We met last night at CB2 and discussed to web-authoring tools: Coda and RapidWeaver. The former requires you to know HTML, and perhaps CSS, the latter can give you a complete set of web pages, uploaded to the server, without such knowledge. I use RapidWeaver for this website (and several others).

The next meeting will be in March, but we have yet to decide a date.

Chris

The next meeting will be at CB2 on Monday 21 February 2011. Among other things we plan to spend a little time discussing web-authoring tools.

The food at CB2 is good, and reasonably priced; the WiFi is reliable and we’ll try a FaceTime video-conference for the first time in that meeting.

Chris

Well, I upgraded within around 24 hours of iOS4’s being available on iTunes. The upgrade took quite a while, starting with a backup of the iPhone before uploading the new OS and finally restoring the iPhone.

I do like the new Mail functionality; the ordering of the Inboxes reduces the finger tap count quite considerably. I also like the folders, although that took a little while to get used to: the small icons can still be recognised if you forget which folder has which applications.

But the overall impression is of speed – lack of it! It takes ages to select something like a contact in Contacts. Email messages are not too slow to open, considering what you are doing with a small computer, but some applications grind almost to a halt. GPS MotionX is pretty horrendous, but that goes for any large application.

I might consider downgrading to iOS3 if I weren’t seriously considering replacing the iPhone with 4G ...

Chris

Note: I did downgrade that iPhone to iOS3.1.3 as my wife wanted to take over the device [added 15 Aguust 2010]. cb

I wrote too soon ...

Snow Leopard will be with us by the end of the week. Although it will not be show a massive new set of functions, the speed of operation should be much higher as it makes more efficient use of each computer’s hardware.

Since Asam persuaded me to buy the best graphics card when I upgraded to my iMac in July 2008, I am hoping that I shall reap the benefits when I upgrade to Snow Leopard.

Here’s a summary of what’s in it. And here is a list of the applications which will apparently not work with it, at the moment anyway.

Chris

I’ve managed to finish Glyder from Glu, on my iPhone. It’s an excellent game in which you can glide for ages Read More...

Along with Leopard's update to 10.5.2, there is a Graphic update, which comes after the Leopard upgrade. But Bento is also upgraded to v1.02. Don't trust the applications upgrade checker, by the way. My application would not detect the upgrade and I had to go to the Filemaker website and download it.

Oh, and Aperture is upgraded to v2. You have to pay for the upgrade (£65), but the difference is marked. And you have to upgrade to read Olympus E-3 DNG files.

Chris

Happy New Year to all caMMac readers

I start the New Year with full operational Filemaker Pro v9. I had not deactivated either of my installations (iMac and MacBook) before upgrading to Leopard and when I came to run FMPro I found that I was deactivated. What's more I had no activations remaining to me. It took a couple of phone calls to get one activation, then another after it was "escalated" to the USA. Carl at FMPro in the UK came up trumps (thanks, chum). But why did the Leopard installation not warn me? [I used Erase and Instal]

Anyway, now you know: deactivate all your software before upgrading to Leopard. But it is worth the (pretty minor) hassle.

Chris

My installation of Leopard on my machines (I bought a Family Pack at the Regent Street shop) coincided with hard drive problems on both my iMac and my MacBook. I chose the Upgrade option for the installation on the iMac, and that seemed to work fine; but the MacBook would take only an Erase and Instal, for some reason. And, although I keep the files synchronised between iMac and MacBook, it was only once I had completed the installation that I remembered some files that I had not updated ...

However, then I had problems with the Keychain and RapidWeaver: the application would try to access the Keychain (after presenting the Allow/Deny alert) and would then take an age to complete the startup process, with the file loading grinding really slowly. It would take a long time for Force Quit to arrive on the scene and then the whole iMac would limp until I rebooted it. After taking advice on the RapidWeaver Forum, I deleted my RapidWeaver references in Keychain and ran Onyx to clean up the links etc ... Then it worked fine. But Time Machine was not working as I had hoped. Its backups seemed to be complete ones and it ran out of disk space quickly. So I made 3 backups of all my stuff and reinstalled Leopard using Erase and Install and all works beautifully.

I am really pleased with Leopard now; my advice to all is to Erase and Install after you have backed up ALL your current files. And I now have a 1TB Iomega external drive to take Time Machine (bought from Cancom in Cambridge).

Chris

Well, it didn't take long for Filemaker to gain compatibility with Leopard, but now there is another toy to play with: Bunto. Have a look at the Preview page for more details. But it looks great and I am sure that the functionality is just what I wanted. It might challenge SOHO Notes for dominance as the automatic database for my personal use.

Chris