InDesign took over from PageMaker as Adobe’s solution for multi-page design, for newsletters, newspapers, books, magazines, brochures, flyers, etc.

Virtually all magazines you pick up at the newstand are done with this tool, or with Quark Xpress. I routinely use it for my proposals, technical manuals, and just about anything I want to end up on a printed page. After starting out in 1985 with Pagemaker 1.0 on two 400k floppy disks, I graduated to Quark and then to InDesign when Quark was slow to develop for OS X.

The main meeting starts at 7pm.

Final Cut Pro SIG discusses “Good Video, Bad Video” at 6pm.The Final Cut Pro User Group meets monthly to share their knowledge about video production and using Apple’s professional video editing software. Anyone interested in video production and editing is invited to attend.

The Final Cut Pro User Group meets monthly to share their knowledge about video production and using Apple’s professional video editing software. Anyone interested in video production and editing is invited to attend.

Contact John Powers at 530-477-1937 orjohn@poohbah.com for more information.Final Cut Pro is a video editing program that is popular with professional filmmakers, film editors, and corporate video and event producers. It has become one of the industry standards for video editing.

Final Cut Pro is part of Apple’s Final Cut Studio suite of creative video tools. More information about Final Cut Studio can be found at http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/ 

Our original plan was to cover networking in April, fonts in May, and photo management with Aperture/Lightroom in June, InDesign in July. Instead, I did the fonts demo in April… and May is a challenge because both Rick and I are going to be swamped with finals and I’m going to have just returned from a week in Washington D.C. 

The networking demo is quite complex to prepare for, but the InDesign demo might be a quick one for me, since I use it frequently, and it might follow on the font/typography thing quite well. 

So, unless someone wants to step in and do a demo of Lightroom/Aperture for May, I’ll do an InDesign demo. Then we can do networking, after that.

The Final Cut Pro User Group will meet Monday, April 7, at 6 pm in the Madelyn Helling Library Community Room.There will be short demonstrations of “Good Video, Bad Video” and “Mixed-Media Editing”.

The Final Cut Pro User Group meets monthly to share their knowledge about video production and using Apple’s professional video editing software.

Anyone interested in video production and editing is invited to attend. Contact John Powers at 530-477-1937 or john@poohbah.com for more information.

Final Cut Pro is a video editing program that is popular with professional filmmakers, film editors, and corporate video and event producers. It has become one of the industry standards for video editing. Final Cut Pro is part of Apple’s Final Cut Studio suite of creative video tools.

More information about Final Cut Studio can be found at http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/The Final Cut Pro User Group is a special interest group of the Sierra Mousetrap Macintosh User Group.

Our next meeting will be about fonts on the Mac. A look at fontbook, and Linotype Font Explorer for managing fonts plus some Typography history and tips, and web resources for finding out more… Also, don’t forget about the new Final Cut Pro SIG, at 6pm right before the main meeting (next post) 

Our regular meeting is at 7pm, and will feature Scott Taylor talking about backups with Carbon Copy Cloner and Time Machine. Carbon Copy Cloner is great for making a bootable backup, and Time Machine is Apple’s new solution for incremental backup and recovery of files.

In addition, before the SMMUG meeting, our first Final Cut Pro SIG (Special Interest Group) is having its first meeting. Participants are welcome to bring examples of their work on hard drives or USB flash drives.  The demo machine does not yet have FCP on it, so we won’t be doing demos, yet. This meeting will be open to everyone’s input on what subjects to cover, how to manage the group, etc. 

Everyone is welcome!

You might be interested in these two excellent articles: 

10 Things Every New Mac Owner Should Know

Guide to Switching to a Mac - LifeHacker

As usual we will have troubleshooting and sharing… then we’ll discuss MacWorld Expo. The new MacBook Air, the Apple TV and Movie rentals, and products for the Mac by other vendors.

John Powers announced at our January meeting his interest in starting a group to discuss Final Cut Pro. He and I are pooling our contacts to see if we can make this happen. This can be an informal group, a special interest group of the Sierra Mousetrap, or an independent user group sanctioned by Apple. If you’re interested, contact me.

Here’s the agenda for the next several meetings. This is subject to change. In addition to the listed subjects, we will cover iLife/iWork a little in each meeting, along with Utilities and Techniques for using your Mac more effectively. Each meeting will also include a troubleshooting session.

This list is preliminary, and we may swap subjects on occasion to accommodate presenter’s schedules or new software releases. 

February 4th: 

MacWorld Expo coverage: Those of us attending MacWorld Expo in San Francisco Jan 15-18 are going to bring back our goodies and observations to share with the group.

March:

Backup & Archiving Strategies. Super Duper, Carbon Copy Cloner, Disk Utility, and Time Machine.

April:

Networking:

Multimedia

LAN/WAN

Cross-platform

File Sharing 

May:

Fonts & Type

FontBook (included in OS X)

FontExplorerX (free)

How fonts work, how they’re made, terminology of type 

June:

Photo management software: Aperture/LightRoom

July:

InDesign