Mac Action Issue 3 June 2009

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THE APPLE LOVER’S MAGAZINE JUNE s )SSUE

win IS THE APPLE TAX INESCAPABLE?

The problem with the feminist movement was that the wrong women were burning their bras. * As an Apple Premium Reseller we’re very un-pc.

Sorry.

.co.za

from the editor THERE’S A WHOLE LOT OF INTERESTING CONTENT IN THE PUBLICATION THIS MONTH. SHOCKINGLY ENOUGH, OUR EDITOR STEVE ALLISON HAS REVIEWED THE NEW SHUFFLE, AND DESPITE ALL THE HYPE HAS IDENTIFIED A FEW WEAKNESSES IN ITS IMPRESSIVE ARSENAL OF COOL FEATURES! QUITE A SHOCK FOR THE APPLECOMMITTED MAN, I CAN TELL YOU!

Then we’ve got some very interesting feature content as well.

The Mac Tax article might be a touch lengthy but persevere through it and there’s a fairly balanced, reasonable conclusion in there. Quite rare for any MS – Apple comparison frankly. And of course, there’s another healthy selection of detailed HowTos to get you working better, easier, and more confidently with your Mac. Now, I’d like to take this opportunity to announce that you guys had better start firing up your mail clients and sending us some letters. We’ve secured several new Shuffles from the generous crew at Core for the best letters every month, but with a theme. “What drove me from my old PC into the comforting embrace of my Mac” – all you have to do is send us a few words on this subject and, if your entry is the best for the month, one of these 4GB babies will be on their way to your doorstep. Letters@macaction.co.za is the address, so get typing.

We hope you enjoy reading our third issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together. And keep on computing with panache, it really is the least stressful way.

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contents

THE APPLE LOVER’S MAGAZINE April 2009

NEWS

FEATURES

05. News New products, new software releases, new cool stuff in the App Store, new crazily-priced designer incarnations of Apple products. And the imminent Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, read more details on the lot here in our monthly roundup of hot Apple news!

14. Mac Tax The infamous Mac Tax continues to be perpetuated all over the place, not least in Microsoft advertising campaigns. But how true are the claims? We build a direct desktop comparison, let’s find out right here, right now..

EDITOR’S CORNER 10. Editor’s Corner Steve hates restrictions, and is quite certain life is way too full of them as it is. For his beloved Apple to endorse and perpetuate yet another, is a problem for our Ed this month.

11. The other side This month Russell Bennett stares fear in the face, and wonders if a technology tipping point is one the cards?

20. iSchools The Core Groups bid at bringing relevant, useful IT into the underprivileged classrooms of SA delivers the strengths of the Apple brand where it may just be needed most – developing the minds of the country’s next generation.

PRODUCT REVIEW 24. We’ve got some tasty gear Our Superdrives have been busy loading up and trying out all sorts of software this month, but we do also have a detailed look at the all-new, all-talking iPod Shuffle this month. You can win one too, check the letters page for more details.

25. iPod Shuffle 4GB 26. Apple iWork 09 28. MacFreelancer 30. Roxio Toast 10 Titanium

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HOW TO 32. How To’s Our monthly selection of detailed, and useful, HowTo content starts here. This month we launch out onto the web with iWeb, delve deeper still into iPhoto, and elaborate on the thousands of keyboard shortcuts on your Mac, at least the important ones.

33. Building a website 37. Mastering keyboard shortcuts 40. Manipulating your images

Exspect and Elonex, and although not all of them are available locally as yet, we reckon if enough of you pester them they’ll bring them to our shores!

IPOD COMPETITION ILOVEMYMAC MACS IN ACTION GAMES REVIEW

THE LITTLE THINGS 44. The Little Things.

Our new section dedicated to those smaller bits that help you get the most from your tech purchases, and lifestyle itself. We’re looking at two brands which are locally represented by Phoenix Software with this selection,

Mac Action team Editor: Steve Allison Deputy Editor: Russell Bennett Editorial Contributors: Steve Allison, Russell Bennett Art Contributors: Plutonic AVC Management: Steve Allison, Russell Bennett Advertising Sales: Sean Tingle sean@plutonic.co.za Hosting : www.virtualmags.co.za Subscriptions: www.macaction.co.za

52 Gaming Macs.

Colin Mcrae Rally is about as close to the real thing as you can get without the taste of mud, oil residue, and unburnt hydrocarbons filling your gob. All the thrills and spills right here.

All data contained in this magazine is for information only and every effort is made to ensure its accuracy.

However reviews, comment and instruction are the views of the authors and may contain inadvertent errors, for which Mac Action apologises but takes no responsibility for any actions of any person resulting from the use of information contained herein.

Any prospective contributor or correspondant submitting unsolicited material with a view to its publication automatically grant Mac Action license to publish such material in whole or in part in any edition of this magazine. Any material submitted is at the risk

of the sender and Mac Action cannot be held liable or accountable for its loss or damage.

Whilst this magazine is devoted to the operation and usage of Apple Mac hardware and software products and such third party software and peripherals which may be attached to or installed on Apple Mac products, Apple Mac Corporation do not own in whole or in part this magazine or its publishers. Nor does the Apple Mac Corporation agree to or accept any responsibility for any text or graphic material published herein.

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The $40K iPhone 3G

SO, REGULAR, COMMONORGARDEN IPHONE JUST NOT DOWNRIGHT, WELL, OSTENTATIOUS ENOUGH FOR YOU? Luckily for you, Stuart Hughes is following-up on it’s 22ct gold iPhone with this, the latest iPhone 3G carved from 23g of pure titanium and sprinkled with 53 certified conflict-free diamonds just for the ultra-elite, and it could be yours today for just USD37 4!

With the current state of the global economy, we’re not sure this functional titanium sculpture could be called a

particularly good buy, especially considering that Apple is preparing to announce new iPhones any day now, but it would certainly get you noticed in a crowd. Or, wait, no it won’t really. How many people will actually even realise it isn’t just a skinned iPhone, unless you leave it’s pricetag on printed in large letters perhaps? Otherwise you’d turn into an insufferable bore, explaining to everyone who’ll listen how you’re just so damn rich you needed a phone that would last longer than you will.

Nor can it even be art, unfortunately, by its very definition. An iPhone serves many purposes beyond merely being itself after all. In fact although only a 16GB 3G model, this

one is even more useful than most as it’s not locked to any specific network. Surprised Apple aren’t firing up the legal department for taking these elite rip-off artists on, but then any company that can charge USD4K for a cell phone surely has bank-vaults full of cash to blow on drawn-out courtroom dramas.

Still, if you just can’t stand the thought of the shiny metallic case being scratched or the class-leading display cracking, this outlandish creation fits the bill perfectly. And it is quite breathtaking when you know what’s gone into it – copious amounts of raw wealth engineered into a modern handheld fashion-utility.

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news PHEONIX BRINGS ICLONE 3.0 TO SA iClone 3. is an innovative yet easy-touse software application that makes it simple to add animation to video projects, whether you are an aspiring filmmaker or just someone who would like to add talking 3D actors and SIMS-like content to your latest YouTube offering, podcast, blog, corporate presentation, or school project.

Put the camera where you want it The enhancements in iClone 3. begin with the most elemental of all filmmaking tools, the camera. iClone’s camera system is revised to allow you to add as many cameras to a scene as you require and actively switch the live camera view throughout your animation, enabling you to record an animated scene much like real-world filmmaking.

The camera system also has capabilities to support firstperson recording with FlyCam and WalkCam cameras that

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follow terrain or soar through the sky with adjustable speeds.

Wear different hats iClone 3. simplifies the animation process to two production modes: Editor Mode and Director Mode. Editor Mode allows you to create and refine your scene and actors, and Director Mode to command how your actors behavement with the ease of moving around in your favourite videogame.

For users who want to go beyond the characters, scenes and other content that comes pre-loaded with iClone 3., there’s the iClone Content Store (www.reallusion.com/ contentstore) where you can select from thousands of props, scenes, historical and fictional themes.

With output options ranging from HD-sized video to YouTube-sized video and the new Flash video option with a variety of quality settings, iClone users can share their productions in the fullscreen, DV video format for DVD projects and as streaming videos for Web sites. Videos can also be produced for mobile handsets and e-mails. iClone 3.0 is available from leading retailers at a RRP of R1 099.

For additional information, please visit phoenixsoftware.

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AMAZON’S KINDLE ON THE IPHONE Amazon’s Kindle electronic reading device hasn’t really had any impact on the local market as yet. It’s pricey, for such an archaic-looking monochrome screen, even if it is thin, light, and “magazine-sized”.

But the format got a serious shot in the arm when Amazon released a free to download Kindle viewer for iPhone last month, essentially turning all iPhones (and iPod Touches, of course) into potential Kindle e-book readers. Unfortunately the software doesn’t extend to newspaper or magazine subscriptions, and you can’t buy e-books directly from Amazon onto your iPhone via the application, instead having to purchase your chosen e-book online and then transfer the downloaded file over to your mobile.

The free software includes a neat feature dubbed WhisperSync, which allows you to switch our of the reader app and back to your iPhone OS without losing your place in your book, and is the first time that Amazon has offered Kindle e-book format support for any mobile device other than the Kindle platform itself.

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Media Giant goes massively mobile T

o help cross this digital divide, Gannett relies on Apple iPhone 3G. Gannett employees embraced iPhone and the company launched USA TODAY in the App Store, adding to Gannett’s ability to produce must-have news and information updated 24/7 for mobile users. iPhone has helped redefine how it delivers content and advertising to consumers.

As the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S., Gannett is well aware of the changes happening in print publishing.

And for the McLean, VAbased media giant, change brings opportunity. “ The newspaper business is still a good business. We’re looking at how to get news and information to people in the way they want it, when they want it,” says Mark Morneau, Vice President of Information Technology.

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Media powerhouse Gannett knows how to work fast and furious under deadline. Its recent challenge was to go mobile — transform its 9-plus publications, including the flagship USA TODAY®, from traditional To do that, Gannett is moving beyond print to digital content published around the clock for mobile consumers. “ The news and information business has always been a 24-hour business, because we don’t control when news happens,” explains Morneau. “ The technology is changing, and our business is really in a transformation. iPhone is making a lot of this transformation happen.”

Maximizing Revenue By delivering a customized view of USA TODAY to iPhone users, Gannett has created a loyal — and growing — audience who may have never picked up the newspaper. “We realize the more local, the more updated, and the more interactive we are with mobile content, the more we can connect with our audience,” says Carroll.

Access to the iPhone audience has unleashed advertising opportunities as well, creating new revenue potential for Gannett. The company, along with its subsidiary PointRoll, has developed the first mobile rich-media advertising for iPhone. The mobile ads are fully expandable and provide advanced features such as video tap-to-play, coupon downloads, integrated mapping technology, and user-initiated tap-to-call. “iPhone presents a new business opportunity that allows our traditional print advertisers to extend into mobile and leverage that influential, affluent audience,” says Jones. “We are very pleased with the feedback we are getting from our users and advertisers. Developing for iPhone is a very bright future for us.”

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Apple Worldwide Developers Conference to Kick Off with Keynote Address on Monday, June 8

A

pple will kick off its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address on Monday, June 8 at 1: a.m. A team of Apple executives, led by Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, will deliver the keynote. WWDC will offer in-depth sessions on both iPhone OS 3., the world’s most advanced mobile operating system, and Mac OS X Snow Leopard, an even more powerful and refined version of the world’s best desktop operating system and the foundation for future Mac innovation.

“Last June, we gave developers an early look at the powerful new technologies that form the underpinnings of Mac OS X Snow Leopard,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “At WWDC, we will be giving our developers a final Developer Preview release so they can see the incredible 8

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progress we’ve made on Snow Leopard and work with us as we move toward its final release.”

Snow Leopard and Mac technical sessions will showcase hundreds of refinements to the operating system and dive deep into its new technologies including a 64-bit architecture, QuickTime X, next-generation multicore and GPU processor support, and amazing new accessibility technologies. iPhone OS 3. technical sessions will cover introductory and advanced concepts to help developers get the most out of the iPhone OS 3. SDK and over 1, new APIs available for iPhone OS 3..

WWDC also offers attendees the unique opportunity to work side-by-side with Apple engineers to solve codelevel issues, gain insight into development techniques and get expert advice on interface design.

Other activities at Apple’s WWDC 29 include: More than 1 technical sessions presented by Apple engineers on a wide range of technology-specific topics for developing, deploying and integrating iPhone OS 3. and Mac OS X technologies; Over 1, Apple engineers presenting the latest in Apple technologies and providing one-to-one direction in hands-on labs; and The opportunity to connect with thousands of fellow iPhone and Mac developers from around the world.

Visit the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 29 website for registration and more details at http://developer. apple.com/wwdc.

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How much do you love your Mac?

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THE APPLE LOVER’S MAGAZINE Send us pictures of your devotion and you could win great prizes ilovemymac@macaction.co.za Mac Action

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I don’t know about you but I find there are more and more restrictions on our lives every day. Governments and corporations around the world talk about freedom, democracy and choice and yet, in reality, the opposite seems to be the order of the day.

There was a time when I could sit down at work or in a restaurant and light up a cigarette without thinking about it. Those days are long gone. There was a time when people could express an opinion without fear. Political correctness has put an end to that.

I can’t ride my motorcycle around Kyalami if it makes too much noise. The nearby residents get all upset. Kyalami has been there since 1961.

When people built their houses next door to a racetrack, what did they expect? Back to the road, I can’t drive my car without a seatbelt and the list goes on and on.

It is frustrating that we can’t enjoy the benefits of using the iTunes store in this country. I do have an iTunes store account in the U.K. but even that is of little use because of the fact that Telkom will only allow me 3Gb of data a month, yet another restriction.

I am a Mac person through 10

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and through, as you all know.

The reason is simple, Apple has the best hardware and operating system, it just works.

The original reason I changed to Mac all those years ago though was that I was tired of the restrictions involved in using a PC, the way that Microsoft treated me like a criminal. Apple has never been like that but recently, I have been frustrated even with the company I’m such a supporter of.

IT IS FRUSTRATING THAT WE CAN’T ENJOY THE BENEFITS OF USING THE ITUNES STORE IN THIS COUNTRY I downloaded a series of my favourite television program from the iTunes store on a recent trip to the U.K. Had I bought the DVD, I could have lent it to my family for them to watch as well. I decided to create a DVD using Toast, which I would lend to them.

Guess what? I can’t, the files are locked! I understand that

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Life’s

Restrictions they don’t want the files to be distributed around the Internet but surely I should be allowed to burn a DVD, I can burn a CD of iTunes music. I wouldn’t even mind if they put some security in so that the DVD couldn’t be copied.

The other thing that has been annoying me is the iPhone.

As an Apple user, I really want my mobile phone to be an iPhone. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to use the phone on the network of my choice?

Changing networks is not easy.

We are usually locked into long contracts with our service providers, another restriction.

Changing your number is quite difficult, having to get new business cards and so on. Worse than that, I live in an area where the Vodacom coverage is so poor that the phone is virtually unusable.

So, I guess I do have freedom of choice. Either don’t use a cell phone at home or don’t have an iPhone. I love living in a free country!

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editors column

Tippinng ints po

I

had one of those fiery debates this week, with the tech ed of a very well-known consumer mag, about no less than the merits of the Mac versus the PC. His viewpoint, as ever with these sorts of polarising issues, was straightforward.

Macs are the worst, and PCs rule the planet. That sort of concept for an argument really gets to me.

Now this bright guy who usually has a pretty measured way about him actually started using

nonsensical statements like “This latest MS TV ad proves that Mac is ridiculously overpriced” and “Wow Steve Jobs really did a number on you”...

You know, the sort of grown-up, thoughtful stuff that it always seems to degenerate to in such a discussion.

And I suddenly saw what the problem is with the Apple way, the Mac concept, for people like him. After all I am a person like him, so his disproportionate vehemence had

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editors column to come from something in that background. We’re both PC wizards, diagnostics and repair skills bordering on the intuitive, ability to just “pick up” technology honed and sharp...

It’s fear.

You see people like us, we actually quite like it when our PCs fall over. It gives us the opportunity to dive into them wholeheartedly and fix the problem. Maybe, while we’re in there, make it even better. Faster. Even heavier on juice. We’re the extreme of the PC world, modders and tweakers and overclockers. A troublesome machine is a great challenge, and an opportunity to utilise our talents.

These monstrous skills allow us to do things with computers which others can’t. We don’t in any way fear them, as some members of the general public still do. We aren’t crippled when anything goes wrong, merely delayed until we get it sorted out. Our machines are stable, only really still crashing when we deliberately provoke them anyway. Any piece of hardware you give us, we can install, configure, and work with in a few minutes.

If, suddenly, tomorrow, the

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market share were reversed, and Mac was the dominant environment by a huge margin, many of these hard-earned and proud skills would be largely irrelevant. Obsolete. Or simply not supported. Overnight the hardcore techie would become a dying breed, caged up in dank dungeons filled with mouldy old systems like a mad scientist’s main tower. Large businesses built around selling and maintaining such machines would collapse, and digital outlaws would start hinting the Web.

You see people like us, we actually quite like it when our PCs fall over The fear of redundancy makes even the suggestion of this scenario becoming a reality a terrible idea.

I totally understand this. In fact, it’s precisely the same emotion which still has me grimacing in sheer distaste whenever a DSG gearbox, you know one of those ones that are operated by panels behind the wheels and operate insanely smoothly and quickly complete with digital blips of the electronic throttle to ensure total smoothness on

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down shifts, is mentioned in casual conversation.

In just about every way, from a technical standpoint, I have to admit the damn things are superior. They’re faster than a manual shift, smoother, waste less power and are totally consistent. I still quite regularly fluff a good heel-and-toe down shift, which the electronic throttle blipping mimics perfectly every time. That isn’t the point.

The point is that a driver who hasn’t for years practised these driving techniques, can now simply buy them in the shape of a DSG-like gearbox, and have more efficient and effective gear changes than I can slam through with all my years of focussed practice. It’s downright galling.

Anyway, naturally, the world still needs both sides of the equation. It still needs people who are happier working a stick than paddles, and it still needs die-hard enthusiasts who love little more than getting into the oily bits of their computer systems.

I just wonder if, like with DSG, the balance might tip at some point in the IT world in favour of sheer useability?

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THE ONLY TWO THINGS, APPARENTLY, INESCAPABLE IN OUR LIVES. CAN THE SAME BE SAID OF THE APPLE TAX?

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JUST YESTERDAY, GOOD OLD STEVE BALLMER YET AGAIN QUOTED THE “US$5 APPLE TAX FOR NO MORE THAN A LOGO” ARGUMENT WHILE GLEEFULLY EXPLAINING THAT THE COMPANY HAD ACTUALLY, FINALLY, SEEN ITS MARKET SHARE DIP IN THE MOST RECENT STATS. THIS, CONCLUDES BALLMER, COULD WELL BE THE END OF THE GROWTH FOR APPLE, THE DIFFICULT FINANCIAL ENVIRONMENT MAKING PAYING THE INFAMOUS TAX LESS AND LESS SENSIBLE.

N

ow naturally there are several arguments against his flawed thinking, most of them quite reasonable. The simplest is, Mac users don’t care. The price premium is worth it for a machine which gets the job done in a faster, friendlier, and more efficient manner. With a healthy dose of style alone worth a few bucks here or there.

But having just a few weeks earlier read a great report on AppleInsider completely debunking the MS-commissioned report, “What Price Cool”, by analyst Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies, focussed in particular on the new xServe, I’d like to talk rationally for the purpose of this feature, about pure costs. The result, incidentally, of the AppleInsider piece is (not surprisingly, to be sure) startlingly in favour of the Apple server. Once the various CALs had been added-up over a five year licensing period, the xServe still only cost its original supposedly costly (some USD7 more than the MS server), while the branded midrange server

stacked up against it more than tripled in price to get the same functionality for a 5 year period.

But let us take a look, in Rands, at a similar cost-focussed comparative of desktops.

Being a technical journalist for more than a decade, I know how to put together systems at a decent price point – the trick is to pick your parts carefully, order them as components and then build the machine up yourself of course. So, in half an effort to give every advantage possible to the MS team, that’s what I’ve gone and done. I know a few good places to get hardware at appealing prices, without dipping into resources the consumer doesn’t have readily available to him like obliging press officers.

I’m also comparing against one of the costliest-looking Macs available, the fully-featured iMac 24” upgraded to a 3.6GHz Core 2 Duo with 1 TB Mac HD. Let’s quickly look over the iMac first. Yes, R28 999 looks whopping.

In the pre-built world of Windows you have to go to the surreal

sector of hardcore gaming laptops to hit this kind of money, so surely a comparable desktop machine is going to kill it in a pure price comparison? Well now let’s compare it part for part against our self-built desktop and add up those prices.

Item

Cost

Core 2 Duo 3. GHz CPU 4 GB Corsair DDR3 Desktop chassis with 38W PSU Intel LGA775 motherboard Radeon 485 (512 MB) Keyboard/mouse combo 1 TB WD HDD Samsung 26” LCD 82.11n WLAN (PCI) Speakers

R2245 R19 R1548 R2941 R215 R126 R188 R4225 R625 R324

That all comes up to just R15 426.

And before you climb into me for inflating anything, let me highlight one or two things.

Yes you can get an LGA775 motherboard for R7, not R3K. And yes this pricey board does

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come with things that the iMac can’t compete with, like dual PCI-E slots for multi-GPUs for instance, but we had to base it on a criterion, so we’ve used the support of DDR3 RAM. Believe it or not, this is about the lowest price you’ll pay for a PC motherboard which supports DDR3.

the load just fine because of the power efficiency built-in to the laptop-oriented hardware needed to squeeze everything in to that sleek, shiny package.

because I’m not the biggest fan of the Mighty Mouse and would therefore want a decent Logitech for my iMac as well, I’ll cut this slack.

I didn’t come up with an exact match for the 24” (viewable) size of the iMacs screen, but went with the 26” rather than the 22”

So you’ve got all your components together, and at R15 426 it looks like you’ve managed a substantial saving

Speaking of the RAM, why didn’t I grab some more value-oriented RAM? After all the iMac runs at only 166 MHz, these Corsair modules are rated at 1333 MHz. Well, for 4 GB, you’d save just R2 by going for the lesser RAM modules, and every good PC builder knows that skimping too much in RAM will bring down the performance of the entire PC. It just isn’t good practice.

because there’s a psychological barrier that you cross in terms of desktop real estate when you go beyond 24”, that you’d sorely miss on a 22” PC if your other alternative was a 24” iMac. Same with the smaller bits and pieces, the 82.11n WLAN card, desktop microphone and webcam have to be added if you can claim to be building a directly comparable user experience.

over the coolly costly iMac. I guess Ballmer was right – R14K for pure “cool” and being able to proudly display that famous logo at my desktop would be inconceivable for me...

I’d be a bit concerned about that 38W PSU as well to be honest. I’d probably consider upgrading it, which is going to cost still more.

The iMac comes with just a 28W PSU installed, and it can handle

Really, the input devices should be substantially more expensive.

This cheapie combo I’ve specced will feel rubbish beneath your fingertips compared to the slim aluminium Mac keyboard, but

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But...

There’s no way it’s over yet. All we’ve got on the PC side are a huge pile of bits so far. To make it into a PC, you need an OS at the very least, right? So, on to round 2, software.

There isn’t any point buying the latest hardware then hobbling this with an old OS, besides we

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want all the flashy features we can get our hands on to compete with OS X so it’s Windows Vista Ultimate. Then we need a productivity suite, so we’ll add Office 27 on to the cost of the PC, and iWork 9 onto the cost of the Mac. Now we at least have strong, office-related productivity capabilities on both machines. I’m not even going to add the cost of AV to the PC, although technically I probably should (and recurring over the lifecycle of the machine at that), but although the Mac is barely affected by threats from malicious code its probably good netiquette to include it on this side as well, for the sake of not accidentally passing nasty worms on to your colleagues using PCs. Besides, there are still decent, free AV packages available for download.

But, if you want to match what’s pre-installed on our iMac on the Vista box blow for blow, there’s a lot more to consider. Every new Mac comes with a complete installation of iLife 9 already set up. So that’s iWeb, iPhoto, GarageBand, iDVD and iMovie,

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all ready for you to be productive with. iMovie and Windows Movie Maker are hardly comparable, while iPhoto makes the Image viewer app in Vista look ridiculous – you’d need at the very least to add on a decent image cataloguing package, if not a full-blown professional image manipulation suite. iWeb, GarageBand, and iDVD bring three very useful built-in functions and again exist somewhere between the void the Microsoft environment leaves you in and the massive cost of a professional solution.

And although you may argue that you’ll never use GarageBand for instance, you can’t deny that having it there makes the iMac more versatile a default system configuration.

Yes, if you want, you can get all of this, from the OS up, for free on the PC. Technically though, that’s entirely illegal, friend, and if you tried to use an unlicensed Windows box like this in your business you’d be risking fines of closing-down proportions, which

isn’t really worth it to me.

So let’s tally up then:

Item

Cost

Vista Ultimate MS Office 27 Std

R219 R4225

Just these brings the Windows machine up to R21 841. Add R899 for iWork 9 to the price of the iMac and you come out at R29898. But it honestly cannot be left there either.

For GarageBand-like functionality, you’d need to add at least R2 to the Vista machine. No free website builder gives you the flowing, easy design capabilities of iWeb, but a truly professional environment like Dreamweaver setting you back five grand may be stretching it. You can get a similarly middle-of-the-road thirdparty app for Windows at R15, and then for a fully functional DVD-creation suite like iDVD, you’d need at another R5.

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Just for effectively cataloguing an extensive photo library, add another R1.

And then, of course, you’d be doing without the close integration of all of these applications in the Mac environment, each third-party app behaving like the standalone it is rather than as part of a complete suite. At R27 841 for the PC with all of its software, the Apple Tax has shrunk to just R3.

Now, consider what premium you would pay for all of the softer advantages? The neat, clean, room-lifting real-estate of the Mac versus the sprawling cabling nightmare of the PC? The productivity benefits of a machine which runs faster and almost never fails, surely worth at least 2 minutes of extra work time a day (5 hours a month, at a billable rate of let’s say R3, sees the Mac paying for itself in 2 months)? The satisfyingly high-quality components bringing an air of luxury to your ICT interactions and improving the perceived quality of the tool you’re working with? The peace of mind of using an entirely legal software environment? The sheer feel-good factor of working daily on a Mac versus a more mundane (albeit high-end) PC? Difficult to quantify, very difficult to attribute a cash value to, but nonetheless

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all tangible.

yourself in a shorter timeframe.

There is one final thing. If you’re a hardened old techie like me, building and installing your Windows machine from components up is going to take you in the region of four to five hours. The build process itself, done lovingly to try and ensure that nothing suffers from that common malady installation failure rather than rushed through production-line style, will be about two hours. Then half an hour for the Windows installation, and another 2 hours installing all the drivers for your individual components, setting up your productivity environment and associated software. Of course if you aren’t a technician, you’ll have to pay a professional to cobble it all together for you...

These softer points are, to me and many like me, worth the suddenly tiny upfront cost delta (R3 before even considering the build cost) by a huge margin.

With ongoing cost savings which over the lifecycle of the system (electricity, support builds, upgrade costs) and the high likelihood of recouping some of that investment when it does finally come time to replace, and it appears as though even here, with test conditions set up to favour the generalised, competitive hardware environment of the Windows box, the Mac Tax argument takes only a few moments thought and some elementary addition to turn around.

An iMac will be up and running within minutes of arriving home with the box. It will consume less power than the PC, saving you something on your electricity bill every month, be relevant for longer than a PC (A 5-year old Mac can still be resold, as it’s still useful. Try that with a PC without finding one hell of a sucker), and does all of this through that slick OS X interface which is easy to learn and improves the mechanics of content creation – what many of us do daily with our PCs – enabling you to produce better results for your client and

Oh yes, and you get the logo which Microsoft themselves have admitted is far cooler than any of the Windows-run white box builders can even come close to, let alone the software environment. That sounds like a good deal to me.

And to add insult to injury, you haven’t even got a genuinely high-end PC there... my own home PC would cost quite a lot more and perform better, while you have got the range-topping Mac desktop. Perception versus cold hard fact, however, is always going to be one Titanic struggle.

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With Connecto running over the cellular network, cellular operators can match the offerings of land-line operators to the SMB market, introduce new revenue streams, and extend their reach in familiar territory.

iGniting the flames of knowledge

MANY OF YOU WILL HAVE THE GAUTENG ONLINE FIASCO FRESH IN YOUR MINDS AND BE SCEPTICAL TO SAY THE LEAST. THAT’S UNDERSTANDABLE BUT CORE GROUP IS CONVINCED THAT IT KNOWS WHAT MISTAKES WERE MADE IN THIS DISASTER AND HAS COME UP WITH WHAT IT BELIEVES IS A VIABLE ALTERNATIVE. There can be no doubt that technology is a valuable tool for education. Often though, educators have taught school children about technology rather than integrated it into the daily learning experience. This is one of the limitations of Gauteng Online. They set up a classroom full of computers where children come to learn about computers, and many of these classrooms lie vacant today.

Core Group has taken a different approach, and one which seems to have been recognised as preferential. The iSchoolAfrica iGnite project integrates the computer into the regular lessons in the curriculum, making the technology a tool which improves learning across the board.

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School children, or learners, as we’re supposed to refer to them, from wealthy backgrounds generally outperform learners from underprivileged backgrounds in school grades, according to recognised studies.

Take two children from opposite ends of the social scale and give them access to the same technology and their grades will be a lot closer says the theory.

Unfortunately we live in a country where the gap between rich and poor is huge. What some children take for granted, others can’t even imagine in their lives.

Our government has never been known for it’s generous spending on education, and whether that is due to a poor economy or ministers feathering their own nests is not the point. The fact is millions of young people are receiving sub-standard education due to a lack of facilities, skills, and funding support. Core has recognised that we need to elevate education levels across the social spectrum if we are ever to make this a great country.

Core is ideally suited to providing technology to schools as the distributor of Apple products in South Africa. The Apple platform has so much to offer in the education arena - that is a given. The fact that the platform is so stable and that the hardware, operating system

and software come from the same manufacturer, virtually illuminates support problems. The iLife suite, which is used for the iSchoolsAfrica projects, is standard on all Mac computers so all the participating schools are using the identical software. Then, of course, there is the ease of use for which Apple computers are famous. Learners can get right into a project without spending time learning the software. The

sector. Core are contributing to the development of the country as a whole with the focus on education though. Not only that, alhough Core is looking to external organisations to fund the project, it is providing all of the training and the teaching models itself, as thrashed out in the Core-funded project which covered a total of thirteen schools in three provinces early this year.

As executive director of Core, RJ

THE FACT IS MILLIONS OF YOUNG PEOPLE ARE RECEIVING SUBSTANDARD EDUCATION DUE TO A LACK OF FACILITIES, SKILLS, AND FUNDING SUPPORT. CORE HAS RECOGNISED THAT WE NEED TO ELEVATE EDUCATION LEVELS ACROSS THE SOCIAL SPECTRUM IF WE ARE EVER TO MAKE THIS A GREAT COUNTRY. whole focus is to teach children regular curriculum using a computer rather than teach them to use the computer.

Core Group hopes that the project will be funded by both public sector and private organisations.

There will no doubt be public private partnerships as well.

There is some healthy scepticism here; in addition to a heightened sense of corporate-social responsibility, Core Group obviously support the project so that they can sell a pile of Apple laptops into the educational

van Spaandonk pitches it, ‘Give us the money and put your name to it and we’ll do the rest’. In addition to the R1.5-million pricetag per iSchools “mobile class”, the sponsor is required to provide a facilitator who will at first remain on-site full-time to ensure that both teachers and learners can extract the most from their Applebranded educational tools.

Core has put its money where its mouth is by funding the pilot project. And from this investment has come some compelling evidence of its efficacy, the

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WHAT WE NEED TO DO IN ORDER TO ASSESS THE LIKELY SUCCESS OF THE PROJECT IS TO CUT THROUGH ALL THE CORPORATE JARGON AND LOOK AT THE PILOT IN PRACTICAL TERMS.

participating schools all returning tales of delight, enthralment, and proof of quality learning in progress.

The project The iSchoolsAfrica iGnite project is designed to group 5 schools together in a cluster. Each school is provided with 12 Apple MacBooks, 1 for the learners 1 for the resident school facilitator and 1 for the class teacher. The External facilitator will carry their own laptop as they roam between the 5-school cluster. Also included in the kit is a projector, a wireless router and 1 mini video cameras. The whole kit is packed up into a heavy-duty metal case, which purportedly fits into the back of a Toyota Conquest without hassle. The case is small enough that it can be easily carried between classrooms.

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The idea is that learners will work in groups which is why 1 laptops is sufficient for a class of 35 or so children. Working effectively with others as a member of a team is one of the objectives of the Governments favoured ‘Outcomes Based Education’ (OBE). The iGnite program is in fact designed to meet all of the main objectives of OBE. The pilot What we need to do in order to assess the likely success of the project is to cut through all the corporate jargon and look at the pilot in practical terms.

Children were divided into groups and given a task, which was to make a film about an environmental issue concerning them. Taking this approach was a deliberate attempt to make the learning interesting, which would

inspire the children. The teams had to work together to achieve their end result. They would also have to carry out some research before starting filming. Each team was then issued with the mini video camera and went out to shoot their very own, highly localised documentary on their chosen subject, or even find another creative way of highlighting their findings. Once they got back to the classroom, they used the MacBook to download their footage and iMovie, being part of the iLife suite, to turn the footage into a watchable short film.

Scripting, directing and editing all encourage creativity, while the pre-filming fact-finding teaches sound research principles and logical thought processes.

Teamwork, understanding and discussion of the key issue, and creative presentation skills are

all keys to every aspect of the project.

The learners interviewed after the pilot project were very much in favour of their Apple learning experiences, after all all of this flash tech and interesting ways of approaching the same-old curriculum subjects makes learning more fun. The teachers were very positive as they recognised that they were able to get more out of the children who were downright enthusiastic about participating. Teachers were also at ease knowing that the facilitator was on hand to step in should they be unsure how to use the equipment, and often put in after-schools hours learning with the guidance of their facilitators the ins and outs of the MacBooks themselves.

All in all, I think the pilot project was a success and what is

amazing is the quality of work produced by children that have never had access to technology before.

Technology is becoming more and more a part of the way we educate our children.

First world countries’ schools and even wealthier private schools in this country have been using technology to enhance and support advanced learning methods for several years. It is good to see that the iSchoolsAfrica iGnite program aims to deliver these same advantages to children in less well off schools.

On the other side of the coin, it is a concern for me that children educated using technology lose some basic skills. My generation lost mental arithmetic skill that our parents have because of easy access to calculators. Even though

we had plenty of spelling tests at school, it is a skill I’m losing due to the lazy technique of leaving it to the computer spell checker. But such is the way of the high-tech age I suppose, I suppose in a few years it’ll be more commonplace to know the correct formatting of HTML than regular old English.

Technology is brilliant and is definitely a huge benefit to learners of any age and background. iSchoolsAfrica is a commendable project which looks far more likely to have an effect than any of the digital training implementations have done so far, even if it does help Apple sell a host of systems and expose the youth of our country to the Apple ecosystem as their very first hands-on experience with technology. Clever both in the short and long term, and beneficial to the entire country as well.

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Product reviews Lots of tinkering with software going on this month. Our one piece of Apple hardware getting a thorough going over is the new 4GB Shuffle, and we came to an interesting conclusion on this one!

25 IPOD SHUFFLE 4GB

28 MACFREELANCE

Yes, it’s tiny. Yes, it speaks to you. And yes, it’ll go even better with your stretchy, tightfitting health club apparel. But is it a step forward? Steve’s not so sure.

A useful little workflow management packaged designed specifically for the freelancers of the world. For a centralised solution to the admin needs of your small business, this package is well worth a look.

26 APPLE IWORK 09 30 ROXIO TOAST 10 TITANIUM Apple’s iWork suite is an even more relevant alternative to Microsoft’s expensive Office for Mac than ever before in 9 guise. Get to grips with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote here and decide for yourself.

It may be the de facto Mac toasting suite, but is the latest version full of great new features or just cashing-in on the good ‘ol name? Join us for a spot of Toast and find out.

Mac Action 24

Mac Action

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review: iPod Shuffle

4Gb w e n e h T ffle iPod Shu 199 Price : R : Supplier .co.za e l p p .a www

THE IPOD SHUFFLE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A GREAT LITTLE DEVICE. TINY, LOW COST AND WELL BUILT. UNLIKE OTHER LOW COST MUSIC PLAYERS, IT SYNCS SEAMLESSLY WITH ITUNES JUST LIKE ITS BIGGER BROTHERS. The new Shuffle is available in 1Gb, 2Gb and 4Gb capacities and doesn’t cost much more than a memory stick of equivalent size.

The Shuffle has changed shape although, overall it’s probably not much smaller than the outgoing model, which, let’s face it wasn’t known for its bulk. What is interesting about the new model is the array of new features,

previously only found on more expensive models.

The new Shuffle can now handle things like multiple playlists and podcasts. The big new thing though, is that it talks. As someone who has 65 songs in my iTunes library, I quite often hear a song that I like and can’t remember the song name or the Artist. Shuffles don’t have a screen so there’s no way to find out right? Wrong. The new Shuffle will tell you using a rather cheesy digitised voice. You can also use the Shuffle as an external drive if you select Enable disk use.

Something that appealed to me was the Shuffle’s ability to communicate with my iMac using the USM 1.1 port on my keyboard. The supplied cable is quite short so it saves you having to squeeze your arm up around the back of the computer. It does throw up a couple of warnings telling you that it is going to take longer to charge and sync but it does work.

Once connected, it informed me that it couldn’t accommodate all of my music and asked if I would like it to create a playlist. It created the playlist and then told me that the playlist wouldn’t fit? What I do miss though, is the absence of the “Auto Fill” feature of the older unit. I can see that being able to manage playlist has certain advantages but I liked the ease of plug in and go. It’s all my own music so I’m sure I’ll like whatever iTunes chooses.

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review: iPod Shuffle Another problem with all of this functionality in such a small device is that it’s a little bit tricky to operate. The standard iPod control has been removed and everything happens using a little button on the headphone cable.

The control sits right up under your chin so you can’t actually see what you are doing. Not only that, you have to remember how many clicks are required for each function. A single click to pause, 2

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All in all, I think I preferred the ease of use you got with the older Shuffle but then I also have an iPod classic. The new Shuffle offers a lot more functionality even if it is fidgety to get to. After all, it is a feature rich iPod for the price of a memory stick. What more could you want?

Summary: Still a great device, but somewhat more flawed than the old one.

ALL IN ALL, I THINK I PREFERRED THE EASE OF USE YOU GOT WITH THE OLDER SHUFFLE BUT THEN I ALSO HAVE AN IPOD CLASSIC. THE NEW SHUFFLE OFFERS A LOT MORE FUNCTIONALITY EVEN IF IT IS FIDGETY TO GET TO

clicks skips to the next track and 3 clicks restarts the current song.

I got it wrong several times and ended up selecting the next song instead of the previous one. Click and hold and the little Shuffle will tell you the name of the song and artist. You have to click the top or bottom of the control switch to adjust the volume, which is difficult if you have large fingers.

The headphones are not the greatest but you can’t replace them because you’ll lose the control unit. I’m sure there will be aftermarket headphones available soon but they are bound to be expensive.

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iWork 09

Our rating 3/5

Click hereto learn more about the Shuffle.

MICROSOFT OFFICE IS PRETTY MUCH THE INDUSTRY STANDARD OFFICE SUITE. SEVERAL PC USERS THAT CHANGE TO A MAC IMMEDIATELY SEEK OUT A COPY OF THE MICROSOFT PRODUCT. THERE IS HOWEVER AN ALTERNATIVE, AND A MORE COST EFFECTIVE ONE AT THAT.

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word processor and a desktop publishing solution all in one.

Last but not least, Numbers is the spreadsheet program of the suite.

New in the 9 release of Pages is a full screen view as well as several new templates. Numbers 9 has a range of new templates as well.

Keynote 9 includes some rather impressive new visual effects and of course the obligatory new themes.

iWork 9 is Apple’s own office suite and since the introduction of the last release, 8, it is now fully grown up. iWork has been around for a while but previous releases lacked the all important spreadsheet application. That oversight was rectified; the 8 release included an Excel rival called Numbers.

Those of you familiar with iWork will know that you get three applications in the suite although Pages is really two applications in one.

Keynote is the presentation graphics program which is regarded in the industry as one of the best in its class. Pages is a

ONE OF THE MOST IMPRESSIVE FEATURES OF IWORK IS THE ABILITY TO OPEN AND SAVE FILES IN MICROSOFT OFFICE FORMAT

One of the most impressive features of iWork is the ability to open and save files in Microsoft Office format. There really is no need to worry about compatibility if you are thinking of trying iWork.

I sent a couple of spreadsheets to Windows users that I’d created using Numbers. They were able to open and edit them and weren’t aware that they had been created in a different application.

Documents have to be saved in their native format and then exported but it’s no real problem.

review: iWork09 Documents that were sent to me in Office format opened without any conversion being necessary. The only problem I experienced was that Numbers changed the currency in a couple of my spreadsheets from Rand to Malaysian Ringet. iWork 9 is a fairly minor upgrade, without any real whiz bang new features. It is nevertheless a fully featured office suite that can easily rival any of the competition.

Being an Apple product, it integrates seamlessly with the iLife applications as well as iTunes.

At a price of R899. for a 5 user “Family Pack”, it represents much better value than its Microsoft rival.

Our rating 4/5

For more information click here

Mac Action

27

review: MacFreelance

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Titanium Toast 1 299.99 Price: R1 : Supplier

o.za ftware.c o s ix n e o www.ph

Over the years, Toast has become so much more than a straight forward disc creation tool and offers more and more with each release. Version 1 now has so many features that it would almost be worth buying even if you didn’t want to create discs.

The extract video clips feature is particularly interesting.

Although it says “from any DVD”, that isn’t strictly true. It won’t rip commercial DVDs which are encrypted. It does however convert video from DVDs created in your DVD recorder for example.

The great thing about this feature is that you simply select what device you want to convert for, Apple TV or iPod for example and it takes care of all the settings for you. It even puts the converted file straight into your iTunes library. You can use the conversion feature for files that are stored on your hard drive as well.

Another new feature that should prove popular is the Save Web

30

Mac Action

ROXIO’S TOAST TITANIUM IS ESSENTIALLY AN APPLICATION FOR BURNING CDS, DVDS AND NOW IN THIS VERSION, BLUE RAY DISCS. TOAST HAS BEEN AROUND FOR A FEW YEARS NOW AND HAS BECOME THE STANDARD DISC CREATION TOOL FOR MAC USERS. SO MUCH SO THAT YOU VERY RARELY HEAR MAC USERS TALKING ABOUT BURNING A DISC, THEY ALWAYS TOAST IT.

Video option. You can capture video from a web site and save it for offline viewing and, of course, you can burn it to a disc. You can also convert the file to another format, again for your Apple TV or iPod. Videographers can archive AVCHD video directly from the camcorder onto a disc. Toast will also keep a preview version of the clip on your Mac. Fans of audio books will appreciate being able to convert audio book CDs into an iPhone or iPod format with chapter markers included. If you have ever needed to synchronise the data in two different folders, Toast can do that for you as well. You can even synchronise folders with different computers on your network or folders on an external hard drive.

The new features are great but even without them, Toast is still the best disc creation tool available. It’s easy to use and takes care of most settings for you making it an easy, click and

go application. Of course, all the settings can be manually tweaked for all the control freaks out there.

The way Toast integrates with your Media Browser is an added bonus. It is just so easy to make a disc of photos from your iPhoto library or an Audio CD from your iTunes library.

Toast Titanium 1 is one piece of software that no Mac should be without.

Our rating 4.5/5

Summary: If you want to make CDs and DVDs on your Mac, you need Toast.

For more information go to www. phoenixsoftware.co.za

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31

how to?

Have you ever been somewhat bewildered when it comes to doing things, cool things, on your new Mac? We know the feeling, but over the years Steve has figured out a host of brilliant applications and tools which will help you along your way, and his uncompromising nature allows him to document detailed step-by-step instructions to assist you in getting the most from your Mac. Welcome to our HowTos pages – we hope that there’s something here that will help you out whether you’re a Mac newbie or a seasoned user.

33 IWEB

40 IMAGE MANIPULATION

Part of the iLife 9 suite pre-installed onto every new Mac, iWeb is a great Web design and publishing solution pitched at people who haven’t necessarily study HTML programming. A design suite for designers.

We guide you through creating, building, and publishing your very own Web site in iWeb.

After touching on the image cataloguing strengths of iPhoto last month, this month Steve goes into more detail about actually working with your enormous repository of images, now that you have them organised nicely, in this iLife 9 application.

37 KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS There are pages, and pages, and pages of shortcuts on the Mac, just for the OS let alone any apps you might be running.

This month we share some of the more useful ones with you to help make your Mac experience that bit smoother, faster, and even more efficient.everywhere in Internetland in no time at all.

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Mac Action

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Design for designers So you’re quite interested in design and, rightfully so, see the Web as an excellent avenue for exploring your as-yet nascent talents and getting some honest feedback on whether or not to pursue your budding career any further. You want to build your own killer site, basically, which is so slick, stunning, and chockfull of kick-butt content that the major players sit up and take notice.

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how to? design a website

this answer is already sitting there on your applications dock just waiting for you to take advantage of it. Here’s our guide to getting started in your endeavours with iWeb 9, part of the iLife 9 suite installed onto every new Mac system since the package came out.

Here’s a quick guide to get you started with iWeb, and get your digital presence designed, uploaded, and live to the globe in no time flat.

Perhaps you’ve even tried your hand before, but been daunted by the often highly technical Web development environments out there. While the free, online, dragand-drop solutions are just too limited to really let your innate creativity run free.

Open iWeb It’ll be down there on your dock, but if you’re struggling to find it of course just go up to Spotlight (the magnifying glass in the top right of your screen), type in iWeb and press enter.

Luckily, if you have a Mac, there’s an easy answer to your search. In fact, if your Mac is relatively new,

Creating your site When iWeb opens you’ll be greeted with an information

1

2

window which asks if you want to use a MobileMe account with your project. MobileMe is a separate matter altogether, if you do have an account you’ll know what it is already. It can be useful for enabling certain functions, like comments on your blog for instance, but it isn’t at all essential, so just decline.

Now open your iWeb File menu and choose New Site, or just hit Shift-Command N. You’ll then be presented with a healthy selection of templates to choose from, which will define your basic look and feel to a large extent. Don’t worry too much about what you choose

Mac Action

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how to? design a website right now, pick one you like and start with the Welcome page that comes up in the preview pane to the right. You needn’t worry as you’ll either use this template as just a baseline or, if you’re happy to go with the stock look, you can change the theme at any time and retain your actual objects, as in the images and text your site is built around.

The selected Welcome page will appear, as well as a site structure down the left hand side of the main iWeb window, which for now includes just your welcome page.

It’s a good idea to immediately go to your site name (Site by default), double-click on it and type your own name. This has the secondary effect of bringing up the site properties in the main window, so you may as well go ahead and fill these in. It’s just important stuff like the contact email, where you’ll be publishing to (leave this to Local Folder for now for development purposes),

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and the URL where your site will live.

You’re certainly going to need more than just a welcome page for the site to be at all useful, so click the Add Page button in the bottom iWeb toolbar, or just hit Command N, go through the same theme selection routine and you’ll have expanded your site by one page.

One of the beautiful, userfriendly things about iWeb is that it automatically creates a navigation bar for you as you add new pages. Double-click on and change a page name, just like you did when you first made your site, also adjusts what’s displayed on the sites own navigation bar, with all links automatically updated and working. That’s usually a lot of wasted effort in other Web development environments.

3

Designing your site Now it’s time to let those creative juices flow. Even if you choose to stick with the themed pages exactly as they’re provided, you’ll need to replace the placeholder images with your own visuals at the very least, and generate some catchy text as well.

Just select the Photos tab at the top of the right hand objects window, and if you’re using

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images already catalogued in iPhoto choose this application as your image source. A full listing of pictures in your catalogue will appear in the browser portion of this menu, find the one you like, and just drag it over and drop it on the placeholder.

No painstaking image resizing is necessary, iWeb takes care of it all for you, but if you want to finetune it just click on the image. A slider bar and “Edit Mask” button will appear beneath the image box.

The slider allows you to zoom in on specific areas of the image, while the button will let you set exactly how much of the image you want to display.

You can add new photos, audio or video clips, or Widgets, Google Maps, AdSense, YouTube elements, RSS feeds and the like)

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to your page by selecting the appropriate button alongside the Photos button and dragging your content onto the page. For adding other elements, such as a PDF file for instance, you need to click Insert, Choose, or hit Shift-Command V, and then use the browser window which opens to find your media.

Text is similarly straightforward, and if you’re remotely capable with a word processor you’ll immediately get the hang of adding and editing the words you put on your site, no sweat.

There’s also a useful HTML Snippet widget.

Admittedly, iWeb is very designeroriented so there isn’t a raw HTML editor builtin. But you can add useful code snippets, like Google Analytics for instance, using this widget, so it’s not too big of an issue. Hardcore developers who still claim its best to write HTML directly into a text

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how to? design a website

document won’t like it, but then they’re pros who really ought to shell out the five grand for something like Dreamweaver.

4

Tweaking Click on any object on the layout page and the context of the editing pane will automatically display the section most relevant to refining that element. You can add picture frames or line borders around images, for instance, manipulate the flow and look and feel of the text (although not the font, that’s a separate issue, second-last icon in the bottom row of the iWeb toolbar), and set the URLs and general behaviour of Hyperlinks.

One useful feature in the Hyperlinks section, is the ability to enable or disable hyperlinks while working on your site, so you can test them, then disable them again so that you aren’t accidentally opening up multiple instances of Safari every time you click on the element to

edit its properties.

This is really where the lion’s share of the actual custom designing resides, in this pane. You can manipulate all aspects of the blank page itself, as well as the finer details of all your Website elements here. And it all works really easily too, you needn’t know an HTML Tag from a JavaScript to build sexy, functional websites in iWeb and that is its deepest appeal.

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Publishing Now you’re done actually designing and laying out your site, it’s time to get it up onto your host’s server so that the world can see what you’ve been doing! Click on the top line site name (in our case, FTMP) and the editing window will be filled with the Publishing options, which you’ll recall we earlier set to Local folder so that your site only ever appeared on your own Mac while in development. Click the drop-down menu and change this to FTP server now.

Several new options will be presented in the grey block underneath. The FTP URL and its login credentials are needed, of course, and you can

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how to? design a website

also specify the server path you want to upload your content to as well as choose to use secure FTP protocols rather than unencrypted data.

If you’re a Facebook user already, there’s also a link beneath the space for your URL to automatically publish an update to your Facebook profile when you upload, effectively making the site live. That’s a nice touch for the social networking-aware, as we’re all rapidly being forced to become.

Now just open up Safari and

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browse to your site yourself, not the local version that you’ve been working on but the live, remotely hosted URL. Not only is it gratifying to see the final result, you should also re check every link and element to ensure that it’s translated faithfully online.

Then just sit back and watch the hits come rolling in.

That’s really all there is to it with iWeb. The application genuinely brings Web design down to a designer’s level - the user who certainly knows how to create what people will like to see but

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gets lost trying to figure out the difference between HTML and XML. And iWeb makes every step of Web publishing not only easy and intuitive, but in fact a whole lot of fun!

Hopefully this skeletal guide will get you started on your own projects with iWeb, so you can find out for yourself just how effective it is and how lame most of the free online options actually are. Best of all, as I said right at the beginning, this functionality comes free with every new Mac, so what have you got to lose, really?

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how to? keyboard shortcut

ky brd shrtcts SPEAK TO A SEASONED MAC USER AND THEY WILL TELL YOU THAT THERE IS A REASON THE MAC MOUSE ONLY HAD ONE BUTTON FOR YEARS. THE REASON IS THAT MAC KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS ARE SO GOOD THAT USERS HAD ONE HAND ON THE MOUSE AND THE OTHER ON THE KEYBOARD. JUST BECAUSE THE MAC MOUSE NOW HAS 2 BUTTONS DOESN’T MEAN THAT YOU SHOULD IGNORE KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS, THEY CAN SAVE YOU A LOT OF TIME.

There are so many keyboard shortcuts that we obviously can’t cover them all in this article. Aperture, the Apple photographer’s tool has 4 pages of shortcuts. Once you start working with applications like Photoshop, you’ll find that there are even more. Nevertheless, let’s look at some of the more common and most helpful shortcuts.

Most keyboard shortcuts make use of the key known as the Apple key, which on older keyboards has the Apple symbol on it. This key is actually the Command key so I’ll be using the abbreviation CMD

when describing this key. The Option key is another one that’s a little confusing since it’s labelled alt on your keyboard.

Let’s start with the simple ones that you will use almost every day. Cut, copy and paste I’m sure will be something that every computer user does, and frequently at that. Moving your mouse to the menu bar, clicking edit, before selecting “copy” is a long drawn out process. Not to mention that you have to repeat the process in order to paste the item. In order to cut, select the item or text you want, hold down the [CMD] key and the [X] key

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how to? keyboard shortcut together. In order to copy, use the [CMD] + [C] combination. You can select where you would like to paste your selection using the mouse and then use the [CMD] + [V] keys to paste. Once you get used to the key combinations, you will wonder how you ever managed the old way.

Every now and then, you do something and immediately think “Oops, I didn’t mean to do that”, no problem hit [CMD] + [Z] which is the “undo” shortcut. Don’t bother dragging your mouse over to the corner of the screen to use Spotlight, [CMD] + [Spacebar] and start typing whatever you want to search for .

Copying files from one folder to another is much easier when you have multiple finder windows open. The [CMD] + [N] shortcut is the tool for the job. Once you have the finder window open, you might want to select all of the files in the folder and that’s where the [CMD]+[A] shortcut comes in handy. You can also use the [Option]+ [A] to deselect all of the files. These two shortcuts work in most applications to select and deselect all. The [CMD] + [N] shortcut also works in most other applications to open something new, be it a new document or

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new window. Internet junkies on the other hand don’t have to open multiple windows these days since the advent of tabbed browsing. Firefox displays a little tab for you to click on to open a new one. Safari has no such luxury. Don’t panic though, use the [CMD] + [T] shortcut to open another tab. - The same shortcut

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so that you can be sure that the capture was successful.

There are some single key shortcuts, which I find particularly handy when I’m using a laptop without an external mouse.

Expose, which tiles all open windows, can be activated by using the [F9] key . You can then use the arrow keys to select the

also works when you are using Firefox.

Mac users, particularly those new to the platform, often bemoan the absence of the Print Screen key. Not only can you capture a screen shot, you can even select a specific area of the screen to capture. The [CMD]+[Shift]+[3] shortcut captures the entire screen and places the screenshot on your desktop. The [CMD]+[SHIFT]+[4] shortcut will change the mouse pointer into a crosshair. Simply drag the mouse to make your selection. As soon as you let go of the mouse button, the selection will be captured and placed on the desktop. You will hear the rather amusing sound of a camera shutter being released

window you want brought to the front followed by the [CR] key.

You can hide all active windows by using the [F11] so that you can easily get to something on the desktop. The actual keys that are used have changed on some of the new generation laptops but they have icons on the ‘F’ keys to show you what each of them do.

There are of course several more shortcuts so take some time to discover the ones most relevant to you. Should you want to learn more, click here. You will also find that most applications display the keyboard shortcut next to each item on the menu.

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how to? keyboard shortcut

Make sure you click on the actual keystrokes on the right hand side.

Clicking on the description on the left does nothing. If you make a mistake, don’t worry; just click on the Restore Defaults button at the bottom of the screen and the original shortcut will replace your input.

The fact that there is a shortcut for pretty much anything you want to do is quite cool but what happens if there isn’t a shortcut or the existing one doesn’t suit you? Well, no problem, you can customise keyboard shortcuts and, even better, create your own.

Creating your own shortcut is a simple process; click the [+] button at the bottom of the window. A new window will pop up where you can chose the application you would like the shortcut to be used with. Click on the drop down arrow next to All Applications and then select the

Click on the System Preferences icon on the dock. Click on the Keyboard and Mouse icon and then select the Keyboard Shortcuts button. Should you

decide that you want to change a shortcut to suit yourself, double click on the keys in the order you want to use them for the shortcut.

specific application you want the shortcut to work with. You can of course leave the all applications selected to create a global shortcut, which is a shortcut that works with all applications.

In the menu title box, enter the exact text that appears on the application’s drop down menu.

Click in the keyboard shortcut box and then press the key combination you want to use.

checkbox next to each shortcut.

This is so you can deactivate and reactivate any of the shortcuts, including the ones you created yourself. Deactivating a shortcut is helpful if it interferes with a third party application. Gamers find this particularly useful as games often have non-standard shortcuts.

There’s nothing more infuriating than playing a game and having your calendar display an appointment for example.

Keyboard shortcuts are particularly handy so take some time to learn them. Once you get used to them, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without.

You will notice that there is a

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how to? work with images

How to Work with images

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how to? work with images

IN LAST MONTH’S MAC ACTION, WE LOOKED AT STORING IMAGES IN IPHOTO. SOME USERS WILL HOWEVER WANT TO GO A STEP FURTHER AND START TRYING TO IMPROVE THEIR PICTURES. WHILE NOT A PROFESSIONAL APPLICATION IN THE LEAGUE OF PHOTOSHOP OR APERTURE, IPHOTO WILL BE MORE THAN ENOUGH FOR MOST AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHERS. iPhoto uses non destructive editing which means that every time you work on an image, a copy of the image, including your changes, is made. Your original files remain unchanged so you don’t need to worry about ruining your pictures. The down side is that with all the copies, your library can grow in size quite quickly.

So, let’s get down to business, the first thing you need to do is select the image you want to work with.

Open an event and click once on your chosen image. Click on the Edit icon on the bottom of the screen. If you would like to start editing an image by double clicking it, this can be set in Preferences. Select Preferences from the iPhoto menu and click on the General tab. Click to select Double-click photo – Edits photo.

The default is to edit in full screen

but if you would prefer, select the drop down next to Edit photo and select In the main window.

Assuming that you have chosen full screen mode, the edit tools will hide themselves so that you can see the entire picture. Move your mouse to the bottom of the screen and the edit menu will reappear. Move your mouse to the top of the screen and a filmstrip will appear showing all of the photos in the event so you can start work on another picture by clicking on it.

So, let’s start from the left and see what’s available. The Info icon will open a small pop up with various pieces of information about the photo such as file size and format.

The Compare icon opens up the next image in your event so that you can decide which one to edit. I guess it assumes that duplicates of an image would

live next to each other. It doesn’t allow you to make changes and compare your changes to the original. As I said, this isn’t Photoshop.

The rotate tool is fairly obvious, if you took a picture in portrait format and your camera doesn’t have an orientation sensor, you can rotate the image. This tool prevents neck ache from trying to edit the image with your head tilted to the side.

The crop tool, as you might expect, is used to crop the picture. There is often something distracting in the picture that you didn’t notice when you took it.

Click the crop tool and a crop frame appears over your picture. You can move the frame and resize it until you get only what you want in the picture. It is a good idea to click the “Constrain” check box.

This will keep the aspect ratio the same as the original picture, most important if you want to print the picture and don’t want large

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empty borders. Once you are happy with the crop, click on the Apply button.

The straighten tool is used for straightening the horizon if you took the picture without the camera being straight. It is not used for correcting converging verticals. You will need much more expensive software and a lot of skill to do that. Use the straighten tool cautiously, I find the image tends to loose sharpness when this tool is used. iPhoto will provide a grid to assist you in getting the picture perfectly straight. You straighten the image by moving the slider to the left or right until you are happy with the result. Click the

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cross to the left of the slider when you are done.

The “Enhance” tool is always available if you find the thought of adjusting images yourself too daunting. Its icon is a magic wand because it is supposed to magically correct everything that might be wrong with an image.

Click on this tool and iPhoto will try to make all the adjustments for you. It may not be to your taste but, again, any changes can be undone. I do find that in most instances, the Enhance tool works remarkably well.

The “Red Eye” tool works very effectively. Open an image where your subject has red eyes, and click on this tool. Click on the

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eyes and iPhoto does the rest, it’s almost like magic. On those occasions where iPhoto gets it slightly wrong, change the size to manual and set the cursor size to the size of the eyeball to achieve a more precise result.

Dust on the sensor is a problem that all digital SLR users are familiar with. The “Retouch” tool takes care of this problem to a certain extent although there is no substitute for sensor cleaning.

Click on the “Retouch “ tool and change the size of the cursor to the smallest size possible to just cover the dust spot. The larger the cursor, the more chance there is of affecting other areas of the image. The tool will try to

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match the corrected area with the surrounding pixels. The bigger the selection, the more chance that the surrounding pixels will be a different colour. Click on the dust spot and hey presto, you have a clean picture. The retouch tool can also be used like a paintbrush, which is handy for removing scratches from an image scanned from film.

The “Effects” tool opens a pop up window where you can select various effects. It’s good for changing a picture to black and white or sepia. The other effects, I find to be a bit gimmicky but that’s just my opinion. Try some of the effects yourself; you might like them. The middle one is the original image so you can click on it for a comparison.

The “Adjust” tool also opens a pop up window from which several adjustments can be made. You will need to know a little about enhancing digital images to use the adjustments to best effect.

This is however where you will have the greatest creative control.

Don’t be afraid to experiment, you can always undo any changes you make.

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The levels histogram at the top is a mystery to most people but a simple rule of thumb, move the sliders to the edges of the histogram if there are blank areas on each side. The exposure contrast and saturation sliders will help with under and over exposed images. Click the Avoid saturating skin tones button if you like punchy colours but don’t want the people in the picture to have orange faces.

The highlights and shadows sliders help with overly contrasted images such as pictures taken into the sun. The highlights slider will tone down burned out areas of the picture and the shadow slider will bring out detail in underexposed areas. There is no magic though, if the detail wasn’t there in the first place, you can’t get it back.

Most digital cameras produce slightly soft images that benefit from a small amount of sharpening. The sharpness slider will sort that out for you. Again, there’s no magic here, you can’t make an out of focus picture sharp. Use this slider with caution, over sharpened images look quite blocky.

One last thing, and this is important. On the right of the editing toolbar is a cross.

news Hold your mouse over it and the tooltip will say Exit full screen.

This is the only way to save the changes you have made. If you exit full screen by pushing the Escape key, all your changes will be lost!

You may be wondering why iPhoto doesn’t just ask you to save your work when exiting full screen. Well, if you hit escape, it assumes that you didn’t want to save your changes. If you exit using the cross, it assumes that you do want to save. It will save without asking, safe in the knowledge that your original image file is still intact. Should you decide at any time that you prefer the original picture, click on Revert to Original at the bottom of the Photos menu.

This takes you back to the file that was imported into iPhoto, it won’t simply undo the last change.

Experiment and have fun with your photos, you can always revert if you make a complete pig’s ear of it. Don’t forget, if there is any specific question you have, not just about iPhoto but anything Mac related, email us and we’ll answer it for you.

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gadgets

gadgets

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All of the accessories featured this month can be found at authorised Phoenix Software resellers. Visit their website, www.phoenixsoftware.co.za, for more information.

Exspect iPod Cube Clock Radio That’s right, plug your iPod into this at night and at your desired wake-up hour, you can be roused from your slumber by your own iPod playlist! The Cube also charges your iPod and it’s own internal battery while you sleep, and can be powered by battery alone making it perfect for when you’re away from any wall sockets.

Exspect iPod Shuffle speakers This little audio solution brings similar levels of widespread enjoyment to the music stored on the babiest of iPods, the Shuffle, as has been enjoyed on larger versions for some time already. Available in either pink or silver, it also hides a USB cable inside it’s housing so that you can update your Shuffle playlist from your PC while the unit remains installed in this compact speaker set.

Exspect Wii Illuminated Cooling stand Exspect also have a full range of accessories for other gaming consoles, but this blue-light decorated stand, well, stood out for us. It’s not just pretty either, with a built-in fan ensuring that your Wii remains suitably chilled even during the hottest, heaviest gaming sessions.

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gadgets

Elonex soundBAR i32 Don’t let the contemporary aesthetic fool you, the soundBAR also delivers genuinely powerful audio to your living room. It features a side-mounted MP3 port as well as a fully motorised, front-loading iPod dock as its main party tricks.

ElonexCUBE 3 Remember those mini Hi Fis that were so popular back in the early 9s and have largely become the norm for a ordable consumer audio today? The Elonex CUBE 3 takes that idea a step further, also incorporating a 7” 16:9 aspect ratio TV screen and supporting both digital and analogue video playback as well as good old DVDs and MP video playback. When not in use, the screen doubles as a digital photo frame, and the unit can also be hooked up to your presumable larger TV screen with Composite video and digital audio outputs. For ultimate versatility, there are even a trio of games built-in!

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OHWWHUV Hi there I just wanted to compliment you on your Macazine, I was quite impressed:) the design is simple, clean and easy to read (doing Mac justice) and your pictures are great.

Hi, I heard about your magazine via a DigiCape newsletter. The magazine is most welcome, as most Mac info is usually from a US/European source.

I have been looking for a free video converter for ages, so THANK YOU for sharing Handbrake with us! Amazing!

With regards to the magazine, is it possible to download and save a copy to my Mac? This does not seem to be possible from the Virtual Magazine platform. There is a download section on your website, but there is no files available for download. It is a bit difficult to read the magazine via Virtual Magazine, as the text is not that legible. Using the zoom facility does not provide for a smooth reading experience. It would be better if I could read a pdf version of the magazine. I would then also be able to read the magazine at any time, and not only while connected to the internet.

Your assistance will be greatly appreciated.

One thing I wanted to mention though, that the “bold statement” that iPhoto is the best photo cataloguing software in the world bar none, is a very bold one, and I think you should take a look at Adobe Lightroom, which I find to be vastly superior. My main cringe with iPhoto is the way it eats hard drive space by creating copies of all your photos once you have done anything to them...

Anyways, I’m just being a little picky... Haha.

Well done again on a fine publication, looking forward to the next edition.

Regards Devin Paisley Thanks Devin, glad that you’re enjoying the magazine. Let me clarify, I said that iPhoto is the best image cataloguing application, not the best image manipulation application.

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Thanks and kind regards, Mohammed Yakoob

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Love your Mac? Hi there With regard to your MacAction magazine. The articles are very well-written and I think as a free publication it is a great offering. However, a few issues that border on the side of frustration need to be highlighted. Firstly - the only way to read the magazine is to zoom in on a page - then you have to drag the page around to read it properly (I’m using Safari 4.0) Secondly - to go to the next or prior page, you first have to zoom out again.

Thirdly - there isn’t a way (as far as I’m aware of, anyway) to print the magazine as a whole.

Instead one has to choose ‘print left page’ or ‘print right page’.

I feel if these three issues could be resolved, your magazine would be an even better one.

I look forward to reading the rest of your issues and a big up to you guys for the work you do behind the scenes.

Kind regards Bradley Millar Send us pictures of your devotion and you could win great prizes. ilovemymac@macaction.co.za

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action

Thanks for the comments Mohammed and Bradley. I’m pleased that you are enjoying the content. We have had several requests from our readers for a downloadable copy of the magazine. We have been working tirelessly this month looking at various options, so that the download will offer the best possible reader experience. I hope that by the time you read this, the downloadable will be available here, if not, we will certainly have it for you next month.

THE APPLE LOVER’S MAGAZINE

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win

Win a brand-new iPod Shuffle!

We’ve had a request for a bit of an informal online Mac survey to be done. Just, simply, via letters from any of you out there willing to share some insight. And you can score yourself a brand-new iPod Shuffle 4GB if you do! That’s right, the tiniest and coolest portable music player in the world, which now even talks to you, and so much more. Read a full review this month right here.

So what do you need to do to get your hands on one of these babies? Well we’re giving away one a month for the next six months, to short submissions to letters@macaction.co.za speaking about the main reasons why, if you were a PC user before opening your eyes to the Mac, you ultimately made the move. Was it a particular app that you regularly used that just worked so much better, did you tire of random crashes and viscious virus attacks, or were you simply smitten the first time you laid hands on a Mac and had to have one, for sheer lust of the thing?

Give us a few words on the subject and a sexy new Shuffle could be all yours. We’ll choose the submission we like the best each month and this cool prize will be winging its way to your door courtesy of MacAction and The Core Group.

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iLoveMyMac We’re in the process of securing some more cool goodies to give away to you our good readers next month, and while we do the deals needed in the background we’re putting the section on hold for this month, as we don’t want to pick a winner this month making them ineligible for entry when we’ve got something to give away next month – that just wouldn’t be fair!

So keep sending us your pictures of weird, wacky, or wonderful things you’ve done to demonstrate your devotion to your Mac, or the Apple Way in general, and you’ll be in line for taking our first goodie bag home next month. You can send them through on Facebook or email ilovemymac.

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BACK IN THE LATE8S/EARLY9S, ANTHONY RODSETH BETTER KNOWN AS WOODY WAS SEEING THE MARGINS IN HIS LINE OF WORK AS A DENTAL TECHNICIAN BEING RAPIDLY SQUEEZED AWAY. PRICES WERE LARGELY SET BY MEDIAL AIDS OF COURSE, AS THEY STILL ARE TODAY, AND SELDOM INCREASED, WHILE THE COSTS OF PROVIDING A QUALITY DENTAL SERVICE GREW AND GREW. WOODY DECIDED IT WAS TIME TO FOLLOW THE HOBBY HE’D BEEN PASSIONATE ABOUT HIS WHOLE LIFE, AND STRUCK OFF ON HIS OWN TO BECOME A MOTORSPORT PHOTOGRAPHER!

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I

n partnership with Frans Dely, today a celebrated aviation photographer, Woody’s photography career got off to a slow but steady start. “I owe Frans a lot, a lot of my success has come from lessons he taught me. Not only lessons in the then-new art of digital photography, but also what he taught me about the Mac as a productivity tool. It took me a while to follow his advice, but when I moved over to Macs-only in 1998, I would never look back. I still don’t go out and tell everyone I meet they should be using a Mac though, they’ll realise in time how I achieve the productivity and end results I deliver, and until then my Mac is actually a key component of my competitive advantage so...”

Today, Woody’s company Final Image Digital, provides the highestquality motorsport photos available to corporate and press customers, but has capitalised on the chosen working platform and diversified into a lot of graphic design work.

Woody creates corporate brochures, promotional materials, and basically anything that needs to look Hot Hot Hot for a wide range of major corporate customers.

“It was really my motorsport roots that got me the relationships with these big clients,” he comments.

Today the stunning images Woody’s well-practiced Nikons produce also find their way onto his impressive range of themed calendars, which he produces at high quality and in limited numbers for interested

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customers looking for a reliable, high-impact way of catching the attention of existing and potential customers alike.

His workstation is an impressive dualcore Mac Pro, upgraded to 12 GB of RAM and sporting a TB of internal drive space and another TB of external capacity. “I’ll never struggle with a PC again. With the size of the highly-detailed files I work with every day, the PC just doesn’t cope. My Mac Pro is just perfect, always stable, very responsive.”

And including gargantuan desktop real estate, with a gorgeous 3-inch Apple Cinema LCD attached this Pro has the display space to open and manipulate four full A4-sized projects at once. Woody elaborates; “You don’t actually realise the productivity benefits of a screen like this until you get one. I used to run a pair of LCDs on my setup, but this one 3” display gives me all the space I need in one screen. It’s also like looking at a photo, and I can be focussed on it all day long and not feel any eye-strain!”

Woody still owns every single generation of Mac he’s ever worked on, from the original 7 he switched over to back in 1998, through every generation of G4 and PowerBook up to his current Pro workstation, as well as a pair of MacBooks for those mobile jobs.

“I just don’t sell my Macs, although I could, as they’re all still useable machines. They all still work perfectly well, a lot of people don’t understand

macs in action that about the benefits of a Mac.” Just two things bother Woody about his choice of technology platform. The first, is the 1-year warranty on their screens, which just isn’t competitive any more.

As mainstream manufacturers like Samsung offer more and more competitive high-end digital displays for similar or less money, topped off by full 3-year warranty periods, Woody believes that Apple should follow suit. And the second facet of Mac ownership he disapproves of, are his experiences of poor service levels from Core, Apple’s official SA importer.

“The Mac is undoubtedly the best platform for professionals. There’s the stability, the performance, that awesome OS. And the things I can make it do for me definitely give me a bit of a competitive edge, even over the younger guys constantly coming into my market. It gives me the freedom to diversify my offering, especially important in rough economic conditions like today, which the young bucks often aren’t able to do,” concludes Woody.

Contact Final Image Digital on 12 361 6341 and talk to Woody today if you re looking for motorsport images of simply superb quality. His shots of the recent WSBK round held at Kyalami include some breathtaking scenes, 12 of which already form part of a striking new calendar.

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navigate contents page Driving simulators are designed for people that fancy themselves as racing drivers. They are for those wannabes that know they would have been faster than the pros, if only they’d had the chance. So, that’s just about all of the male population then.

Driving simulators give us the chance to show our friends just how good we really are. They give us a chance to beat the pro drivers, albeit software simulated professionals.

All of that in the safety of an office chair, without the risk of damaging an expensive car; or ourselves. So look out Seb Loeb, here I come!

Driving games fit into two categories, there are arcade games and then there are simulation games. Arcade games are mindless fun with very little in terms of realism.

Colin Mcrae Rally fits very firmly into the simulation category. In fact, some have criticised it for being too realistic - it’s really not easy to drive a rally car so the realism makes it difficult to master. If you’re prepared to take the time needed to begin to master it though there is a very real sense of satisfaction when you get it remotely right.

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There are four game play options – starting with Challenges for when you just want to dive in and have a quick stage or two against no one but yourself and the clock. There is a Championship option for those who have a bit more time and want to gauge their performance against the computer opponents. There is of course the seemingly obligatory Career mode - start at the bottom and work your way up through the ranks driving several different cars competing in events all over the globe. Then there is the Online mode so you can test your skills against the world’s best gamers.

The weather effects are first class and it’s not just a case of occasional rain. There is rain, snow, ice on road surfaces, mud and some spectacular sunsets.

The handling of the car is affected by the nature of the road surface, although when I drive, the car is all over the place regardless of the surface!

Colin Mcrae Rally offers 3 different cars which have been modelled to be as close to the real thing as possible. There’s no doubt that each car feels distinctly different. Once you get the hang of driving them, you can start to tweak the set up by fiddling with suspension, tyre choice and other bits and pieces.

Playstation 3 game but they are none the less quite good. You shouldn’t have too much trouble getting the detail you want to see; even a modest spec Mac seems to run the game without any trouble.

There are a total of 72 rally stages that take place across 9 countries.

All of the stages are actual rally stages although how accurate they are I couldn’t say. Certainly, the graphics give you a real feel of being in the location. What I found particularly amusing is that if you choose random weather for a British stage, it seems to always rain.

The graphics are not quite up to the standards of a high definition

I tested the game on an iMac 2.GHz and turned the detail up to maximum, even though the game itself suggested I turn the dial down a bit. Not me, I want to see all of the glorious graphics.

The gameplay was smooth even at my higher detail level and loading was fast enough not to be of any consequence.

Unfortunately, I was forced to play the game using keyboard controls, which is less than ideal.

macs in action I have an old Thrustmaster wheel lying around which I plugged in, but although I don’t have any drivers for it the game recognised it. I thought all was well, it calibrated fine but once I got to the start line, the pedals were inactive.

Overall, Colin Mcrae Rally is very realistic except for a couple of things. Firstly, if you go too far off the track, a magic hand picks you

up and puts you back on. It also happens if you take a wrong turn even if you are in the process of turning round. When you lose it altogether and go driving through the fields, the navigator just sits calmly telling you what’s coming up next. It would be a lot more realistic if he said, “Where are you going you idiot!”

I really enjoyed CMR, it appeals to my nature as a petrol head. I like the realism and I like the fact that I can go and unlock all of the cars manually without having to wait until I’ve finished x number of stages.

If you enjoy driving simulation, this is the game for you. If you want an arcade game, look elsewhere.

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Steve Allisons MacBook WELL, AFTER YEARS OF BRAGGING TO WINDOWS USERS THAT MACS DON’T FAIL, DISASTER STRUCK. WORST OF ALL, I WAS IN THE U.K. WITHOUT MY TIME MACHINE BACKUP. The strange thing is that I wasn’t doing anything that taxed the processor; I had just plugged in my iPhone so that I could charge its ridiculously poor battery.

The mouse pointer froze and the keyboard stopped working.

No problem, I thought. I held the power button for 5 seconds and switched off. I switched the computer back on and all seemed well, there was the normal boot sequence and the desktop reappeared. Ah, I thought, problem solved but I was wrong.

The mouse pointer was stuck in exactly the same place and the keyboard was inactive. I plugged in an external mouse but that didn’t work either.

My heart sank, I might have lost all of my data or be in for an expensive repair if not both.

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Using a friend’s computer, I got onto Google and found, after a long search, that only two other people had experienced the same problem and no solution had been posted.

I managed to borrow an OS X disc and slid it into the drive, which was still working. Holding the [ALT] key, I booted up onto the operating system disc. Hey presto, the keyboard and mouse worked so the problem was obviously software related. I spent the next half hour trying to work out what I had worked on and downloaded since I left home where my Time Machine backup had been left.

I DID FIND OUT HOWEVER THAT YOU CAN TAKE YOUR LAPTOP TO AN ISTORE AND THEY WILL INSTALL THE UPDATES FOR YOU. Eventually, needing to use the computer, I decided to re-install OS X safe in the knowledge that most of my work was on a memory stick. I chose the Archive and Install option, which I had never used before. I clicked on Preserve Users and Network Settings and then held my breath.

I need not have worried, the

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MacBook fired up and everything was the same as before the problem. My email accounts had been preserved and all my data was safe including my iTunes and iPhoto libraries. iTunes wouldn’t open complaining that the library had been created in a newer version of iPhoto. Still, all my pictures were safe.

That really was the only problem, reinstalling using the Archive and Install, preserving user settings option puts your computer back the way it was but without all of the updates.

In a normal country, that wouldn’t be a problem but here, where our national telecoms provider perseveres with ridiculously low data caps, downloading 8 odd Megs of updates has quite an impact. I did find out however that you can take your laptop to an iStore and they will install the updates for you.

The old Mackbook is now working perfectly again. Even when things go wrong, you know why you’re an Apple user. It could have been so much worse. Still, it teaches you the importance of regular backups.

Steve

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