Meeting Notes - 17 June 2014

by **bdahm** Wed Jun 18, 2014 5:35 pm

New people continue to show up. This week Billy, a web designer, came to check us out. We’ll probably never see him again.

SwiftKey
Mike was on hand today to give us a demo of the keyboard app, SwiftKey. The SwiftKey keyboard lets its user use a single finger and glide across the keyboard touching the letters in a single, continuous motion. In theory, anyway, this is faster than poking at specific keys. In addition it features predictive suggestions, so as you type several words appear above the keyboard offering possible choices for the next word. Selecting the word could speed things up considerably. It works similar to auto complete, but in addition it learns your word choices over time and thereby becomes more accurate.

Mike showed a series of screen casts to demonstrate how it works. It used to cost $3.99 in the Google Play Store, but now it is free. In iOS 8 Apple will allow use of alternate keyboards for the first time and this one will be one of the top choices no doubt.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.touchtype.swiftkey

Thanks to Mike for the demo.

BitCoin Goes Local
BitCoin has been around since 2009 and has achieved a certain amount of notoriety and success as a crypto currency along the way. It’s a digital payment system which has found wide acceptance because of its anonymity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

It has left the realm of the geeks recently by going local in the form of BitCoin ATMs. With the use of a special ATM machine one can buy and sell BitCoin. Thanks to Jerry Nissen for alerting us to the very real perils and complications of using these BitCoin ATMs. Check out this video.

Tested: We Buy a Bitcoin!

SlideShark
Lots of people are loath to give presentations because of all the complexities and work involved. Chris showed us an app called SlideShark that takes some of the drudgery out of presenting your PowerPoint presentations using an iPad.

https://www.slideshark.com

He also said that SlideShark maintains a large database of presentations on a variety of topics, which individuals have uploaded and are available for anyone to use. Chris found one on the recent Apple World Wide Developers Conference and showed a collection of slides from the keynote.

Well, that’s just about going to do it for this week. That’s a wrap. Catch you next week.

-Bill