… our last year as the
Santa Barbara Mac Users Group
Presented in reverse chronological order.
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December 20, 2012: The holidays were upon us and we were celebrating with our annual party. There was no shortage of technical talk, but the focus was also on conviviality, sharing recipes, and other such seasonal fun!
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October 18, 2012: SBMUG members began the meeting with a vote to change the name from Santa Barbara Macitosh Users Group to Santa Barbara Apple Users Group (SBAUG).
Kathy Gleason then showed us her work-in-progress, a photo journal of her travels to New York City and Switzerland. Kathy used iPhoto for iOS to edit the images, put them on the journal’s pages, and annotate them with text on the images and on “sticky notes”, and add weather and calendar date icons. The journal is then posted to the cloud for her friends to see.
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August 26, 2012: SBMUG had its annual picnic again at the private Hope Ranch Beach Park, this time on a Sunday from noon until nine. Turkey hot dogs, hamburgers and salmon with all the fixin’s were provided and barbequed by SBMUG. The site was warmer than Goleta Beach because of its seclusion, but a stroll on the beach was just a few minutes away.
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May 17, 2012: Joe LaCorte, training instructor for MacMechanic, showed us how to convert a MobileMe account to an iCloud account and the nuances involved. He also covered how to set up iCloud and the hardware and software required to do so. Joe’s step-by-step instructions made the process easy to understand.
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April 19, 2012: AT&T representatives Chanta Peak and her team demonstrated products and discussed services that enhance productivity.
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March 15, 2012: SBMUG member Ed Togami talked about a few ways of supplying power to our iOS devices as well as other power-hungry electronics. Ed’s presentation included demos of solar power and means of powering while on the go.
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February 16, 2012: John Wiley, recently retired from a varied career in technology, psychology, writing and teaching, presented his experiences and solutions in aerial photography with a Mac. He took us through the quick steps he uses, from snapping the picture to editing the final product. Many of his photos have been featured in books and magazines and on his popular websites. You can see some examples on John Wiley’s photostream.
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January 19, 2012: Steve McIntosh told us about his experiences as a Mac user in China. He and his wife lived in Beijing from June 2004 to 2011. Steve was doing a number of jobs, including teaching English.
Macintosh computers have long had Chinese language support, though computers running Microsoft Windows have long been dominant in China, with 99.3% market share as recently as January 4, 2012.
BeiMac, the Beijing Mac Users Group, was very small. When the new G5 17-inch iMac came out in 2005 there was no place to buy one in China, so a friend bought one for Steve in Los Angeles. Unusually, it wasn’t dual voltage and wouldn’t run on China’s 220-volt power. Service centers claiming Apple certification were either inadequately equipped or phoney. (A bigger problem was fake Apple Stores, where even the employees thought they were working for Apple.) After Steve’s iMac problem got the attention of Steve Jobs, Apple sent him a 20-inch iMac with a technician to set it up!
The Chinese government was censoring the web, but in 2008 the app Witopia provided a fast, secure internet gateway that bypassed China’s Great Firewall. iPhonAsia.com began as a weekly webcast in China on the release of the new iPhone. Chinese expatriates knew how to get around the firewall, but during the 2008 Olympics it was difficult.
In 2008 Apple was still exotic and largely unknown, but this soon changed. (Apple launched an online store in China in October, 2010. A November 2011 survey in China found that Macs were owned by 5% of respondents and the Mac was the most desirable brand of PC.)
There was so much demand for the iPhone 4S arriving in China on Friday, Jan. 13, 2012, that a near-riot broke out in front of the Beijing Apple store. Many of the people waiting to buy iPhones were migrant workers hired for the equivalent of $14 to buy for scalpers. The introduction of the iPad in 2011 caused a riot too.
In the first week of 2012, the four top-selling books in China were all about Steve Jobs.
The Mac has been “transformed” in the last 4 years, Steve says, and everyone who buys a Mac installs Windows XP with Internet Explorer 6 because all the Chinese websites are designed for IE6. But malware is a big problem. There are more cell phone users in China than in the US but not many land lines. And the iPhone is now a status symbol. (And in the US as well, according to one SBMUGer. About 5 years ago the status symbol at business meetings here was the top-of-the-line Nokia phone; now everyone at the meeting has an iPhone 4S.)