thursday of the month, but that day in November is Thanksgiving Day, so we will meet a week earlier on November 16 at 1 p.m. at the Pi Office in Rockville, Maryland. See everyone there!