Usually the meetings last for hours! :-)
Here are the minutes from our meetings. Nothing formal, but we hope it will show people either interested in the group or who could not make it to the meeting what we covered. | January 7, 2009 - "Apple Mail" with Brian Hubbard December 3, 2008 — "Introducing Pages" by Jon-Eric Eliker September 3, 2008 - "MobileMe" with Clayton Yocom August 6, 2008 – "The iPhone 3G" by Brian Hubbard July 2, 2008 by Jon-Eric Eliker
This month we changed things up a bit. When we started the club meetings a few months back, we planned on having three presentations each meeting. The intent was to provide a variety of topics each meeting in order to attract as many interested people as we could. The side-effect was that we consistently ran out of time and were forced to either run long, cut some of the presentations short, or drop some of our agenda items altogether. Now, instead of three presentations, we are only scheduling one “main” event for the evening along with ad-hoc “lightning talks” (plus the usual snacking, chatting, and so forth). The one-event idea seemed like good approach since we usually had a lot of interaction from the group. Also, this approach would allow us to get more in-depth on the chosen topic than time allowed with three topics to cover. The “lightning talks” were an idea of Ed’s (from Dealerflow, of one of our sponsors) that he had picked up from conferences he has attended. At the beginning of the club meeting, five-minute time slots were allocated for later in the meeting. Any attendee could pick a slot and use their five minutes to talk about any Apple topic on which they wanted to share. The key is to still provide a variety of information during the meeting while still keeping the time under control. Our main presentation of the evening was from Anthony Smith. He gave the club a thorough of iTunes including the various searching, sorting, and categorizing options. It was great to see such a complete tour of a product many of us have but may not fully understand yet. As expected, many attendees chimed in with descriptions of how they use iTunes and what features they find most helpful. We did not have any lightning talks on the schedule this evening. It seemed appropriate to give everyone a month to think about the idea so we will start with the scheduled time-slots at our August meeting. Our drawing winner this month was our presenter, Anthony Smith. Maybe this can serve as encouragement to others who might have an idea or two they would like to present at a future meeting. Please join us at our next meeting on August 6 at 6:30 (6:15 for snacks). June 4, 2008 by Jon-Eric Eliker Another great turn-out this month and, once again, we saw a few new faces. We are grateful to our sponsors for providing a meeting location (Inventrek) and food and drinks (Beckley Computer Center and Dealerflow). Mark Shorter, our club President and Brian Hubbard, our Vice President, were both back with us this month after missing last month’s meeting due to other obligations. Brian resumed his position as meeting leader and started us off at 6:30 as people were finishing their pizza and soft drinks. Brian presented on the topic of “finder and folder management.” He walked us through the basics of Finder including different views available and the benefits of each, and demonstrated some helpful keyboard shortcuts. He also shared with us his suggestions on managing a folder structure to quickly locate your files. Throughout the presentation, Brian demonstrated some of the latest advances in Leopard like CoverFlow, Stacks, and QuickView. Following his presentation, Brian lead the group for in a discussion about the future of the KAUG web site and some options we have available. Notably, he demonstrated a prototype web site he’s created using Ning. Expect more discussions on the Jon-Eric was up next with the topic “putting your own videos on your iPod or iPhone.” His presentation was focused on moving video from iTunes, YouTube and DVDs to any of the later-model iPods. Following a tour of iTunes, he used free software to download and convert YouTube videos (Fast Video Download for Firefox and iSquint) and to convert videos from your own DVDs to a format usable on an iPod (Handbrake). A few meeting attendees pointed out that YouTube stores iPod-compatible videos that may be downloaded directly using a bookmarklet such as the one on this blog. We wrapped up the evening with another drawing for Apple-themed merchandise (won by Mark Shorter) and an open Q&A time. A few new meeting topic suggestions were given during the Q&A time including using Airfoil and Apple’s AirPort products. Our next meeting is July 2 at 6:30 (6:15 for snacks). We hope to see you there!
May 7, 2008 by Jon-Eric Eliker
Thanks to Inventrek and our other sponsors, Beckley Computer Center and Dealerflow, for providing a great meeting location, the Apple-themed prizes, and pizza, snacks, and drinks. We saw a number of the same faces from our last meeting plus a couple new faces. It is hard to ask for more than that! Mark Shorter, our President and Brian Hubbard, our Vice President, were both unable to attend this meeting because of other obligations. Ed Brown (Dealerflow) made the comment that this is probably the first KAUG meeting ever where both Mark and Brian were missing. I suppose after 24 years it was bound to happen. We will be glad to have them back at our June meeting which will be on June 4.
April 2, 2008 by Jon-Eric Eliker
The first club meeting since 2005 was held on April 2 at Inventrek Technology Park. We were pleasantly surprised to have twenty people attended. What a great turn-out for the first meeting! The group was quite diverse including a couple of long-time KAUG members, local high school and university instructors, a few college students, employees of firms with offices at Inventrek, to name a few. Our meeting announcements in the local newspapers and at Delphi seemed to be most effective in reaching people.
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