A bit more about Macs - and comics!

If you're new to a Mac, there'll be lots of things you might not know are even there. The F3 key on your keyboard is a good one, for example. You'll see that there's a sort of icon made up of little rectangles on it. If you press that key, you go over to a view called Mission Control (at least in English!). You'll usually see the icon in your Dock too (or you can find it in your Applications folder).

In Mission Control you can see a thumbnail version of every window that's currently open on your Mac. If you then click on one of those thumbnails, you jump straight to that window. You tend to have a lot of windows open when you use a Mac (it's so easy to jump back and forth between programs), so this is a great way of not forgetting what you've got open!

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Another of these 'hidden' functions is the spacebar! If you, say, get a mail with an attached document, click once on the document to select it and then hit the spacebar. You get an instant view of what the document contains without having to open the program it was produced in. If you just want to check a detail in the document, this saves a lot of time. Or if you're cleaning up your desktop and you can't remember what a particular document is, you can find out … and then either save it somewhere or trash it.

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You may know that Chris and I went to the EUROCALL conference in Gothenburg at the end of August (EUROCALL = the European Association of Computer-Assisted Language Learning - a great bunch of people) … so I decided to make a comic out of it!

This is made in a program called Comic Life 2 (http://comiclife.com). It's one of those programs that's free to try out, but you have to buy the full version (for 229 kronor from the Mac App Store - when you buy things from the App Store, btw, they're both installed automatically and updated regularly) if you want to avoid a watermark over your comics after 30 days. 

What I've done here is use one of the templates in the program, then drag photos I took with my iPhone and drop them into frames where they were re-sized automatically. Naturally you can adjust the layouts, etc. As you can see, the program automatically 'comic-izes' the pictures. Imagine what you could do with a bunch of pupils and a digital camera!

In fact, I'm exploring an idea with someone we met in Gothenburg. He teaches English in Tokyo and we were discussing how to get reserved Japanese students to really take part in the lessons … and we started thinking of a business English course, where he takes pictures in Tokyo and we turn them into a business English comic …

You can read more about the EUROCALL Conference here: http://www.eurocall2012.eu

It's going to be in Portugal next year …