At every meeting we have little Q&A session, during which members have the chance to bring forward their Apple/Mac related question in front of the group and have them help finding an answer to the troubles.
Below you’ll find last month’s Q&A notes:
Q. Do Passbook ticket appear when you travel or all the time?
A. If you find your ticket on the BA app, you can download it to Passbook
Q. I haven’t upgrades to Mavericks from Mountain Lion, because I have CS5, and when I google, it implies I won’t be able to open my documents. Is that still the case?
A. It is not compatible with Mavericks. Worked on a Mac Mini though – just need to increase RAM in the system, as it needs more memory. Everything that works in Mountain Lion should work in Mavericks.
Q. I use a program called Expression (Microsoft). I can still use it in Mountain Lion but it has gone slow. Any suggestions?
A. Try splitting up your libraries into smaller collections.
Q. What would you recommend from a iPhone 4S with 8GB, should you upgrade to 7.1?
A. You may find that the cache files with the download may fill up the phone and cause a crash. You need to clear out everything off the device first before downloading it. So, for example, have about 1.5GB free.
NOTE. If you are thinking of upgrading to Mavericks, make sure you have at least 4GB of internal RAM.
Q. I have been looking for a simple way to make musical scores on the Mac. Is there something simpler than Sibelius? (I want to make a music score)
A. This is a note sent in to us:
There’s some great music notation software out there that’s worth looking at. Some not so cheap, and others that, arguably, don’t cover as much ground…
Here’s a quick run down:
1. Sibelius (http://www.sibelius.com) – a professional application. This is what I use, and I’d recommend it very highly. There are also student/reduced functionality versions available if the full version price tag is tad scary…
2. Finale (http://www.finalemusic.com) – a fully featured direct competitor of Sibelius (above). In my opinion, much less intuitive to use, but also has slimline versions available.
3. MuseScore (http://musescore.org) – free software, and reasonably comprehensive, so I’ve been told
4. Noteflight (http://www.noteflight.com) – cloud based software with a free account available, although full features require a pay for subscription
5. NotateMe (http://www.neuratron.com/notateme.html) – iOS software that recognises your music handwriting and converts it to music notation. Frankly though, it’s in its very early stages of development and there’s a long way to go yet.
6. Also, one to watch for the future… (http://blog.steinberg.net) – it’s currently being built by the fabulous (and recently made redundant) development team who build Sibelius (no. 1 above), and who now all work for the German music technology company Steinberg (who develop, amongst other software, the famous Cubase music/audio sequencing programme). The team are building a brand new music notation programme for Steinberg, that will certainly rival all of the above, but we’ll have to wait at least another year (possibly longer) before we see it on the shelves…
There are others too, but these are the frontrunners/easiest to use.