2012.05 Editorial: Off the Mousepad

By Holly McEntee

Hi everyone! We had a really spirited meeting on April 18, with several members chiming in to both help answer questions raised during the first hour and during Dave's presentation on e-books. (See below for a summary.) That's great, we love audience participation — a users' group is all about users helping each other! But now we on the board need your help in a different venue: While the board members have a lot of knowledge among us, we don't know everything (gasp!) and sometimes we receive excellent suggestions for Mad Mac presentations that none of us know anything about. In the newsletter two such topics are offered, and we're interested in any members who can help us out by doing presentations on them. Don't be shy — we're all friends at Mad Mac!

During the 6:00 Q&A at the April meeting a member alluded to the "voice recognition" capabilities on his iPad 3 and asked if there was an Apple-branded voice-to-text app available. A couple of members mentioned Dragon and MacSpeech, but the general consensus that no such app existed. The next day I got an e-mail from the member who explained that what he'd assumed was voice-to-text software was, in fact, Siri: the microphone icon disappeared when he disabled WiFi. (He did not have 3G capability enabled.) So for those who were hoping for an Apple-branded iOS voice-to-text app, you'll have to wait a bit longer.

Ho hum, on April 24 Apple announced 2nd quarter revenue of $39.2 billion and a quarterly net profit of $11.6 billion. Ye gods! I tried putting these numbers into perspective somehow to try and get my head around them, but no luck even with multiple internet searches (some of which led me into very strange territory, indeed...).* Makes the $25 million raised by a local public figure seem downright paltry. On that note, remember to participate in the primary on May 8. You should always welcome the opportunity to exercise your right to vote. For information on voting locations in Madison visit
http://www.cityofmadison.com/election/voter/where.cfm

I hope to see you at the meeting next week!

Sincerely,
Holly

*Info supplied by membership coordinator: The total equalized property valuation of the City of Madison was $21,965,2211,700 in 2011. In other words, Apple made enuf money in 3 months to buy the whole city and still have enuf left over to match the entire economy of Afghanistan.