appleJAC Users Group

President's Place

by Julie Smith

Harken back only a few short years ago to when, if you wanted a new software program, you either had to go to an electronics store (and hope they carried Apple/Mac software), or purchase a disk off your favorite online site and wait a few days to receive it in the mail.

Well, fellow Mac users, no longer. With the popularity of the iOS devices and instant downloads, you can now purchase your computer software or apps the same way. Keep in mind, "app" is short for application, and an application is software. It’s all the same thing, just different branding. As long as you have high-speed internet connection or access to wi-fi, it is an efficient delivery system.

Doorprizes won at the previous April 3 appleJAC MUG meeting include:

• iTunes card......Brian Fuller
• Flashlight........Todd ?
• Pen...............Ann Lane
• Apple cloth......Jenice Taggart
• Lion Tutorial....Bill Krause
• Apple cloth......Gale Fuller
• Stress apple......Ron Hansen
• appleJAC cloth..Mathias
• appleJAC cloth..Peggy Landwehr
• appleJAC clip...Jim Stevenson
• Stress apple.....Joe Mertzlufft
• Stress apple.....Dan Watson
• Stress apple.....Jan Watson

With the popularity of portable devices like the iPod, iPhone and iPad, we had focused on apps for those devices, but this month we get back to the computer that made it all possible, the Apple Mac. Whether you have an iMac, Mac mini, MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or Mac Pro, you are now able to download your software directly to your computer and start using it right away. And, with the availability of gift cards at nearly any store, gifting software is as easy as ever.

A few of our members will show some of their favorite Mac Apps and demonstrate them for us Tuesday, May 1, 2012, at the May appleJAC Mac User Group meeting beginning at 7:00 pm in Kennedy Hall below the Immaculate Conception School gym.

Hope to see you Tuesday, and bring along a few friends.

SoundJaw: Sound Booster for iPad

a review by Tom Piper

Disappointed when you play music, a movie or podcast only to have the sound muted by your folded-back cover, or whatever the iPad is laying on? Wouldn’t it be great if you could redirect to sound toward you?

The SoundJaw is a device that greatly enhances and boosts the sound of your iPad. Developed specifically for iPad 2 (compatible with the new 2012 iPad), you can now enjoy a movie in the car, a loud room, outside, and all the other places you usually find it hard to hear. This unit is guaranteed to not only revolutionize your iPad, but also the market for accessories in general. 

The idea behind the SoundJaw is so simple, but makes all the difference for listening. It increase both the decibels and the quality of the music to which you listen. This results in a crisper sound that doesn't get lost to the world behind the iPad. More information is available at www.soundjaw.com/.

This little jewel is easy to mount, and does make a real difference in sound redirection. I only wish it was constructed of a thinner material so the back-cover could fit over it more comfortably. I’ve been using mine since I got it at Macworld | iWorld last January.

You can buy a SoundJaw in black, white, or purple for $12.99 at www.tinylightbulbs.com/all-products/soundjaw.html. Free domestic shipping, as well as discounted international shipping, on orders of 2 or more.

iKlip Studio: A Portable Desktop Stand for iPad

a review by Tom Piper

Even with an attractive case, protective foldable cover, and matching back-shield, do you occasionally find it difficult to position your iPad properly next to your work area? Would it be nice to have a portable versatile stand to meet these needs?

IK Multimedia has released another great product called the iKlip Studio. It is constructed of lightweight, shock-resistant, durable thermoplastic material that reliably supports the iPad in both horizontal and vertical positions. The rubber foot pads grip the desktop surface and prevent unwanted sliding, and convenient slots in the housing allow access to every port of the device for charging or connecting to external speakers with handy channels for keeping the cables neatly organized. Its flexible orientation allows its position to tilt from a very low-profile angle (ideal for use with apps like mixers or controllers) to a near-vertical position for use as a reader for tabulatures or scores placed behind keyboard controllers.

A detachable bracket is also included on the iKlip to hold IK’s iRig guitar interface adapter in place and keep it from hanging off the iPad. For extreme portability, the iKlip Studio folds flat so it can be easily carried in any iPad or laptop bag.This stand now occupies a prominent location next to my MacBook Pro for easy and quick reference of my iPad. It also becomes an occasional easel for my spiral-bound notebook and work papers. It is very functional and handy for many things.

iKlip Studio costs $29.99 and is available from select music and electronics retailers worldwide, or direct from the IK Multimedia online store at www.iklipstudio.com. Many other popular iPad and iPhone hardware and apps can also be found at this website. This stand has been designed for musicians, and is a practical solution for most iPad owners in almost any desktop use, as I have found in everyday practice.

ScrapBook for iPad: A New Concept in Telling Your Story

a review by Tom Piper

According to the dictionary, a “scrapbook” is a book of blank pages for sticking clippings, drawings, or pictures in. Is that how you have kept your memories of vacations, special events, and such with paper and paste? There is now a better way with your iPad to do this and so much more.

From Left Coast Logic comes an innovative new called ScrapBook. It is a new way to tell your story in an easy and simple way. You can create flip books with photos, voice attachments, interactive maps, detailed notes and even to do lists with alerts. Whether you want to show an adventure you’ve been on, or plan the next one, this is the app to help you organize, create, and relate, in portrait or landscape mode.

ScrapBook encourages you to create multiple books, resize items with your fingertips, mix notes/journals/photos/voice/maps, drag&drop to place items anywhere on any page, create and present in portrait or portfolio mode, tap any map to interact with Google Maps, make ScrapBooks to commemorate your vacations, trips or your plans for the next one . . . make ScrapBooks to store and build your ideas, and to present your ideas to others.

If that’s not enough, the Notes in Scrapbook are the same as those in their award-winning app SmartNotes which rose to #1 in the business category last year. Each SmartNote has features to attach multiple photos and voice notes of any length, plus To-Do’s with pop-up alerts . . . its even great for journaling.

Within five minutes of activating this app on my iPad, I was posting notes, to-dos, photos, and voice recordings about my Easter weekend with the simple click on the “+”. Resizing and repositioning items were just a pinch and a swipe away, and adding a new page was done in a flip. Quick and effective, this is exactly how easy it should be.

To learn more, go to http://www.leftcoastlogic.com/blog/scrapbook/. Regularly $4.99, it is on special at the iTunes Store for only $2.99 until April 21. This is another fine product from the folks who also brought you SmartPad, SmartNotes, SmartPlans, SmartCal, SmartTunes and SmartTime for iOS devices.

NatureSpace: Tranquility in Your Pocket

a review by Tom Piper

Do you remember as a child when you laid in the grass with the sun in your face and the wind blowing the grass and trees around you, and birds calling in the distance? Or, sitting near a stream with the gurgle and burble of water rushing over the rocks? Or, other tranquil sounds that quieted your spirit, calmed your mind and relaxed your body? Your iOS devise can bring those feelings back again!

NatureSpace Holographic Audio has brought a great catalog of soothing sounds to your iPhone, iPad or iPod. Like dreaming while awake, their recordings create the illusion of being transported to another place. Not just the sounds of nature, but the spaces of forests, canyons, rivers and open fields which induce a “being there” experience. Created with recording techniques designed specifically for headphone listening, they reach deep into your subconscious and the dreaming begins.

As their website (www.naturespace.com) depicts, “Nature’s living, changing, 3-D sound field is captured with accurate depth, distance, space and position. Above, below, behind, and all around, you’ll wonder why you’ve never heard anything like this before. Pristine natural events and environments are arranged and orchestrated into Journeys and Natural Spaces. Always shifting and changing, they go far beyond static nature recordings. Designed to entertain and relax you, they pull you in and become yours.

This is a relaxing experience intended for your earphones. The sound can be optimized for your earbuds (there is a button for that), but I prefer the larger over-the-ear type which help convey the more subtle and expansive sounds, particularly at more modest volume settings. With my eyes closed, reclining in a comfortable chair, without distractions, I soon achieve the “being there” experience which this app emphasizes. The result is a truly relaxing state of tranquility which is most satisfying.

The catalog of sounds comes in two categories. The Natural Spaces are either a singular recording edited down to compress the timeline, or have subtle layering to create an idyllic ambience. There is plenty of room for your mind to wander around through the space as the transitions from busy to calm occur slowly and naturally, with less activity in the foreground. They are designed with the listener maintaining a fixed perspective in the scene. These include Evening at Lake Unknown, Songbirds of Daybreak, Sea of Tranquility, Flew Bayou, and nine more. 

The Journeys are event-oriented recordings, either something occurring around the listener, or the listener's perspective actually moving through different spaces. They have a wider dynamic range and are more theatrical than the Natural Spaces. Some are enhanced with sound design techniques and subtle film scoring methods to enhance the contrast between tension and release. These include Thunderstorm, Zen Wind and Water, The Wolves, First Morning Migration and four more. Each track provides a description of its contents while playing.

NatureSpace is a free app from the iTunes Store and comes with 6 free tracks. They have thought through this process very well, and provides excellent resources in their app to learn more and communicate with the company. Each track is generally 10 to 13 minutes long with 6 tracks to a bundle ($9.99 each, downloadable). Individual tracks are available for $0.99, $1.99 or $2.99 each. All purchases can be made from inside the app. This is a very fine collection of sounds to compensate for our busy everyday lives.

MacPhun Quality: Color Splash Studio/Snapheal/FX Photo Studio

a review by Tom Piper

We’ve been taking pictures for a long time with our SLR and digital cameras, and now its even easier with the high-resolution iPhones and iPads. Once imported into our Macs, there are a variety of simple manipulation tools (like iPhoto) plus some high-end applications like Adobe Elements. What we need now is a set of powerful tools at more reasonable prices.

MacPhun LLC has produced some innovative and robust tools to manipulate, enhance and share your treasured photo images. Three of their Mac applications stand out with features and capabilities of great value to many of us.

Color Splash Studio is a most powerful, comprehensive and intuitive application to help create amazing photography by applying selective colors. Some of the features and tools include integration with latest versions of iPhoto, Photoshop & Aperture, high-end algorithm for fast and most impressive image processing, monochrome layers include grayscale, sepia and blue tone, adjustable vignette/brush/grayscale/sepia/color/blur, support of practically all image formats, and high resolution support. It goes far beyond “old school” color splash (selective colors) apps and doesn’t put any limits to your photography creativity for only $1.99.

Snapheal is a superhero for your photos which will erase unwanted objects, fix skin imperfections, delete text, perform complex image edits in a matter of clicks and seconds. 
With this useful application, you can remove unwanted objects from the image, delete people from the photos, make skin imperfections vanish, erase unwanted text (watermarks, text on signs, etc), dramatically enhance photos with clone & stamp tool, lighten dark areas, sharpen images, add blur, and adjust saturation, gamma, light levels, shadows and much more. The built-in video tutorials are great with video tips on how to use each and every tool. 

The 10 most essential tools to make your photos look perfect. All this power in an amazingly intuitive and stylish user interface, which lets you preview the results, compare resulting image with original, switch between tool panels with a click and what is most important understand how to work with the app in no time. Snapheal was created to help you make perfect photos easy for only $14.99.

FX Photo Studio PRO will take you to the brand new level of photo creativity on the Mac, no matter whether you are a professional photographer or just a hobbyist. You can combine and layer any of the 172 effects to create the perfect looking image. It has a completely customizable interface that allows you to preview each effect, compare original and resulting images, label favorites and even save combinations of effects as presets. The new masking and color splash tools allow you to apply effects and colors to a part of the image only, giving even more creative freedom to your photography. 

Effects include Lo-Fi, Grunge, Art, Vintage, Tilt-Shift, Sketches, Hollywood FX, Color Splash, Blurs and many more. With this set of professional editing tools you can improve and enhance your pictures even further. The elegantly simple design provides easy access to every photo processing tool you'll need, without cluttering your screen and allowing you to focus on your image. You can import pictures from Aperture or iPhoto library, load images from any folder on your Mac or digital camera, export images in a variety of formats to iPhoto or folders on your Mac or share via most popular social networks, and even an enhanced denoise tool. This innovative and powerful FX Photo Studio Pro is available for only $39.99.

Macphun markets itself as having inspiring software, all of which can be found at http://www.macphun.com/. I’ve only looked at these three, but they also have PhotoPal, Perfect Photo, Silent Film Director, Cartoonatic, ArtCamera, DoodleCam Focusold, MyWisdom, ArtPuzzle HD, Predator Vision and much much more. All of these are practically-priced and well-developed products that can be of excellent value for us. Indeed, these are the powerful tools we’ve been looking for at reasonable prices, and their frequent updates keep making these tools better and better.

Recent Malware: What To Do About It

by Randy B. Singer (see attribution at bottom)

There are a couple of new Trojan Horses going around that are quite nasty. The one that is receiving the most press is called Flashback.

Article: Mac Flashback Trojan: Find Out If You’re One of the 600,000 Infected <http://gizmodo.com/5899352/mac-flashback-trojan-find-out-if-youre-one-of-the-600000-infected> Find out if you are already infected by the Flashback Trojan, and it tells where to go to find instructions on how to eliminate this malware if you are. (Don't be too upset by the title of that article. I've yet to hear a single firsthand account of someone being infected by Flashback.)

A simpler method (i.e. non-command line) than the F-Secure steps to check to see if you are infected by Flashback is this little app that runs the test for you. It just posts a dialog that says whether or not you're infected. It does not make any attempt to remove the trojan. You can download it here: <http://rsdeveloper.com/downloads/test4flashback.zip>

Apple has already pushed out an update to Java that includes a patch to make your Mac immune to Flashback. Once you either find out that you aren't infected with Flashback, or you find out that you are infected with Flashback and you eliminate it, it would be a very good idea to go ahead and update Java to acquire immunity to Flashback.<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5228?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US>

There is another Trojan Horse going around that is carried via a Microsoft Office document. Don't confuse this with the Flashback Trojan. Apple has already pushed out a patch to protect you against this Trojan also. Apple updated XProtect with a definition to catch the Office vulnerability. They refer to it as "OSX/Mdropper.i." This should have happened automatically in the background on your Mac if your are running OS X 10.6 or higher (i.e. Snow Leopard or Lion).<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT465> (There is no version of XProtect included in versions of OS X prior to OS X 10.6/Snow Leopard.)

In addition, if you have Microsoft Office installed, it's a good idea to install the Microsoft updaters for Office. These include a patch against this Trojan also:<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads>

Now, the question that always comes up is: Do I need to install anti-virus (AV) software at this point? Most ordinary Mac users do completely without any AV software, and yet you just about never hear about a Mac user being infected with Malware. There are still no actual viruses (defined as self-propogating software) for the Macintosh. I’ve told you, above, how to deal with the latest malware threats without the need for AV software. So not much has changed that would require that we all run out and purchase AV software.

I’ve run what is usually the most highly rated (in magazine comparison tests) AV software program for the Mac for over a decade: Intego’s VirusBarrier ($50) <http://www.intego.com/virusbarrier> just to be able to tell clients that I am running AV software. (Clients don’t understand that a Macintosh isn’t the same thing as a Windows computer. And I don’t want to bother to try explaining the difference to them.) In all that time VirusBarrier has never actually protected me from anything of any consequence. While VirusBarrier is excellent, some users have (rarely) reported that it can cause nasty software conflicts (as can any AV software that runs constantly in the background). And since VirusBarrier always running in the background on your Mac, even though it is mostly unnoticable, there is some (minor) level of performance degridation (and once again, this is true of any AV software that is always running in the background).

So, instead, you may want to download and regularly use this free product: ClamXav (free) http://www.clamxav.com/. ClamXav doesn’t run constantly in the background like most other AV programs. (So it shouldn’t cause any software conflicts or slowdowns.) It can, however, be set to run on a schedule. It is easy to use, and it is comprehensive. So it is a good choice to install on your Mac, even if AV software really isn’t necessary for your Mac.

___________________________________________
Randy B. Singer (via Apple User Group Digest)
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)
Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html
___________________________________________

All iOS Apps for 04/03/12 appleJAC MUG Meeting

President's Place

by Julie Smith

When thinking about what to write for the April President’s Place, a series of random thoughts entered my head. They range from what do pro golfers do for fun and relaxation to the elementary question: “why do you drive on a parkway and park in a driveway?” The golfer question has always been of particular interest, maybe only to me, as over the years I’ve read a number of interviews with professional athletes who seem to play a lot of golf when they are not practicing or playing their professional sport. I’ve always wondered, what, then, do pro-golfers do when not playing or practicing their sport? That’s just how my mind works.

I remember over the years seeing pictures of animals in costumes and wondered why people would do that to their pet. Well, now I have pets and am like a proud parent when their child wears a cute costume or accessory.

Yes, I have become one of those people of which I made so much fun for years.

Now, before you wonder where I’m going with all of this, please follow along . . . 

I think the same could be said for a group such as ours. I remember, back before I started using a Mac, that PC users used to make fun of Mac users and talked about how simplistic the computers and users were. I have discovered through the last few years, especially after joining the appleJAC Mac Users Group, that we see our computers as less of an inanimate object, but more an extension of ourselves.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I suspect a good number of you enjoy using your computer for work and fun, and quite frankly, somewhat miss it if you don’t have the opportunity to use the equipment as often as you might like. That includes the revolutionary iOS devices (iPod, iPhone, iPad) that have become commonplace.

Now that those devices have permeated nearly every sector of life, be it work, play or study, so has the explosion of available apps for these devices. Which is why we are devoting our next meeting to them.

Join us at 7:00pm, Tuesday, April 3, 2012, at Kennedy Hall at Immaculate Conception Church, for an informative demonstration of the latest in Mac OS and a few of our favorite apps.