Our October meeting was about word processing. This is a vast subject that, in one way or another, encompasses the entire history of microcomputers. Lawrence Charters, Strait-Mac Vice President, purchased his first microcomputer to turn it into a word processor. No word processing programs existed, so he wrote his own. (It was terrible, but he had a word processor!) We also covered, briefly, Apple’s Special Event on October 13, introducing new iPhones and the HomePod mini. This was a virtual meeting, via Zoom.
Video recording of the October 20, 2020 meeting
Notes by Kathleen Charters
Question and Answer (Q&A)
Q: Member has unwanted key clicks, especially when using the “delete” key
A: Check the Accessibility and Notifications settings in MacOS. Accessibility feedback can accidentally trigger keyclicks, speaking text on the screen, zooming text, and other features. Notifications can also be triggered by almost anything you set to give you a notification.
Q: Upgraded to Catalina and looking for missing files; how do you look for a file on iCloud and in Time Machine?
A: In Finder, go to Settings and check everything under General. This will show iCloud Drive and (if you have it) Microsoft One Drive and Adobe Creative Cloud. these are Then set the preferences under the Sidebar to show whatever you wish in the Finder sidebar. If Time Machine is turned on, you can go back 6 months to restore from there, or any other period. Time Machine Preferences show in the Menu Bar and can see the last time it backed up; turning it on and leaving it on, will slow things down a bit during the first backup since everything is backed up. After that, it backs up on the hour and takes a few seconds to a few minutes.
Q: I use OverDrive to download audiobooks, but now it has an X.
A: The X means it is not a 64-bit application, and your Mac won’t run older 32-bit apps. Look for a version that will do 64-bit, or use Kindle to access audiobooks. You can also use Libby for books from NOLS (North Olympic Library System).
Q: Why is Apple going to 64-bit only?
A: The use of 64-bit makes your operating system and data more secure. Catalina also separates the operating system from your data on the rest of the machine, making it much harder for anyone to break in, or for you to accidentally compromise your system.
If you cannot get a 64-bit version of a program, it is possible to set up a virtual 32-bit machine using something like Parallels; this is an advanced procedure recommended only for advanced users.
Q: My iPod Nano died. Apple’s online help asks the user to try using a different power cord and this solved the problem.
A: HDMI cables are sensitive to static electricity, as are Lightning and USB cables. The cables are also delicate, with Lightning, Thunderbolt and HDMI cables containing built-in electronics. Treat cables with care.
Q: My desktop Mac from 2011 cannot get WiFi or ethernet to connect to it, is this too old to connect?
A: If the ethernet cable is working it will connect; WiFi may be too old for the type of encryption currently used. If ethernet does not work and the cable is good, this could be a circuit board issue, and a circuit board failure will take out both WiFi and Ethernet networking capabilities.
Q: I don’t know if I should get a new Mac or upgrade my old one.
A: One problem with upgrades is the range of devices that are called, say, iMac. An iMac could be a colorful machine from 1998 or a burnished aluminum iMac from 2020. What can be upgraded, what components need to be used, and how the machines can be taken apart and put back together varies enormously. Some iMacs (and MacBooks) have soldered-in RAM that cannot be upgraded, other machines can be upgraded but are too old to make this worthwhile, or the upgrade process requires completely dismantling the machine, and putting it all back together is a job left for experts.
Advice on memory: you need a minimum of 16 GB of RAM; 8 GB will work, technically, but can slow down the machine. If you do your own memory upgrade, it might void your AppleCare, and you may have to pay the full price of the repair.
Solid state (SSD) vs. hard drive vs. Fusion drive – a Fusion Drive saves data to solid-state as an intermediate step and later saves to the hard drive; if the machine crashes it is easier to recover from a hard drive than a solid state drive or a fusion drive. data centers use hard drives or solid-state drives, not fusion drives.
Solid-state drives are much faster but also more expensive than hard drives.
Costco carries only the low-end versions of Apple machines. Apple will make a machine specific to your needs, but the price is higher, too.
Business Meeting
Strait Macintosh User Group President Sabrina welcomed new attendees. In response to a question, Sabrina said the membership fee is $24 per household; mail a check to the PO Box shown on the website, made out to SMUG.
The SMUG mailing list has over 350 addresses. As a year has passed since the list was built, and many people have not attended or written, we will purge names of those who have not attended or paid dues over a year; a notice explaining this will be sent out and give a month’s grace before names are put in inactive file.
A member said postings on NextDoor do not reach Port Angeles; how do we let the Port Angeles people know about the opportunity to meet on Zoom?
Several people noted Wave Broadband has had issues over the past 2 months, including 18 days with an outage in last month.
Discussion of new Apple devices
Apple has introduced new iPhones, and the HomePod mini.
Advantages of HomePod; if you have two HomePods they will automatically link and play in stereo, with very good sound. The HomePod mini does not have a woofer, unlike the larger HomePod. The new HomePod software has an intercom feature that allows a message to be sent to all other HomePods on the network. The HomePod mini is $99.
iPhone 12 – The design change is similar to iPhone 5 with the aluminum edge, new iPhone is designed so it is not hard to hold on to; the new glass (current gorilla glass is tough) is a crystalline ceramic, transparent and stronger than previous surfaces.
The international standard for cell phones is the same as that used by AT&T; Verizon only works in the US, and has a better network in the US. The new iPhone has 5G but there is no standard for 5G, and what one vendor calls “5G” doesn’t necessarily mean what a competitor means.
Olympic Peninsula is not a population center so do not expect to see high-speed 5G here anytime soon.
The iPhone 12 camera now offers a low light mode due to in-phone processing, and does not require extra lighting for most indoor photos.
The iPhone mini to iPhone Pro Max offers a range of camera capabilities; easy to take good photos in low light. Why is the camera important? People now take more photos with their smartphones than they make phone calls; photography has significant improvement.
Presentation on word processing
Will talk about three different word processors: Microsoft Office 365 Word works on desktops, on the web, on an iPad app, and on an iPhone app; Apple Pages does the same; Google Docs is web-only, but exports Word-formatted documents.
Demonstration
MS Word – the first GUI version was introduced in 1984 for the Mac. In 1989 Microsoft bundled it with PowerPoint and Excel as Microsoft Office; it has now evolved to Microsoft Office 365, incorporating a calendar and mail app as well as a notetaking app, available on the desktop or on the web with a web browser. Old versions of Word documents end in .doc and new ones end in .docx.
Things you can do: word processing is complex, as you can do simple things or complicated things, as there are an almost infinite number of ways to express yourself on paper, with many different languages and character sets, running left to right, right to left, and up to down.
Word will optionally show invisible characters if you select the Paragraph symbol in the menu.
Find and replace, e.g., find two spaces and replace all with one space.
Track changes – can turn off.
Can search for a word and get the number of occurrences, can look for just a word with a space after it or can search for a string that may be part of a longer word.
Can replace a name with an abbreviation or an abbreviation can be replaced with the full name.
Can get rid of white space – carat W — ^w — will replace white space with a single space.
To get rid of centered text can select all and align-right.
There are multiple formats you can save to.
Almost everything that Microsoft Word does can be done in Pages. Pages is included, free, with all recent Macs, and if you don’t have it, you can probably download it from the Mac App Store.
Press the Command Key and spacebar to use Spotlight to find and launch Pages.
Pages can open a Word document and can export to a Word formatted document; Pages offers several export formats.
Pages is free; MS Word is an annual subscription.
Pages file format is unique to Pages and cannot be read by other word processors.
Text Editor
Rich Text Format (.rtf)
BBEdit – used for writing code, can read a .RTF (Rich Text Format) file, originally developed by Microsoft for Word.
Can copy from MS Word and paste into BBEdit to get rid of anything that cannot be used on a Web page; the result is clean text that requires minimal editing before posting on a Web page.
Also allows saving in different formats and will open an MS Word document although does not show all of the MS Word formatting.
Can get rid of double carriage returns and replace them with single carriage returns to get rid of white space and make document smaller in size.
Can remove page breaks to shorten length.
Can change document size, printers need .6-inch margins to print properly.
To make it easier to read change the formatting for the paragraph to add space after so have 6 points after every line.
Amazon has automated book publishing, needs to have documents properly formatted for this to work well.
Take Control Books – offers several electronic books on word processing and text editing. Buy them, download them, and start reading in minutes.
Apple’s lineup for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations: Pages (word processing), Numbers (spreadsheet), KeyNote (presentation – can also export and make a movie).
SimpleNote text editor
Made by Automatic which also does WordPress (the SMUG site is created in WordPress).
All SimpleNote documents are stored in the cloud, just pure text (no formatting).
Focus on writing, can read and write from any device with a web browser.
Google Docs
From a browser e.g., Chrome, select Google options: Google Docs.
Saved as type, easy to use, can format, can download in several formats including ePub, a . PDF is rigid in size but ePubs sizes to the device used for viewing; all are saved to Google Drive; can use this to share with other people, many people can work on the same document.
Questions and comments
Used Word at work, KeyNote, and Pages at home, use Latex to write math equations in Pages much easier than doing this in Word; can create math formulas and move them around using Latex; example of mathematics dissertation.
Writers use left and right delete using an extended keyboard or can use a key combination in some applications.
Word shortcuts may not be documented:
- Searching for a paragraph feed: type carot P — ^p
- Tab is carot T — ^t
- White space is carot W — ^w
Big Sur is a huge change since moving to a new chip (Apple silicon) and Apple wants to be backward compatible with current chips, two million iOS apps support a billion iOS devices and want to support these apps on Macs; also clever hacks forced revisions.
The pandemic has slowed down the development of systems software.
Hope the release is reasonably soon.
Next month; Health benefits of the new Apple Watch and the latest iOS by Kathleen Charters.