Many thanks to all that attended and took part in presenting at last month’s special MMOOS (Maine Macintosh Owners & Operators Society) meeting celebrating the release of Mac OS 10.5 “Leopard”.  We had the largest attendance ever recorded at a MMOOS meeting, thanks in part to MacHeads from other Maine Apple User Groups making the pilgrimage to Brunswick High School.  It was a blast – let’s do it again sometime.

This month we’re back in our regular cozy digs at Thornton Oaks Retirement Community in Brunswick.  We’ll gather next Tuesday, December 18^th, at 6:30 PM in the large meeting room in Bldg. 25 at Thornton Oaks.  Our feature program will be “Keeping You (and Your Mac) Running Fast and Fit”.  We’re going to look at tips, techniques, and applications that will help you spend minimal time working ON your Mac and more time working WITH your Mac.  Check out our website at mmoos.net for directions and more fun stuff.

Now on to Safari 3, which has been around as a Public Beta for awhile but is now “final” in Leopard.  Besides being very fast at rendering pages, Safari 3 also contains several new features to make web surfing easier.

Let’s say you want to find a specific word on an open web page.  Click “Command – F” on your keyboard and a “Find” banner drops down below the Bookmarks Bar.  Enter the text you’re looking for, and Safari shows you the number of matches and brightly highlights matching text while gently dimming the rest of the page.  To “step through” all occurrences of the text on the page, click “Command – G” until you find the one you want.  Slick.

Say you’re typing lengthy comments into a form field on a website.  Before Safari 3, if you typed in a lot of stuff you needed to scroll up and down in the field to review what you wrote.  Safari 3 lets you resize text fields on any web page by grabbing and dragging the corner of the field.  The rest of the page flows around the resized field to make room.

Many times you’ll come across a PDF file embedded in a web page.  New controls in Safari 3 let you zoom in or out of the document, click a button to Save it to your Mac, or open it in Preview, all from within the browser window.