Steve Zalot presents iLife'08

Many thanks to Steve Zalot for a tremendous presentation on Apple's new iLife'08 and iWork'08. He certainly covered all of the bases and everyone had a tremendous insight into what the programs had to offer.
Now all we have to do is put his helpful hints into play.

Read - Watch -Do sequence for learning

Adobe Photoshop CS One-on-One (CD-ROM included)
By McClelland, Deke
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 978-0-596-52975-8 490 pages, $49.95 US, $64.99 CA,
Company/Producer’s name: Deke Press/O’Reilley
Phone #: 800-998-9938 Online address: www.oreily.com

Deke created this book for both amateur and professional graphic artists, designers, and photographers. It is another in a series of books that provide step-by-step lessons accompanied by beautiful full colored lessons combined with video lessons and data files. The author’s approach is a “hands on –step-by-step process" that allows the reader to proceed at their own pace and establish their own sequence of lessons to personalize the instruction.
The book’s content is divided into 12 lessons that include several (up to 3-7) step-by-step exercises to explain the techniques. Explanations, data files, and video lessons support these real world project based exercises.
The book is highly visual, colorful, informative, easy on the eye providing nicely laid out pages on heavy clay based paper, and a comprehensive index to support the text.

Lastly, the wonders of the digital age have provided us with the possibilities of a virtual classroom in which anyone can invite an expert in the field to tutor them one-on-one. I would like to say that Deke McClelland has created a comprehensive training experience into which you can submerge yourself for hours at a time. In process of reading this book you'll get a good dose of graphics theory, best practices, and tips for avoiding Photoshop disasters. L. McNeil

Apple Updates MacBooks to Santa Rosa, GMA X3100; 2.6GHz MacBook Pro

posted by MacRumors.com

Thursday November 01, 2007 05:08 AM ESTAs rumored, Apple has quietly updated the MacBook tonight to the Santa Rosa architecture with mild speed bumps and the GMA X3100 integrated video

White 13.3"
$1099.00 2.0GHz/1GB RAM/80GB/Combo/GMA X3100
$1299.00 2.2GHz/1GB RAM/120GB/SD-DL/GMA X3100
Black 13.3"
$1499.00 2.2GHz/1GB RAM/160GB/SD-DL/GMA X3100

Despite comparable clock speeds (2.0 -> 2.0GHz, 2.16 -> 2.2GHz) to the old models, the new MacBooks use the Santa Rosa chipset which boasts a faster 800MHz front side bus over the previous MacBook models. The introduction of the GMA X3100 video card also provides significant benefits over the previous models. The new specs can be seen at the Apple Store:

Next Step Leopard....

Take Control News: Start Preparing for Leopard Now with New Ebooks
by Adam C. Engst
If you're excited about Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, now scheduled for release on 26-Oct-07, make sure you're ready to upgrade with the early-bird edition of "Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard." This 60-page ebook not only walks you through the prep steps that help guarantee a trouble-free Leopard installation, it also comes with a free, instant-download upgrade to the 124-page full edition of the ebook, which will offer detailed advice on every aspect of installation, based on countless hours of meticulous research by Joe Kissell. In particular, the early-bird edition helps you evaluate if your current Mac will run Leopard well, how to make an appropriate backup in case of installation problems, smart ways to clear disk clutter and unnecessary files, and whether you should rethink your partitioning scheme. The full version will be available as soon as Apple begins shipping Leopard; see the FAQ at the link above for details.

But there's more! You can save 25 percent if you pre-order "Take Control of Customizing Leopard" along with buying the early-bird edition of "Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard." In this title, Matt Neuburg helps you customize your new installation, with a special emphasis on new tweaks to old features and on helping you start using new features, such as Spaces and Time Machine. We can't say much about Leopard until our non-disclosure agreement is lifted, but we plan to make the full ebook available to those who pre-order via our Check for Updates mechanism as soon as Apple begins selling Leopard.

For those of you who want to learn all about Leopard, we recommend our "I Love Leopard" bundle, which saves you 30 percent and includes the above-mentioned two titles; it also includes three more "Take Control of... in Leopard" pre-release titles: Sharing Files, Fonts, and Users & Accounts. We expect to ship these three additional titles at the same time as (or very shortly after) Leopard's release. You'll find the "I Love Leopard" bundle on the left side of both the "Upgrading" and the "Customizing" Web pages.

Owners of previous "Take Control of Upgrading to..." and "Take Control of Customizing..." ebooks can take advantage of a discounted price on these titles; click the Check for Updates button in your ebook to access the offer, or send us email if your ebook is too old to have a Check for Updates button. However, note that buying either of our bundles gives you a better discount than upgrading each title individually.
Publication, product, and company names may be registered trademarks of their companies. TidBITS ISSN 1090-7017.
Copyright 2007 TidBITS; reuse governed by this Creative Commons License.

Downloading freeware version of 'Flip4Mac'

'Flip4Mac' allows one to view Microsoft Media (audio and video) files via 'QuickTime Player', and within a web browsers' window.

Click here to download 'Flip4Mac 2.1.3.10.dmg' (7.5 MB).

---

What gets installed, and where.

Within the '/Applications/' folder, a folder titled '/Flip4Mac' is created.
Within the '/Applications/Flip4Mac/' folder are:
'WMV Player.app',
'Flip4Mac WMV User Guide.pdf',
'Flip4Mac WMV Uninstaller.pkg', and
'WMV Upgrade'.

Added to the '/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/' folder are:
'Flip4Mac WMV Plugin.webplugin', and
'Flip4Mac WMV Plugin.plugin'.

Added to the '/Library/PreferencePanes/' folder is:
'Flip4Mac WMV.prefPane'.

Added to the '/Library/QuickTime/' folder are:
'Flip4Mac WMV Export.component',
'Flip4Mac WMV Advanced.component', and
'Flip4Mac WMV Import.component'.

Review: Keynote 3 by Michael Krayewsky

For complete review click here: http://macguild.org/reviews/review399.html
Overview
Keynote 3 is Apple's next-generation slide-show presentation software for delivering compelling presentations, building cinema-quality slideshows, studio-quality photography portfolios, animated storyboards, and more, all with ease and elegance. You can incorporate photos, movies or music from your iLife libraries, as well any graphics from Safari. Keynote is Apple's equivalent to Microsoft's PowerPoint. It is intended to make the process of creating a presentation about as easy as it gets. However, while not perfect, Keynote 3 has become a compelling alternative to PowerPoint, which has become the de-facto presentation tool used by professionals and managers alike.
Summary
Keynote 3 has evolved and expanded on its past strengths with new and unique capabilities, such as polished templates, cinematic transitions, textured 3-D charts, Bezier curves and masking, tables with calculations, and export to iDVD and iPhoto. I found it exciting and fun to create and edit slides in Keynote versus doing it in PowerPoint. Keynote continues to eat into the well established world of Microsoft's PowerPoint. Compatibility between the two applications has increased substantially since the early days of Keynote 1. There are still some drawbacks, to Keynote, such as resizing images in Light Table view and the way Keynote handles missing fonts. As Mac OS X software continues to grow with innovative features, and new and cost competitive Mac laptops and desktop computers increasing Apple's market share, Keynote will be in the hands of more and more professionals and managers, yielding snappier, smoother and more professional presentations.

Pros

• Default themes are elegant, refined and sophisticated
• Inspector and Media Browser provide simple interface to facilitate ease of creation and modification of data
• Bezier curves and 3-D charts for advanced graphic effects
• Ability to export your finished presentation in a number of different formats

Cons

• Incompatibility in text boxes from PowerPoint to Keynote when fonts are different
• Inability to embed hyperlinks to applications or documents
• Unable to increase the size of the images in the Light Table view
  

Overall Rating

4 out of 5 Mice

Review: Newertech Universal Drive Adapter

Check out this website for technology reviews: http://www.clickheretech.com./

The Universal Drive Adapter allows practically any hard drive (or optical drive) to be attachable to your current Mac via USB. Because the hard drive isn't protected in a case, this is not a long term solution. If you want to use a internal hard drive via usb (or firewire) over a extended period of time, purchase a quality external case.
Pros: Sturdy, reliable way of adding practically any hard drive to your Mac
Cons: A bit pricey, but you get what you pay for often. This device, like all USB bridges, are for temporary use only. It would be nice if it had firewire

For the complete review by David Greenbaum check the above link.

Flash Pix Generator

Want to add a flash picture to your page? Choose a picture, a border and an effect and make your own Flashpix.

http://www.profilepitstop.com/myspace_flashpix/

Then the directions are:
What do I do with all this then? - to add this flashy text to your MySpace Page, follow these simple instructions..

1. Log into your MySpace account. From your home page (click "Home" in the menu) select "Edit Profile"
   
2. In the text area where you'd like the flashy text to appear, place the code that you see above you at the moment
   Yeah, but how do I do that? - highlight the code with your mouse (it should automatically highlight when you click on it) and then copy (press CTRL+C) the code. Then go to the area in your MySpace profile where you want the text to appear, place your cursor in the text and press paste (CTRL+V).
   If you are using Internet Explorer you can click on "Copy Code" to do this automatically (you may get asked to allow the page access to the Windows clipboard)
   
3. Save your profile and you're done! Sit back and wait for the compliments on your cool new flashy profile to come pouring in...

[TIPS] Google Sky - a MUSTsee

Thanks to this article by Mark Wagner (http://edtechlife.com/?p=1821) I now know about Google Sky! Check out the news video on the right of this page for Good Morning America's broadcast of the unveiling of the program. This program is free and truly amazing!

http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/Technology/story?id=3509522

iLife'08 and iWork'08 released

Take a guided tour.
http://www.apple.com/ilife/guidedtour/