Mac

Discusses all things Mac and Apple related.

Contact: Richard Corzo. Meets the first Thursday of each month, 7:00 p.m. at the DACS Resource Center.

DACS Community Forum: http://www.dacs.org/forum/

News and Notes

At the August SIG meeting we discussed iOS4 for the iPhone and iPod touch. It is the update to the former iPhone OS, now called iOS. It runs on iPhone 3G and later iPhone models, and the second generation and later of the iPod touch.

Its biggest feature is multitasking of third-party programs, but that feature on the iPhone requires at least an iPhone 3GS.

Note that there has always been multitasking of Apple-provided apps. For instance you could run the iPod app in the background and start another app, or you could be on a phone call and then open the Safari browser at the same time. What's new is that now you can run an audio app like Pandora in the background while working with another app, or receive a Skype call when you are doing something else on the iPhone. To view which apps are running or suspended, just hit the Home button twice to see a scrollable list at the bottom of the screen and choose which.

Another new feature is app folders, so that you can organize related apps in folders on any of your Home screens. With up to 9 apps in a folder, this also increases the number of apps you can access easily.

The Mail app has been improved with a unified Inbox for those of us with multiple e-mail accounts, and more direct access to the inboxes of those accounts.

There is also a new iBooks app you can download from which you can view books from the new iBookstore, books in ePub format, as well as PDFs you can load through iTunes.

We also had time for user questions, and two people asked about the Time Capsule. One had a friend who wanted to partition the hard drive inside the Time Capsule, but there is no easy way to do this. It turns out the reason he was interested in partitioning, was he wanted to back up more than one Mac on his network. To do this you don't need to partition the drive. On each Mac go into Time Machine preferences in System Preferences, and select the Time Capsule as the backup drive. The Time Capsule will happily back up the multiple Macs and keep them separate.

There will be no Mac SIG meeting in September, but be sure to see Dave Marra's presentation on Snow Leopard at the DACS general meeting on Tuesday, September 7. We'll resume the Mac SIG in October.

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