It was a really good meeting at BMac last night. Here're a bunch of notes. I may report more later on some of these.
The main speaker was Hadley Stern, a local guy who has written "iPod and iTune's Hacks" for OReilly. He talked for about 90 mins describing some interesting stuff.
Stern's website: Apple Matters applematters.com
A good source for iTunes related applescripts: Doug Adams dougscripts.com
Make the iTunes visualizer into your screensaver: scriptsaver
Source of alternate itune viualizer plugins: MacUpdate
Freeware app that will convert text into a spoken word sound file. TextReader.
A good place to get text of classic written works: Project Gutenberg.
Source for ideas on creating iTune smart playlists: smartplaylists.com
Source for mp3 tools: mp3 rage.
Someone recommended good "in the ear" earphones from Koss. Did he say they only cost $14.95, maybe.
iPod car controller from Griffin. Cassette plugin, plus remote controls.
Duke Univ. gave all freshman an iPod preloaded with study material. Jury still out on whether this was a good program.
An audience member reports that a local Boston Univ. will announce soon a similar program.
Overall, a very interesting session from Stern.
Some interesting things that got mentioned during Q&A:
Simple Finder. I'll be looking into this.
Portfolio keeps being mentioned as a good photo manager for the professional photog.
Disk Warrior seems to be the disk management/repair utility of choice. Note: I used to be up-to-date on this kind of info. No longer.
Tinkertools mentioned again as a good util for customizing various OSX features.
I'm apparently the last person to hear about Google Maps. This is a new Google tool, made public in the past few days, which offers Yahoo!Maps/MapQuest type functionality. But it seems to have a very cool UI. It apparently only runs on some browsers right now. Firefox only? More on this soon.