TransMUG.com

I love to compile our friend Jost’s Tool Kit for the Northern California Translators Association‘s journal, Translorial, not only because I always learn interesting bits, but also because it reminds me of all the annoyances I don’t have to bother with anymore since I stopped being a regular Windows user. It also saddens me when he has to caution “when it ain’t broken don’t fix it.” After all, one of the pleasures of paying a lot of money for those fancy computers is to equip them with the latest technology. It is unfair to have to fear breaking the whole thing each time you want to try a cool new gadget or simply upgrade to the latest version!

As a Mac user, you can upgrade your apps endlessly without fear, and the best tool I have found for that purpose is the MacUpdate website. Every time you download an app from the site, its reference is kept with your account and each new update is signaled to you by email. Mac shareware is fantastic and covers almost every productivity need you may have, and beyond. Try these applications without fear and keep them up to date; you and your Mac deserve it.

The Mac platform is getting new converts everyday, particularly since you can now run Windows at full speed on a Macintosh; so, to answer the much anticipated launch of Vista, Apple dressed all its store associates in “Beyond Vista” T-shirts. After reading a few critiques of the new Windows system, there are very, very few features I find that I haven’t been using for almost two years now in Mac OS X Tiger. Even the new Windows system font looks like the Mac’s! And Mac OS X Leopard is poised to bring great new breakthroughs this Fall.

After Macworld, I wrote online about the impeding incompatibility of Wordfast with the next edition of Office for the Mac and today, as I am writing this column, Wordfast creator Yves Champollion just announced that a Java version of Wordfast is in the works. NCTA members will meet with him when he visits SF on April 18th. To learn more about this, come to the next TransMUG meeting on May 12th, where you will get the full report.

Stay up to date with this TM saga, and more, here and by subscribing to the TransMUG list. Membership in this full-fledged Mac User Group recognized by Apple also offers advantages such as discounts on Mac products, among others. And it’s free!

This article was written for the May issue of Translorial.

Written by Yves

My presentation on RSS at the 2006 ATA Annual Conference can now be downloaded from this site in three different version: a 5’38″, 6.5MB QuickTime movie, and two 7.1MB PDF documents, one with notes, and the other one without notes by clicking the corresponding links. Thank you for your interest.

Written by Yves

Outreach in New Orleans, at the 2006 ATA Annual Conference, has worked well this week. There is obviously a steady number of translators who want to do all their work on their Mac. Being able to run PC apps in your Mac is nice, but having them as native Mac apps is better. Trados representatives on the exhibit floor received many requests from Mac users for a native version of their market-leading product.

In the meantime, translators whose interest has been piqued by our mini card campaign can become members of the full-fledged Mac user group that is TransMUG on our Yahoo! Group site, with discounts and other benefits even for those not in the San Francisco Bay Area where TransMUG is based. I will give an account of how the group benefitted from the contacts made at the Conference in a future article.

For now, I am glad to welcome a handful of new members brought by the reprint of my latest article in Translorial, the journal of the Northern California Translators Association, in À Propos, the newsletter of the French Language Division of the ATA.

Written by Yves

Following a steady tradition, TransMUG, the NCTA-sprung Mac user group for translators, will meet again before the next general meeting. Less traditionally, though, this time we will see each other on a Sunday, and in South San Francisco, at the Hilton Embassy Suites. The hotel has a nice atrium, with sandwich counter, which should accommodate us perfectly between 11:30 and 1:00, right before the general meeting. Neither Apple nor the third-party developers for the Mac platform rested on their laurels since our last meeting, and between the Leopard announcements and possibly much more to come between press time and our meeting, there will be lots to talk about.See you on the 17th.

Written by Yves

The TransMUG blog is now open for business! After being tempted to use Blogger–with a beautiful interface and great features–I finally decided against it since the interface was not allowing to export the blog in case we would like to use a different host or host it ourselves in the future. WordPress.com is completely flexible on that end. Besides, its templates are quite decent.

If you have any knowledge of CSS that would help us customize the TransMUG blog nicely, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Enjoy!

Written by Yves