New Jersey Macintosh Users Group

This Month's General Meeting:

Meeting Date: April 21, 2026 at 6:30PM

What’s hAppling, NJMUG Trustee Elections, David Pogue Talk’s about Apple’s First 50 Years, Mark's Ai Built Club Membership Manager App

NJMUG April Meeting Will Be One of the Best Meetings in Years!

Get ready for an exciting April meeting! Besides our usual “What’s hAppling” news update, we’re also kicking off our first trustee elections in ages. If you’re planning to vote, you definitely need to be there! The eleven candidates with the most votes will be our new board of trustees. Please bring a pen or pencil to fill out your ballot. Votes will be counted at the meeting, and the new board members will be announced right then and there.

After the general meeting, the new board will get together to decide on the new officers for NJMUG. A day or two after the general meeting, the new club board members and officers will be announced on our website and sent out in an email to all members.

If you still haven't paid your annual club dues, please bring your $30 to the April meeting and we will collect it there. Thanks in advance for remembering.

NJMUG 2026 Board Trustee Candidates

1	George Ajjan	2	Scott Alenick
3	Mark Astmann	4	Jay Green
5	Anne Gherardi	6	Jerry Gherardi
7	Bob Helmond	8	Catherine Mascis
9	Louis Perez	10	Alan Walter
11	Rich Wolfson	12	Write in 1
13	Write in 2	14	Write in 3...11

I recently finished a fantastic book called “Apple, the First 50 Years” by David Pogue. David is a well-known author, a seven-time Emmy winner, and the CBS Sunday Morning Tech host since 2002. Sharon Zardetto Aker, our club’s founder, and David collaborated on a couple of books back in the day. David is famous for his storytelling skills and his ability to explain tech stuff to everyday people. The book dives into Apple as a company, covering its highs and lows, the good and bad choices it made, and the amazing and not-so-amazing hires. Since we’re a Mac group, I bet most of you will recognize many of the characters in this book. I’ve been an Apple fan since the Apple II and have read dozens of books about the company and its key figures. I thought I knew all the interesting Apple stories, but after interviewing over 150 people for this book, David revealed things I never knew. Many of these new insights help us see Apple’s past decisions in a new way. I listened to the audio version, which David narrated himself. It was a fascinating read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I highly recommend it.

Speaking of David Pogue….

He’s planning to join us on Zoom for our April meeting, where he’ll share his thoughts on Apple and the people surrounding both the success and failures of the company. Plus, he’ll be sharing some personal stories about the important decisions Apple made along the way, both good and bad. We’re in for some really interesting stories and a wonderful 45 minutes of David’s time. It’s going to be a special event, so please come, even if you haven’t been to our recent meetings.

Mark Astmann has been working on and will demonstrate a cool system using AI and his experience as a product manager to help clubs and associations manage their member lists and dues. Imagine groups like our Mac group, Civic or neighborhood associations, sports and recreation leagues, garden and hobby clubs, Non-Profit chapters or professional and fraternal societies. This system was designed to avoid the hassle of messy spreadsheets or costly monthly subscriptions many clubs currently rely on. It’s a Zero Installation, Privacy First, Low Cost system.

Club Membership Manager is an elegantly crafted HTML file that works on any operating system that supports a Chrome-based browser. All of CMM’s data is stored in a small .club file, so you can easily store both the Club Membership Manager HTML file and 500 members in under 8MB of space, making it your Portable Command Center. CMM’s Interactive Dashboard presents all the critical information about your club at a glance, so you can quickly see how your club is doing. Using a green, amber and red color scheme you can easily spot which members have paid their dues, which have dues due in the next 30 days, and which are overdue.

The program keeps track of when each member’s dues are due, and with just three clicks, it sends an automated email to remind them to send in their checks. Click the dues reminder button, click the Open in Mail button and click your send button. Staying in touch with your members couldn't be easier. Club Membership Manager also allows you to create custom email templates using all the fields from a member’s record as merge fields. The app tracks and records all emails sent to each member, so you can see every email a member has received. The app can generate PDF reports of your club’s data and lets you output CSV files of your member’s data, which can be useful for performing spreadsheet data analysis.

Finnally, Mark Astmann’s wife, Sherry, was curious about the nutritional content of different fruits and asked Alexa about each one, jotting down the answers. Mark thought this was a task for AI. He tried the same question with several AI tools, and these two stood out. ChatGPT whipped up a lovely infographic, and ClaudeAI created an interactive webpage showing all the information. Mark's daughter asked him to do the same for vegetable and and ClaudeAI created an interactive webpage showing all the information.

---

New Jersey Macintosh Users Group

Founded in 1984, NJMUG is the Garden State's flagship Macintosh Users Group with members throughout New Jersey. Our community of members are dedicated to sharing their knowledge, insights and experience on the Macintosh computer platform.

---

Social Media Links - Follow Us

---

NJMUG's 30th Anniversary Video

---

Letters to NJMUG

Date: 2/9/2022

To the New Jersey Macintosh Users Group,

I'm now a 51-year-old professional in New York City, but I grew up in New Jersey at a time when Apple was first rolling out the Macintosh. I now have two teenage sons myself, and after I was discussing what I did for extracurricular activities in high school, on a lark I looked up the New Jersey Macintosh Users Group, which I was involved in starting up. I was absolutely delighted to find the web page below referencing my participation, and I wanted to say thank you so much for memorializing the group's history. I'm glad it continues, and I'm writing to say how much I appreciate the costless but meaningful gesture of remembering the group's history. I'm only sorry I wasn't on a mailing list to be able to commemorate the 20th anniversary! Wishing best of luck, and another 35 years of success, to the New Jersey Macintosh Users Group!

Very truly yours,

Michael ("Mike") Waldorf

---

Become an NJMUG Member

Download our membership application and mail in with your membership dues or bring it with you to any monthly meeting.

---