Mac Action Issue 2 May 2009

action

MAC

the apple lover’s magazine May 2009 • Issue 2

Rewriting history

How apple got to where it is today Self-mutilation, devotion or art? How much do you love your Mac?

There’s a significant, game-changing shift coming to the computing world Multi-Touch!

The Apple iLife suite is, says Steve Jobs, one of the biggest reasons people buy a Mac - We test drive iLife 09.

Useful Apple gadgets from Griffin Technologies

MAC

action

How much do you love your Mac?

the apple lover’s magazine Send us pictures of your devotion and you could win great prizes ilovemymac@macaction.co.za

from the editor

Lost in the Muse W

e put our hearts and souls into the first issue which, despite one or two mistakes, we’re very proud of. We had a lot of teething problems, which resulted in the last issue being a week late.

Nevertheless, we worked hard to sort most things out and then realised that we had been so busy that we hadn’t been concentrating on this issue. Still, we buckled down and here it is.

We will of course be constantly trying to improve the product so any feedback that you can give us will be greatly appreciated. This magazine is for you, the reader, and we would like to tailor the content accordingly. Please send any words of criticism, or praise, to letters@macaction.co.za.

What has been encouraging is the response that we have had so far to our first issue; we have had one or two criticisms but a lot of constructive criticism.

In general it seems local Mac

“Welcome to this, the second issue of Mac Action. This has been akin to the difficult second album they are always talking about in the music business” users are happy that they now have an SA-born publication to support.

This is an exciting time to be a Mac user. There are so many new products that we just didn’t have enough pages to review them all so you can look forward to more good stuff next month.

“In general it seems local Mac users are happy that they now have an SA-born publication to support” I decided that the new release of iLife was worth looking at in-depth. It has so many new features. We have included the Mac Mini, which we love as a cost effective and yet fully featured way of getting onto the Mac platform.

This month we have a genuine Mac platform game rather than a multi-platform online game.

It’s called Neverwinter Nights 2. I’m not a hardcore gamer but Russell is, so he has put the title through its paces.

Over and above that we have included, as we will every month, all the latest news, opinions and several pages of how-to articles. Please send us your questions to questions@ macaction.co.za and we will try to provide you with answers.

The more commonly asked questions or the ones that require more in-depth analysis will form the basis of future how-to’s.

So, all that’s left is for me to thank you for reading Mac Action. We love Macs and I hope it shows.

Apples for Africa -Steve Allison

Mac Action

1

MAC

action

contents

the apple lover’s magazine April 2009

news

features

07 06. News There have been a huge number of interesting goings-on this month, from off-the-wall patents, off-thechart performance from the new Xeon Nehalem architecture, and frankly off-the-rails real-world stress test results! Read all about the most important Apple news we could squeeze in to these eight pages starting right here.

20 20. A gathering wave This month we take a look at the coming revolution, and yes it’s going to be a big one. Global, in fact. We examine what it’s taken to get multi-touch technology to the tipping point it is sliding over as we speak.

Editor’s corner 16. Editor’s Corner Our editor Steve Allison reckons Apple ought to have a go at replacing his often-infuriating PVR decoder.

18. The other side Russell confesses his deepest sins, and wonders why everyone in the world can’t just get along?

2

Mac Action

16

20. Apple’s roots unearthed A minor confrontation in our office this month led Steve to delve deeper into the roots of our beloved IT supplier to uncover some facts, and set the record straight.

product review 31. We’ve got some tasty gear under the spotlight this month.

Apple TV Take Two, the new iLife 09 software suite, all 24 inches of crowning iMac glory, and Griffin’s funky iTrip Autopilot

32. Apple TV 35. Apple iMac 20” 38. Apple iLife 09 44. Griffin iTrip Autopilot

26

35

how to

ilovemymac

46. How To’s Our monthly selection of detailed, and useful, HowTo content starts here. This month we get better acquainted with iPhoto, iMovie, and Handbrake.

62. Ilovemymac Yep, you guessed it, we’ve had a couple of emails from the more committed amongst you African Mac users about some interesting things you’ve done to show your appreciation for the fruity brand.

Check out our first instalment into this monthly series, and send your own moments of madness in for a chance to win something cool

47. iPhoto 52. iMovie 56. Handbrake

47

the little things 60. The Little Things Our new section dedicated to those smaller bits that help you get the most from your tech purchases, and lifestyle itself. This month we’re dedicating these two pages to the great little add-ons from Griffin, recently launched into the country in partnership with The Core Group.

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

next month!

60

macs in action games review

68

68. Gaming Macs Phoenix Software sent us a copy of Bioware’s excellent Neverwinter Nights 2 for the Mac, so we revisit this AD&D fantasy world for some gratuitous fireball-chucking.

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.

speak to your people. mac people.

4

Mac Action

Speak to your people. mac people.

MAC

action

Advertise Here Call: Sean Tingle Mobile: 082 568 62 14 email: sean@plutonic.co.za

the apple lover’s magazine Mac Action

5

news Apple tops Forrester customer satisfaction survey Customer satisfaction levels among the ranks of committed Apple users are industryleading, says the latest report by market research specialists Gartner. The numbers see off the Windows-based competition by a healthy margin.

Q1 sales droop obscures growing market share A fall of 14 400 units in total sales so far in 2009 shows a drop of just under 1% against the first quarter of 2008, while the industry as a whole fell 7.1% - which wasn’t as bad as the 8.2% being forecast.

6

Mac Action

navigate contents page

A survey by Forrester rated customer satisfaction in three key areas – usefulness, ease of use, and enjoyment of use, and Apple topped out on all three. A commendable 80% of customers of the brand are very pleased on all three scales with their latest Apple purchase. The nearest competitor managed 66%, a clear gulf behind the market leader.

As nice as it is to see them ratified, these results come as little surprise for Apple fans.

How can you use something as elegant as a Macbook Pro and not just know, by the rightness

Further entrenching the strength of the brand, this contraction actually represents growth in market share, from 7.4 to 7.6%, as competitors turned in figures which starkly reflect the global economic crises.

Apple Computers continues to maintain its course through the challenging conditions, riding a high of holiday iPhone sales while enjoying the effects of yet another stunning, successful design and specifications update across the range, going out through authorised dealers and the online stores.

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

of the product in your hand and the measure of what it enables you to do, that it’s a market leader?

“Forrester rated three key areas – usefulness, ease of use, and enjoyment of use” Still, kudos like these never hurt a company that is doing impressively well despite the continued turbulence in the global economic sea.

But don’t expect the company to limit its own innovation at this point. New niche products like the acclaimed Apple TV, as well as new mainstream models, are already well into being designed. We all know how much the company and its people like to be hailed as innovative geniuses, so we expect them to be close to perfect on the very first try.

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

admin advertising sales contac us

news Introducing Toast 10 Titanium Pro

Phoenix announces local availability of Roxio Toast 10 Titanium Phoenix Software has announced the immediate availability of Toast 10 Titanium, the latest version of Roxio’s burning and digital media software for the Mac. The latest version helps to greatly enhance and extend Mac OS X and iLife applications with a broad range of additional capabilities for creating, sharing, and enjoying personal digital media content.

Toast 10 delivers pioneering features that include: an audiobook creator for

converting audiobook CDs into files compatible with portable devices; AVCHD Archive for quickly backing up original content from high-definition camcorders onto DVD or Bluray Disc (BD) ; and a Web video file capture and conversion tool that allows Web-based video to be enjoyed on DVD or mobile devices.

“Toast is far more than better burning on Mac OS; it’s about enabling users to manage, create, enjoy and simply do more with their personal library of digital photos, music and video,” said Jason Phillips, Sales Director at Phoenix Software.

“This latest version will have special appeal to consumers who want to easily move digital media between their Mac and digital devices such as the iPhone, or enjoy Web-based video content offline.”

Phoenix software also announced the local availability of Toast 10 Titanium Pro aimed at prosumers, creative professionals and designers, as well as photo and video hobbyists.

In addition to offering everything available in Toast 10 Titanium, Toast 10 Pro includes the high-definition/ Blu-ray Disc plug-in as well as these award-winning, third-party applications for developing advanced photo, video, and audio projects:

1

HD/BD Plug-In – Author HD video content on to standard DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. Take HD video footage from AVCHD camcorders, and EyeTV and create Blu-ray Discs or even standard DVDs with HD content that can be played on any standard Bluray set top box or PlayStation 3 game console.

2

SmartSound Sonicfire Pro – Orchestrate the Use Sonicfiique automatic feature or select from a library included music tracks and Mac Action

7

news

navigate contents page

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

adjust the mix and feel of the score to perfectly match your videos and slide shows.

3

BIAS SoundSoap – Remove unwanted noise like wind, hisses, scratches, and pops from LPs, cassettes, or almost any audio, music or video soundtrack.

4

LightZone – Produce striking photos in a simple and intuitive way. Sophisticated features such as zone mapping and relight give you the control to achieve professional quality results.

5

FotoMagico – Turn pictures into spellbinding slide shows with a few clicks, and then present them in high definition. Innovative text, transition and alignment tools ensure astonishing results. Burn your slide show to DVD or Bluray Disc for easy viewing and sharing.

Pricing and availability: Toast 10 Titanium is available from leading Mac retailers countrywide, including Incredible Connection, iStores, Project 3, DigiCape, EC Mac, CitiMAC and Access International for the suggested retail price of R1 299.99 and Toast 10 Titanium Pro for R1 799.99.

8

Mac Action

The front line The largely one-sided war with software giant Microsoft has picked up intensity with the international release of three new adverts primarily attacking Apple’s pricing strategy and limited range, supported by a study into the “Mac Tax”

– the premium that Apple users pay over their PC counterparts to be Mac users.

The report was quickly identified by astute observers as grossly one-sided. Its compiler, Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies, has admitted that the research, paid for by Microsoft, includes data fed to him by the Redmond-based firm and omits some key considerations.

Yes, it cannot be argued that Apple fans pay for the ease of use, superior functionality and outright reliability of Apple hardware. But the price delta shown in the “realworld” scenario, in which a user purchases a high-end workstation and entry-level mobile system and maintains them over the course of five

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

years, is unrealistic at well over $3 000.

The ad campaign so far consists of three instances of “ordinary citizens” who, looking for computers for specific purposes and on strict budgets, apparently plump for Microsoftbased systems in favour of Apple products. Their decisions are based on various criteria after deciding that they “just aren’t cool enough to be Mac people”.

But is has been countered by an Apple spokesperson explaining to Macworld that “a PC is no bargain when it doesn’t do what you want”.

The same commentator capitalises on the messages in the ad campaign, saying that at least Microsoft and Apple agree

admin advertising sales contac us

that the Mac is undeniably cool, and streets ahead of rival products thanks to its worldclass design and software environment at any price.

Most industry pros recognise that the Mac Tax “study”, naturally commissioned by Microsoft, omits some crucial data while taking a skewed view of the Mac ecosystem and pitching some peculiarly uncompetitive products against, at times, already-obsolete Apple alternatives. And it fails to take into account anything beyond the purely quantitative.

The same criticism can be made about the ads, which disregard more qualitative advantages such as user productivity and enjoyment in favour of a purely dollar-based stance. Apple users generally acknowledge

news

that these are the very reasons they are willing to pay the cost premium over a conventional PC. Either way, Apple’s increasing market share and strong stock market performance tell their own story of the success of the company’s model, and its product portfolio. User sentiment appears to at least in part echo Microsoft’s, that using a Mac is cool.

Customers across the world continue to make up their own minds about whether this ultimate style factor, combined with the streamlined functionality that has been an Apple trademark since the company was born, is worth the price premium, and continue to vote with their wallets at Apple Stores.

Mac Action

9

news XServe performance doubled by new Intel architecture Apple has unveiled an updated Xserve that delivers up to twice the performance of the previous system. Using Intel “Nehalem” Xeon processors and a nextgeneration system architecture, the 1U rack-optimised Xserve delivers up to an 89 percent improvement in performance per watt. Xserve is available with up to two 2.93 GHz Intel Xeon processors and industry-leading storage options that include a low-power solid state drive (SSD) and up to 3TB of internal storage. Starting at $2 999, Xserve includes an unlimited client licence for Mac OS X Server version 10.5 Leopard.

“The Xserve is the best workgroup server for our education, business and creative customers,” said David Moody, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Mac Product Marketing. “With up to twice the performance, better power efficiency and an innovative SSD drive option, this is the best Xserve we’ve made.”

The new Xserve includes Intel

10

Mac Action

navigate contents page

Xeon processors running at speeds up to 2.93 GHz, each with an integrated memory controller with three channels of 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC memory that delivers up to 2.4 times the memory bandwidth while cutting memory latency up to 40 percent. Using highefficiency power supplies and intelligent thermal management, Xserve delivers a 19 percent reduction in idle power use.

Xserve’s industry-leading storage capabilities include a 128GB SSD boot-drive option that requires a fraction of the power of a hard disk and delivers up to 48 times faster random access times without occupying a drive bay.

Xserve’s three 3.5-inch drive bays support both 7200 rpm SATA and 15,000 rpm SAS drives and can be configured with up to 3TB of internal storage. Two PCI Express 2.0 x16 expansion slots provide huge I/O bandwidth to support the latest high-bandwidth expansion cards.

The Xserve RAID card option now delivers improved performance up to 497MB/s and supports RAID levels 0, 1 and 5 with 512MB of cache without using a valuable PCI Express

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

expansion slot. A 72-hour backup battery is included for enhanced data protection.

Every Xserve ships with an unlimited client edition of Leopard Server, offering support for Mac, Linux and Windows clients without the added cost of client-access licences.

Leopard Server extends Apple’s legendary ease of use with Server Assistant and Server Preferences, which allow even nontechnical users to quickly manage users and groups on the server and easily set up key services.

Leopard Server includes Podcast Producer, the ideal way to automatically publish podcasts to iTunes or the web; Wiki Server, allowing people to collaboratively create and modify their shared websites with just a few clicks; and iCal Server, the world’s first commercial CalDAV standard-based calendar server.

Leopard Server is fully UNIX compliant and LDAP and Active Directory support allows Xserve to fit right in to existing IT

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

environments.

The new Xserve joins Apple’s latest hardware products in setting new standards for environmentally friendly design.

Xserve uses PVC-free internal cables and components, contains no brominated flame retardants and features a power supply with an average energy efficiency of 89 percent.

Pricing & Availability: The new Xserve is immediately available through the Apple Store (www.apple. com) and Apple Authorised Resellers, although the product is not strictly applicable to the SA market just yet. If you’re looking for the ultimate workstation however, the Mac Pro features the same next-gen Intel architecture and is available to SA customers right now.

The Xserve standard configuration, with a suggested retail price of $2 999 (US), includes: A single 2.26 GHz QuadCore Xeon 5500 series

1.

admin advertising sales contac us

processor with 8MB of fully shared L3 cache;

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

3GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC RAM;

7.

8.

9.

Tnternal graphics with Mini DisplayPort output;

A single 160GB 7200 rpm SATA Apple Drive Module;

news Entry-level Macbook migrates to NVidia

Dual Gigabit Ethernet onboard; Two PCI Express 2.0 x16 expansion slots;

Bonjour®-enabled Lights-.

Out Management processor and Server Monitor Software;

Two FireWire® 800 and three USB 2.0 ports; and

An unlimited client licence for Mac OS X Server version 10.5 Leopard.

Build-to-order options and accessories for Xserve include: dual 2.26 GHz, 2.66 GHz or 2.93 GHz Intel Xeon processors; 160GB and 1TB 7200 rpm SATA Apple Drive Modules; 450GB 15,000 rpm SAS drives (third party option); internal Xserve RAID card; Gigabit Ethernet, 4Gb Fibre Channel cards and a 750W redundant power supply.

For the entry-level, 13” white Macbook to continue to offer superb performance as the graphics demands on modern systems continue to grow, it needed a new graphics subsystem. So Apple has quietly upgraded this mobile little beauty with the NVidia Geforce 9400M with 256MB of RAM from the aluminium Unibody Macbook line.

As the economy continues to struggle, Apple has seen the importance of leading the sub$1000 notebook category in terms of performance.

Users on a budget can now buy a machine with toplevel performance in all its operations in this classic white polycarbonate Macbook – a model which many believed was soon to be discontinued with the introduction of the Unibody Macbook further up the value graph. Mac Action 11

news

Apple moves to patent advanced new tech The company has filed for two very interesting new technology patents in niche fields. The first set of applications, potentially driven by lessons learnt in collaboration with off-centre motoring specialists Rinspeed in creating its groundbreaking iChange concept vehicle displayed at the Geneva auto salon, is a system for pairing

12

Mac Action

navigate contents page

Apple mobile devices with in-car electronics systems.

The second paints a picture of an intriguing new sports tech - which sees a new breed of smart sensors integrated into eyewear or helmets and tracking the eye itself potentially being added to the basic pedometer functions of the Nike+iPod kits.

The vehicle pairing system could be used to enhance the security of your nextgen motor vehicle by, for instance, disabling the vehicle should the paired Apple device be out of range. It also makes for a much more bi-

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

directional interface between an Apple device and vehicle infotainment systems for easier access to and control of your car’s technological value-adds.

The sports-tech patents could give birth to a whole new control interface, making the users gaze into the navigational interface while engaged in a chosen healthy activity. This set of patents includes details for more advanced biometric sensors, which Apple has been working on for some time, which could provide a far more detailed analysis of an athlete’s performance.

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

admin advertising sales contac us

news ne the

xt

biig ng th

Apple continues to be tightlipped on what will be released over the next few months.

Growing anticipation Amid a flurry of rumours and speculation about new products Apple continues to be tightlipped on what will be released over the next few months. There must be something ridiculously cool in the pipeline if even half of the wild rumours turn out to be based in fact, but exactly what it could be remains anybody’s guess.

A new HD-capable iPhone appears likely to be launched once the much-enhanced

iPhone OS 3.0 is ready to come out of its current Beta phase. In addition to a slew of other new features including addressing the oft-criticised lack of cut-npaste, there is an enterpriseoriented functionality which some say will put the new iPhone “ahead of Blackberry”, the undisputed leader in the mobile enterprise space.

And it seems that each week beta OS users are discovering intriguing new functions in the third incarnation of the OS, so expect it to hit the streets with a lot more than conservative predictions suggest.

A multitouch-enabled tablet Apple continues to be a strong possibility, despite the company being historically unmoved by this growing market. Remember that in dismissing the existing lineup of tablets Apple execs said they don’t see much point in the capabilities of existing

tablets, inferring that any such items they produce would feature a revolutionary set of features and capabilities. Of course Apple has the ability to introduce such a gamechanging product into an existing market. So if this line does become a reality, don’t expect a device mimicking existing tablets to find a place in the Apple stable.

The new patents just filed (see previous news article) aren’t likely to produce actual product for some time. But they do suggest interesting new directions being taken within the company which - while likely to launch in a niche product - could have far-reaching consequences spanning the entire product lineup.

Whatever the next big Apple product might be, we feel the

Mac Action

13

news company has proven its mettle time and again. The next big thing will probably revolutionise the market segment it enters.

An entirely Apple-controlled wireless interface with car infotainment systems would be nice, especially something notably more comprehensive than we have now with mere cabled inputs or “tricking” the stereo with FM signals, neither of which is an adequately bidirectional signal to enable lower-level integration with systems beyond the hi-fi anyway.

But until it actually hits the market, analysts will continue making wilder and wilder guesses as the global anticipation builds. The simple truth is that, even without hard facts to go on, so many people around the world are eagerly awaiting the new products.

This in itself speaks volumes for Apple’s penchant for innovation. We’re watching for our next clues to come from the annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco in June, where the company is also expected to showcase its latest OS, dubbed Snow Leopard.

14

Mac Action

navigate contents page

Unibody survives toughest real-world test yet It’s a result which not even highly controlled testing environments could have dreamed of. But when a Turkish Airways flight tragically crashed in Amsterdam this year, killing several passengers and badly injuring hundreds more, Apple had no idea such a glowing testimonial to its new Unibody Macbooks would, literally, come out of the disaster.

When the wreckage was cleared away, passenger Serif Baris’ Macbook Air was discovered to still be functioning despite looking rather the worse for wear. Baris himself sustained severe injuries, from which he has thankfully recovered, and

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

was astonished to find his slightly buckled Macbook still booted up after the monstrous force of the plane crash had done its worst.

There’s absolutely no better, sterner test of real-world quality than the real world itself, and this example underscores the superb manufacturing of Unibody Apple Macbooks.

Perhaps Apple ought to get into the business of designing and constructing the planes themselves.

Not only would they crash less regularly, but pilots could be trainedup on their operation much more rapidly and passengers could be sure that if the worst did occur, the strength of construction would keep them comparatively unharmed.

Check out images of the mildly mangled, somewhat Daliesque Macbook Air and the original article here.

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

admin advertising sales contac us

news

US Army confirms Apple as WeaponsGrade The US Army is one of the most high-tech organisations on the planet. Juggling and comprehending data from an array of high-tech sources including recon satellites, combat drones and intelligence broadcasts has become a nightmare for the soldier on the ground.

Now, rather than equipping combat personnel with custom, expensive, and counter-intuitive handheld electronic devices for gathering and interpreting all these feeds, the US military has chosen to distribute the iPod touch, and to a lesser extent, the iPhone, for this purpose.

Soldiers need little training on the device, as many have already used one or own one themselves, while its capabilities are limited only in how far the software developer is willing to go. With new funding directly from the US military driving new applications intended to make soldiers’ lives easier, it’s

an ideal platform for building new solutions to traditional intelligence problems.

From the most simple task of language translation through to real-time video feed from advanced reconnaissance activities, the touch delivers a broad-based functionality previously unheard of. Such functionality would have required the battalion to be loaded-down with unique, individual handheld electronics rather than one lightweight, portable, easy-to-use and just about infinitely extensible little unit. It’s tough as well. Fitted in a durable sleeve to prevent scratches from obscuring the screen, this consumer device can take a substantial knock and keep ticking.

For a consumer device to be adopted as operational equipment by the US military is all but unheard of, and shows how richly useful Apple’s mobile platform is.

DivX 7 for Mac expands supported media library The latest version of the popular DivX video encoding format has launched for the Mac, bringing the capacity to recognise and play media files encoded in all current and previous versions of the software to the Apple platform.

DivX 7 can be downloaded for free here, so PC users can rest assured that media in their library based on this format can continue to form a part of their media collection, even should they desire to migrate to the richer, prettier, and according to Microsoft, undeniably cooler World of Mac.

Mac Action

15

column

An Apple PVR, now wouldn’t that be good?

There are two electronic devices in the rack under my television. They are a High Definition PVR and an Apple TV. Both are fairly modern hightech devices with one vital difference, the Apple TV actually works!

the problems I have now. You see, one of the reasons Apple products are so good is that the hardware and software are designed, from the ground up, to work together.

I’m sure the PVR itself is a welldesigned piece of equipment.

Pace is a reputable company that has been doing this sort of thing for years. The problems start, as far as I can see, when the unit arrives in South Africa and our local service provider adds its own software.

The first thing you notice when switching over from an older decoder is that the TV guide is divided into three sections, all channels, channels that you have marked as your favourites and programs that you have recorded.

This got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be great if Apple made a PVR? Then I wouldn’t have all

I’m convinced that you would have to work quite hard to write software that badly. It really is disappointing because the

There are no divisions for Sport, Entertainment and so on, which means scrolling through all the channels to find the one

16

Mac Action

High Definition picture looks magnificent although we only have a single HD channel in this country. Yet, because the software is so bad, you are always tempted to switch back to the older decoder.

column

you want. Sure, that is a minor inconvenience but it must be really easy to program that feature.

the box, there is a big red Reset button on the front panel. No such thing exists on the Apple TV.

PVR, as I’m sure you know, stands for Personal Video Recorder, so you would expect to be able to record the programs you want to watch later. It’s not that simple.

Actually recording programs is a bit of a lottery. Quite often it will record about a minute of the program and then stop.

There is always that moment of apprehension when you finally get around to watching a recorded program, while you wait to see if it’s all there and excitement if it is.

When looking through the guide at up and coming programs, quite often, nothing is displayed. Sometimes the programs appear after waiting a while and other times the machine needs a reboot. I suppose I should have been suspicious when taking it out of

So here we have a device designed to record programs and its weak spot is, wait for it, recording programs. In the words of the prophet of BBC Top

Gear Fame, Clarksonious – “How hard can it be?”

Now, you will have noticed I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the PVR and a lot less talking about the Apple TV. The simple reason for that is that the Apple TV just works. I load movies into my iTunes library and when I want to watch them, the Apple TV come up trumps and plays the movie. It’s that simple.

So Apple, come on, get into the PVR business and we can all enjoy our viewing experience the way it’s meant to be.

-Steve Allison

Mac Action

17

editors corner

navigate contents page

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

to mac or to pc? or both?

W

ell would you look at this. We’re only the second issue in, and already the office has lit up with controversy thanks to the similarly stubborn but usually diverging personalities of our editor Steve and I. No erstwhile competition, it isn’t a spat as serious as those which our country’s leaders tend to splash all over public TV and which threatens to tear our little publishing startup apart. Merely the headbutting of a pair of powerful IT paradigms, really.

18

Mac Action

column You see Steve, as you may have guessed already, is pretty gung-ho. We don’t call him an Apple evangelist for nothing.

Steve pretends to feel for them, but in actual fact he likes nothing better than to sting a beleaguered PC-using friend, colleague or family member when they’re down by responding sagely to the desperate pleas for IT assistance they send him with “Should’ve got a Mac I guess hey?”

Then there’s me. As much as I love and appreciate the Apple Way for what it is – the ultimate answer to the question “Can’t I just get a computer that does everything I want, that I can use without learning binary, and that will just run from the day I get it home from the shops till the day someone actually puts a wrecking ball through it without me having to fiddle inside or get ripped off by profiteering techies?”, I grew up on the PC and it still does it for me in some ways. Namely gaming (yes, I know you can dual boot into Vista and game on the Macs power hardware Steve), and the fact that I actually like to fiddle. Quite a lot in fact, it’s why I’m good at reviewing stuff.

It’s not just in my PC either. We were reminiscing about old cars the other day and I was recalling how my first ever car, a

stealthily rapid ’83 Ford Escort, fastback shape, complete with unassuming five-door body, a clean coat of cream paint, and even the original “1.3 GL” badge at the back despite not being a 1300 since long before I first took ownership, had its hood up every weekend. Yes that was often because something was wrong with it, but even on those weekends when every mechanical component had survived another whole week there I’d be, digging into the engine bay to play with those few bits that I knew I could.

Hell, I tend to buy preposterously pricey new RC car kits just for the fun of building the things. Not because I need a new one, or because my older model is anything short of in excellent running order. Just so that I can.

Anyway back to the point. I don’t think that enjoying and appreciating both the world of Apple and the world of PC need necessarily be completely impossible, with the two cultures never meeting and in constant mortal struggle with one another. For me each fulfils an entirely unique role, the Apple machine is there for when you want to get something done in as easy, comfortable, and streamlined a manner as you could need.

It’s there to impress friends, colleagues, customers even with its elegance, and it’s there to provide a rich computing experience for the creators of the world. And it’s there for sheer productivity benefits.

My PC, meanwhile, exists to be quirky, problematic, and a classic “Will she won’t she” adventure every time you go for that power button.

My Escort was a long long way from perfect, but man I developed a deep affection for that clunky machine. It certainly doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the sophisticated and smoothed experience of a shiny new model though with all the comfort features ticked and advanced electronic management making weekend tinkering all but impossible.

But in common with popular theology, the complete converts of one particular school of thought are naturally and constantly driven to the desire to teach others the wondrous truths they realised which led to their choosing one or the other path... so I guess in the end I don’t mind the evangelist’s sermons all that much. But I’ll probably remain as I am, passionate about both sides of this key digital divide.

- Russell

Mac Action

19

navigate contents page

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

Catalysing Touch – contemporary alchemy?

There’s a significant, game-changing shift coming to the computing world, and I think we all know what I’m talking about.

Like a pebble dropped into a small pond, the ripples have quickly spread across the surface of the industry as a whole.

This is not a quantifiable shift, at least not in the traditional development terms

20

Mac Action

– larger numbers, higher resolutions, faster throughputs. All of these facets are made tangible by the measurement itself, 1600 X 1200 is clearly better than 1280 X 1024. But the interface through which we interact with our machines is more tangible still by its very nature, without necessarily being able to be assigned a metric value.

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

admin advertising sales contac us

Changing gear Let’s take a step back. What’s all the big fuss about? Well, does anyone remember that old Top Gear episode where they drive one of the world’s first motor cars, the one which used a peculiar system of levers and pedals to operate, and that eventually ended up almost being crashed into a hedge as a result?

Anyone remember having a car like that? No? That’s because a better way was created, and became such a part of the package and our very lifestyles, that the old method was forgotten.

And we’ve stuck to the newer “interface” of three pedals and a steering wheel for a hundred years. That’s because changing the way we do things isn’t something which can be done every day. Only when the new system is profoundly superior will we even consider learning it anew, and replacing our hard-won “traditional” skills with a newer alternative just because it exists.

Of course ordinarily the new mechanism also has to include a solid foundation, a back-end which could highlight the new

feature to its fullest potential.

Take the humble mouse. It took almost 30 years from the first concepts to these 2D singlecursor pointers becoming commonplace on desktops.

The first multi-touch experiments came out of Bell Labs in 1984, just one year after launching the project, so by the same conceptionto-adoption timeframe, the technology has but five years left to make the difficult transition.

“Take the humble mouse. It took almost 30 years from the first concepts to these 2D single-cursor pointers becoming commonplace on desktops” The Rise Yes, this was the year when the already-old single-touch system was recognised as woefully inadequate as a control interface, and multitouch technology was born.

Although strictly speaking, some academics beavering away in a Higher Learning Laboratory had actually

demonstrated something along these lines a few years earlier still.

Not very much became of those original samples. After all, the big new interface, that snazzy little mouse, was the challenger to the traditional keyboard as an input device and was growing in popularity at the time. Multi-touch technology remained far too expensive, impossible to deploy as part of a commercial solution.

But inspired researchers continued to develop and refine the technology, confident in their belief that they had the next-generation input device in their hands, conducting arrays of tests, proving theories, affecting enhancements, and generally polishing the platform for widespread adoption and a total paradigm shift in humanmachine interaction.

Respected researchers such as Jeff Han of New York University have reiterated this notion of multi-touch as groundbreaking input technology, while leading Microsoft researcher into the technology, Bill Buxton, details clearly in his

Mac Action

21

seems to have most of the bases covered, thanks.

“Multitouch systems that I have known and loved” the angles and possibilities, as well as some of the drawbacks, which the technology represents.

This interesting read includes a great Buxton quote; “Everything is best for something, and worst for something else. The trick is knowing what is what, for what, when, for whom, where and most importantly, why.”

Now that is one unusually ambiguous researcher, but I’m not sure I agree. This argues that multi-touch will co-exist with traditional media like the mouse, “complementing” the tried-and-trusted method with new features. In my view, multi-touch seems to work so beautifully, why keep the mouse? If anything the keyboard is the traditional input device which needs to stay, but as a pointing device multi-touch 22

Mac Action

Naturally it isn’t that simple. But if all the software we needed worked perfectly with multi-touch tomorrow, I can assure you that most people on the planet would be happy to relearn this new interface.

And a lot of that is because, from what we’ve seen of multi-touch so far, there’s really not that much to learn.

The whole point is to make interactions with the machine more efficiently hardwired to the human mind, more an extension of our bodies than tools we manipulate in predefined 2-dimensional patterns.

The Everybody Interface Anyone with an iPod touch, iPhone, or even one of the new unibody Macbooks can tell you, it really works out this way.

And, on the notebook, it integrates just perfectly

into the system. The dumping of a single-touch trackpad for the glass multi-touch system never does anything but make whatever you’re doing with your machine easier, more intuitive, and more satisfying.

It makes sense, Apple has always stated that its operating environment is designed to make sense to our brains, rather than this gray matter having to make sense of it, and the multitouch functionality is utterly intuitive.

What is also interesting are the routes which various giants in the technology industry went with the power of multi-touch, particularly our favourite antagonists, Apple and Microsoft.

The former, we’re all aware, kicked it off with a stylish, relatively affordable, very mobile and technically strong cellular phone, its first in the segment and largely credit as the device responsible for introducing multi-touch to the world.

Microsoft’s Surface, meanwhile, cost $10 000, was the size of a table, and otherwise was technically great-looking with some very cool features included.

So which one of these companies is more committed to taking multi-touch to heart?

Admittedly, with the quiet integration of multi-touch capabilities into Windows 7, the Redmond software giant has recognised the coming multitouch wave and it’s poised to be quite a battleground!

“Speculators have even come up with a pseudo conspiracy theory along these lines, suggesting that Apple has a “megaplatform” built around multitouch as the most natural, intuitive and user-friendly interface we’ve ever seen”

In addition to the consumer devices though, the addition of that multi-touch tracking zone in the new Macbook doesn’t net Apple the title of the first to introduce the technology to the general computer market – Dell already did that with a troublesome range. But it is undoubtedly the first wellintegrated, executed, and massproduced implementation.

Now I’m not going into too much detail about the Apple multi-touch patent here, but I will briefly add that anyone

who thinks this company has claimed its IP solely in order to inhibit development of the technology, I doubt that that will be a problem.

Speculators have even come up with a pseudo conspiracy theory along these lines, suggesting that Apple has a “mega-platform” built around multi-touch as the most natural,

intuitive and user-friendly interface we’ve ever seen – poised to take huge bites of the computing market while strangling its competition’s ability to produce anything competitive.

It’s already begun Apple has always striven to deliver next-gen platforms packed with an arresting and highly intuitive environment, and multi-touch is enabling a step to the next level of humanmachine interaction. The company has been building up to this point for several years, and with its acquisition of multitouch specialists Fingerworks in 2005 the writing was on the wall for astute observers. And with consumer devices and now notebooks sporting the technology already out, it’s also not hard to believe rumours of the company buying up millions of multi-touch displays...

If you have already got to try a multi-touch interface in Mac Action

23

And these first tentative steps will just be the beginning, as applications of all varieties learn to capitalise on the interface the possibilities are enormous.

Multi-touch has paved the way for a new age of interaction with machines.

It’s happening right now. Look again in 12 to 18 months how you’re interfacing with your various machines, and if multitouch isn’t at least among your options I’ll be astounded. And the transition will occur so quickly that the years spent developing the enabling technology won’t endure as memorably in our memories as they should. They never do.

This makes right now a pretty good time to marvel at all the effort, from all parties, it has taken to get the concept to the highly polished state it is in today. And as multi-touch grows in its installed base, even more energy will flow into it, finally overhauling a largely forgotten aspect of tech development – the most tactile element of the modern computing experience – the human interface device.

24

Mac Action

MAC

action

whatever format, you’ll know the basics of what makes it so... right, to use. It’s certainly powerful, and is likely to require little training or familiarity to use effectively.

the apple lover’s magazine

Ad

Advertise to your people.

Mac people.

Ad

Mac Action

25

A Brief history of Apple 26

Mac Action

M

any people attribute the personal computer and the home computer revolution to IBM, including one of our colleagues in this office. So after taking him outside and beating him with a wet fish, I decided it was time to set the record straight.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were friends and had been for years by the time Apple Computers was created in 1976. Both were considered to be dropouts but I think we can take that with a pinch of salt as most computer geeks of the era were considered to be dropouts. Let’s just say they were non-conformist.

Although the reason they chose the name Apple is not entirely clear, it is believed that they saw Atari as their biggest competitor and wanted to be listed above it in the phone book.

The original Apple logo featuring Isaac Newton under the fabled apple tree.

The rainbow Apple logo, used from late 1976 to early 1998

The monochrome Apple logo, used from 1998 to late 2000, predominantly on hardware. Still appears on various products in various colors, such as iLife packaging.

Stylized Apple logo, used 2001 to around 2007 on Apple software.

Logo used from 2007 to present.

Mac Action

27

Wozniak worked for HewlettPackard and Jobs was in the employ of the video games company, Atari. The two had more than a passing interest in computers and Wozniak was an electronics genius.

They were both members of “the Homebrew Computer Club”, an organisation of electronics enthusiasts who got together to share information. Jobs and Wozniak began working on the Apple 1 in1975. Wozniak saw it as a hobby but Jobs had bigger ideas.

Once the Apple 1 was completed and working, Jobs saw the opportunity to sell the device. They offered it to Hewlett-Packard, since Wozniak was employed there, but they weren’t interested.

Jobs decided that they should produce the computer on their own. He negotiated a deal with an electronics retailer who would buy 50 computers. They didn’t have the money to produce that number of computers. Jobs went to an electronics supplier and negotiated terms, which enabled them to produce and get paid for the computers 28

Mac Action

before they had to pay for the components.

It was on April 1, 1976 that the Apple computer company was born. There were actually three members of the original company, Jobs, Wozniak and Ron Wayne. Wayne was a colleague of Jobs at Atari; he was a lot older than the two Steves and probably a lot less cavalier than the two younger members. After 12 days, Wayne decided the risk was too great and resigned from the Apple Company with a payout of $800; I wonder how much he regretted that decision.

Wozniak had been limited with the design of Apple 1 because, being a hobby at the time, they didn’t have much money. With the sales success, there was money in the bank and Wozniak started work on Apple II, a much-improved unit in terms of functionality.

Realising that this could be a huge sales success, they wanted to build a better case and create a computer that ran out of the box. Having managed to secure some funding with the help of a new investor, Mike

Markkula, the Apple II went into production. The Apple II is the computer that really started the home and personal computer market.

The IBM PC didn’t appear until 1981.

Jobs had become interested in the research being carried out by Xerox into the Graphical User Interface (GUI), although it was known as WIMP at the time, which stood for Windows Icon Menu Pointing Device.

Xerox invested a substantial amount of money in Apple in return for Apple using the GUI research to form the basis of their operating system.

Jobs began work on a business computer, which would use the GUI and was codenamed Lisa.

By 1979, Apple Computers was a successful company that employed several people. Jeff Raskin, an Apple employee,

came up with the “design and implementation philosophy, which demanded generality and human usability over execution speed and efficiency.” He formed an official project in 1979, which was codenamed Macintosh!

In 1980, Apple went public, with Michael Scott becoming president. Apple’s stock increased 1 700% in the first year of its listing. Jobs tried to take control of the Lisa project but was turned down

by Scott. With his nose out of joint, he started to look for a way to outdo Lisa and turned his attention to Macintosh after realizing the progress that had been made by Raskin.

Scott eventually agreed that Jobs should take over the project.

Wozniak was injured in a plane crash and decided to take some time off from Apple and the Macintosh project. He returned to Apple in 1983 but not on the Macintosh project.

John Scully, who

had been president of Pepsi, became president of Apple in 1983. Scully and Jobs didn’t see eye to eye which lead to a power struggle within the company. Jobs was the eventual loser and, in 1985, resigned from the company that he had started. Jobs bought Pixar and, in addition, formed a new computer company called Next.

For the next few years it was business as usual for Apple until 1997 when it bought NEXT. The acquisition brought Jobs back into Apple and

by September of that year he became CEO, the position he still holds.

2001 was very significant for Apple, with the introduction of the two products that define it today. OS X, which has its root in the NEXTSTEP operating system, combines the stability of Unix with an easy to use graphical front end. Later on in the same year, Jobs announced a hard-drive-based, portable MP3 player called iPod. Many IT analysts attribute the current swing towards Apple

by consumer computer users to the success of iPod. Let’s face it; it has become a household name and the de-facto portable music player. The word “Podcast” can also be attributed to the iPod. The other significant event in the recent history of the company was the switch in 2006 to Intel processors. The G series had pretty much reached its limits and rather than re-invent the wheel, a deal was struck with Intel. The switch to Intel meant Windows could be run in a virtual machine, which eased the transition to Mac for those that still need to run Windows applications. Of course, as we know, once users have seen the benefits of Mac, they never want to use any other computer.

This is just a brief history, touching only on significant events. If you would like to find out more there is a very interesting website called The Apple Museum.

-Steve Allison Mac Action

29

How much do you love your Mac?

MAC

action

Ad

the apple lover’s magazine

30

Mac Action

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

Product reviews We’ve gotten our hands on some more sexy Apple products this month, and take a closer look at each in turn to uncover any hidden talents or (unlikely) defective thinking.

32. Apple TV

38. iLife 09

Is the stylish Apple TV really worth the money, given our limited broadband connectivity and inability to hire out movies via iTunes as our US-based peers are able to? Well you’ll just have to read this view to find our thoughts!

It’s loaded by default and per gratis onto any new Mac you buy today, and is a quite affordable upgrade if you are already a Mac user, but is it really worth the outlay? Steve dissects the suite to give you his advice.

35. iMac 20”

44. Griffin iTrip Autopilot

A display based on the award-winning standalone Apple Cinema 24” display has to rock our Mac-obsessed world somewhat. We hand the latest iMac over to Russell to see if all that real estate can get him thinking straight about these killer products.

FM broadcasting iPod signals to a standard car entertainment setup is really how Griffin made its reputation as a leading provider of Apple-oriented accessories. The new iTrip Autopilot, with Smartscan function, should uphold this legacy, but does it?

Mac Action

31

review: apple tv

navigate contents page

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

ier: om l p S u p p p l e. c 0 w.a 450 w w i ce : R 5 9 9 9 Pr ), R ) GB 0 (4 (160GB

T

he Apple TV costs R4500 (for the 40GB version). Is this the price for typical Apple flair which will enliven and enlighten your living room, or almost fivegrand worth of extravagance for little more than a whim? When Core offered me one to test out of the blue, I was keen to find out.

Our editor, you see, is always expounding its virtues. But he does that with most things that come with that beloved logo.

So let’s just see how far those rose-tinted glasses go.

It’s certainly an attractive little 32

Mac Action

unit, and since its power supply is on board there’s no bulky transformer like on my Xbox 360. In fact there’s very little to the unit itself or to connecting it. Once the power is in and you’ve connected the HDMI cable from unit to TV you’ll be impressed at how little noise it generates, compared to a cruder media-centre PC or even a console. Weird that there’s no power button though, perhaps Apple are confident that it never crashes?

Anyway, it’s got an Ethernet port, but thankfully also

integrated 802.11 b/g/n WiFi. Even more fortunate is that I’m testing a draft-n wireless router at the same time, so I can capitalise on this highest-rate wireless LAN. And connecting to the network is quickly and easily accomplished when you first power it up using the typically sparse Apple Remote, which any iPod user will immediately understand. But the interface is such that even the technophobic should be comfortable with it relatively quickly. This is a good thing as

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

this type of device is oriented more towards the general user.

One of the big criticisms of the first-generation Apple TV was its inability to function without a Mac or PC on the network with iTunes installed. You don’t have to do this any more, although you’d really be missing the point a bit if you didn’t. Anyway, you don’t because now the Apple TV connects straight over your broadband internet connection to the iTunes Store itself, allowing you to browse and

download the content available there straight to the box itself.

There’s all sorts of content available to international Apple TV customers, but unfortunately here in SA we’re quite severely restricted. We can’t rent movies or buy TV episodes. And if you could, the combination of slow DSL speeds (unless you’re on a 4MB connection perhaps) and restrictive bandwidth caps would limit your use of these services anyway, especially if you’re fixated on HD content to max the potential of your sexy

admin advertising sales contac us

HDTV. Still, there is content we can access even without resorting to “cheating”. These are primarily the free iTunes Store offerings, so you can get podcasts for instance, and you can connect to photo albums using your .Mac or Flickr accounts. Nice, sure, but not really all you want from a media centre revolution.

Fortunately the more you explore the Apple TV, the more really nice

features you discover, even working within this limitation. As soon as you connect your Apple TV to your iTunes library it becomes more like a traditional media-centre device, streaming all manner of media with little fuss and via a somewhat complicated but well-thought-out command interface. And the speedy 802.11n WiFi enables very smooth streaming even when playing HD content.

On the subject of HD, the Apple TV doesn’t actually produce a full 1080p signal. It

review: apple tv renders internally at 720p, then upscales this to 1080p so your TV itself doesn’t have to do the conversion, which can cause quality loss. Only committed pixel-counters are really going to see much difference between this upscaled image and a native 1080p signal. Video quality, on the whole, is very good.

It does now allow full Dolby Digital 5.1 audio, another feature the original lacked, so you can thump that 5.1 home entertainment system you have hooked up to your TV in all its glory. And combined with what is probably the killer new feature, AirWaves, it’s this audio capability which almost saves the Apple TV in our market.

Thanks to this neat trick, any WiFi-capable or networkconnected device can stream its iTunes MP3 playlist straight out to the Apple TV, which then of course reproduces these beats on the entertainment system for maximum effect.

Even if you’re browsing through looking for content to watch, the audio stream will continue to play, controlled entirely by the iTunes installation on the streaming machine, until you

Mac Action

33

review: apple tv find what you’re looking for and start watching. At this point the music turns off in deference to the movie soundtrack.

Although the platform isn’t uncrashable I found it to be pretty stable overall. And it’s always responsive, making navigation painless. As a regular PC-user, not all of my movie media is in the MP4 standard, but a couple of classic DVDs I have ripped into iTunes looked great on the big screen.

Although the platform isn’t uncrashable I found it to be pretty stable overall. And it’s always responsive, making navigation painless Honestly, that’s about all there is to it. No, I haven’t mentioned the fact that you can connect to and play YouTube videos straight away, but that’s because I tend to prefer movies made, at least to some extent, by professionals. The rest, which is the bulk of the Apple TV offering, just isn’t applicable here.

34

Mac Action

navigate contents page

So given that it’s little more than a great and convenient big-bass and connection-free MP3 player, conventional digital media centre, and that cool and useful Apple Remote, you might be thinking I was less than impressed with the Apple TV. That isn’t exactly true.

In fact, I’m enthralled by it. With the functionality this device enjoys in fully mature, high-tech markets it must surely be all but unstoppable. It’s a genuinely integrated, internet-aware allmedia device stored neatly in a self-contained, attractive and low-noise little package. And it has enough power to perform all of these media activities quickly, seamlessly and pretty reliably too.

The fact that so many of the criticisms levelled at the original version could be addressed with no hardware change, just an automatic software update, is what really impresses me. Just imagine what the next version of the firmware might enable.

Remember, the local broadband arena is expanding rapidly at the moment, and a South African iTunes store is always just a settled negotiation away.

Once those two limitations are lifted, you’ll be sorry for choosing anything else over an Apple TV, it’s that simple.

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

It might look a bit expensive at the moment, while it operates in local conditions in its limited manner. But the price is far from ludicrous for what is, after all, the smartest media centre on the market. And once it’s been fully unleashed, it’ll be worth every cent in entertainment.

Mac Action rating: 4/5 (SA broadband rating, 1/5. Combined, 3/5 with a promise to revisit)

We want to look at one again in a year’s time when our local infrastructure has caught up with the thinking behind the Apple TV. Summary: Great machine, typically superb interface, local iTunes Store and bandwidth limitations really suck though!

Click here for more information

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

L

ots of Apple detractors, read Microsoft fanboys (yes, there are, for some reason, a lot of these), quote a “limited range” as a downfall of the beautiful PC. I don’t really see that, yes it’s simplified somewhat compared to the often-bewildering array of options on a PC, but it’s actually pretty comprehensive covering desktop, notebook, server, and workstation in turn, just quite tightly-defined.

The four-variant desktop range begins with this baby, the 20” iMac. It’s powered by a 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU with 2GB

admin advertising sales contac us

DDR3 running at a comfortable 1066MHz. Storage comes courtesy of a 320GB HDD, and the well-known Superdrive optical combo. There’s an integrated nVidia GeForce 9400M which shares 256MB of main RAM for video memory, connected directly to that stunning 20” flat LCD, which sports a maximum resolution of 1680 X 1050 pixels, and a Mini Displayport for adding an external display if you wish.

Stereo speakers with a builtin amplifier deliver the audio while the built-in iSight camera and microphone mean you’re

review: imac 20”

immediately video-conference ready.

In terms of connectivity it’s comprehensive. One fully Gigabit-Ethernet capable LAN port, a solitary Firewire 800 port and six USB ports, builtin Bluetooth and the fastest available WiFi specification 802.11n also integrated in the package. And you get all of that packaged into the superbly attractive, slimline little aluminium chassis which just makes any desk look immediately less cluttered and classier overall.

Mac Action

35

review: imac 20” And possibly the best part of it all, is that you simply haul the iMac from it’s packaging.

Plug the keyboard into a USB port, the MightyMouse into the keyboard, and the power cable into the rear of the unit, reach around the back for the power switch, and you’ll immediately be up and away with full functionality from this wellchosen hardware mix. It’s really all very impressive, and I haven’t even got to the strongest point yet, which is all the software.

My test iMac from Core came loaded with a couple of extras, but any customer machine will include an impressively comprehensive range of applications without spending another cent. The latest version of the iLife 09 suite is preloaded, which incorporates iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, and GarageBand. iPhoto and its Faces feature, which our editor has given richer detail on elsewhere in this issue, is just brilliant, and GarageBand is hugely entertaining if you’ve any musical flair in you. Yes perhaps it isn’t the ultimate solution for professional musicmakers, I’m not sure, but then again the iLife suite isn’t really for professional applications.

That’s iWork 09, which is also already on my iMac, but won’t

36

Mac Action

navigate contents page

be on customer systems. Mine also boasts the Microsoft Office for Mac suite, as well as VMWare Fusion, a virtualisation platform, both of which would carry extra costs.

Although after becoming more familiar with Pages and Numbers (the iLife components) I couldn’t see much point to the MS Office apps except for the completely closed-minded, habit-set user, the VMWare installation was greatly appreciated for running Windows boxes within OS X Leopard.

Both Pages and Numbers do take a bit of working out, but if you’ve ever used a word processor or spreadsheet app before you’ll quickly have the hang of them, and once you do they in a small way actually make the act of working creatively even more fun. It’s an impression which is hard to pin down really, it infuses the whole Mac experience – is it the packaging, the stunningly crisp and bright display, the unfussed operation? Well you know the answer, it’s the whole lot of course, which is why Apple maintains a closed ecosystem.

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

Of course the OS itself – just brilliant naturally – includes a host of built-in software apps too, and they’re just the kinds of things you need as an average computer user. Time Capsule is a

fantastically elegant full-system backup solution, Spotlight a powerful and effective metasearch tool, and of course the ubiquitous iTunes music platform. Some of these apps you’d pay for in an MS environment, some not, but it’s great to have a good selection of software features available out the box, of apps which are going to be genuinely useful to you as a user.

I logged right in and did some customisation – I like the Dock to magnify on mouse over for instance, which isn’t on by default, and prefer slightly larger icons for my CRT-wearied eyes. I connected to my SSID-disabled, WEP-protected wireless LAN next, and within quite literally 3 minutes of booting the system, as an expert computer user but more of a Mac beginner, was operating at full steam. It’s just deeply impressive the absolute

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

admin advertising sales contac us

which immediately requires an upgrade of some sort, which seems more than pointless.

From a reviewer’s perspective, what I can tell you is that I’ve never, ever had an entry-level PC here to test which, which when it’s come time to pack up and return to the benevolent supplier I’ve thought “Oh no, please don’t take it away!” And although, for my gaming habits, I’d prefer a stronger 24” model ultimately, when this test iMac had left the house, I found myself quite regularly pining for it. It’s just lovely.

ease of everything to do with this iMac. I even really took to the seemingly-small aluminiumbased keyboard of the thing, although since I am something of a gamer the iMac did show something of a weakness here – the entry-level CPU and that 9400M graphics chipset not exactly making mincemeat of resource-heavy titles. But then for an entry-level machine it fared better than its cheaper, more traditional cousins, and just cruises through heavyduty and massively useful functi8onality like sorting through huge photo archives.

So, it’s almost R15K. For an entry-level machine. Isn’t that a lot of infamous “Mac Tax”?

Well to be honest, no it really isn’t. Yes, you can buy an entrylevel PC for a third the price, it will feature a third the power, it’s really that simple. A PC for that price will be running one

review: imac 20”

of those hideous Celeron or even Sempron processors, 1 GB of DDR2, a much smaller harddrive, outmoded and decrepit 15” CRT, no integrated camera, microphone, speakers, a significantly more useless integrated GPU, 10/100 Ethernet, no 802.11 let alone 802.11n, and will still need software bought and installed to do anything with. Yes, for R15K you can add all of these options on, but you’re still going to be buying a PC

Rating : 3 ½

Summary: Lacking some gaming power, but still quite the charmer.

For full specifications click here.

Mac Action

37

review: iLife09

The iLife suite is, says Steve Jobs, one of the biggest reasons people buy a Mac. I’m inclined to agree. There is so much you can do with your Mac right out of the box that you don’t need to dig 38

Mac Action

navigate contents page

deep into your pocket for third party software. Unlike some other manufacturers the preinstalled software isn’t second rate, “get you started” software that will soon need to be upgraded. On the contrary, iLife is comprehensive, powerful and not only that; it’s fantastically easy to use.

If you bought your Mac in the last few years, you already have a version of iLife installed. So, is it worth spending R899 for

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

the latest upgrade? Well, let’s have a look at the new features and see. You do get a five-user family pack for your money but that is designed for five users in the same establishment. You shouldn’t really go halves with a friend down the road and use 2 licences each. iPhoto is the best photo cataloguing application in the world, bar none. That’s a bold statement, I know, but I really believe it’s that good. iPhoto

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

admin advertising sales contac us

also includes new editing tools which, while not comprehensive enough for professional photographers, are more than adequate for amateurs. iPhoto has had several improvements and new features added in the 09 version and this application alone justifies an iLife upgrade.

a brilliant feature. Not only does it recognise that there are faces in a picture, it also recognises whose face is whose. Click on the Faces tab and iPhoto will go and find all the pictures that have a face in. This takes quite a long time if you have a large library.

There are 2 new organisational and search tools in this version.

In addition to Events, which was included in iPhoto 08, you now have Faces and Places. Faces is

All you do then is put a name to a face and iPhoto looks for all the pictures with the same person in them. If it’s not sure, it will display a list of faces that it

review: iLife09

thinks are a match. You just click to confirm or reject.

Click on the Faces tab and you are presented with a corkboard display with a single snapshot of each person you have named. Double click on the snapshot and all the pictures of that person are displayed. A really cool feature is that there is a Smart Album icon at the bottom of the screen. Click on a face and then the Smart Album icon and you have an instant

Mac Action

39

review: iLife09

navigate contents page

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

contain GPS data. Just click on the little info button, which appears on the thumbnail of a picture or event, and you can add location information.

Again, you can use the location information to search for pictures and create smart albums.

Facebook and Flickr publishing have been added and the names you have added using Faces are converted to Facebook nametags.

Smart Album of that person.

I have heard reports from people that say that Faces was even able to recognise their pets, which gave me an idea. I photograph motorbike racing so I clicked on a rider’s helmet and told iPhoto that it was a face, expecting it to sort all the pictures of the same rider. iPhoto wasn’t fooled, it didn’t work.

Nevertheless, I’m sure that shape and pattern recognition can’t be far off.

Places is the other new search tool. It sorts your photos according to where they were

40

Mac Action

taken. Some modern cameras already have GPS functionality built in. If you have a camera with a GPS (and iPhone users, you do) iPhoto will use the

imbedded GPS data to sort your pictures.

You can manually add location information to photos that don’t

New slideshow themes make it easier to show your pictures to your friends. Various themes are available at the click of a mouse, which can be customised, using your own choice of background music and various other options.

Once you have created a slideshow, you can save it and export it to your iPhone or iPod Touch. iMovie 09 has several new and interesting features which will help you to create a professional looking movie using your camcorder clips.

Even as a novice you can create something special so that your

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

family and friends will want to watch your holiday video instead of making excuses at the very mention of it.

“Facebook and Flickr publishing have been added and the names you have added using Faces are converted to Facebook nametags” The new advanced drag and drop features are easy to use. Drag a clip onto a clip in your project and you are offered three options. Replace substitutes the clip, Insert splits the clip and inserts the new one and Audio Only allows you to add an additional sound track using the audio from the new clip.

There are several more options to chose from. But it seems Apple decided to shield the casual user from making choices that they probably don’t need or even understand.

You can choose to show the more advanced tools by enabling them in Preferences.

The advanced tools include wonderful options like cutaway effects.

admin advertising sales contac us

The Precision Editor helps you to fine-tune your edits, which will make transitions look a bit more natural. The precision editor allows you to control video and audio transitions separately.

Very few amateur videographers use tripods and hand holding a video camera often produces clips that are a little bit shaky. iMovie 09 has the solution including the new video stabilisation feature. iMovie analyses a video clip pixel by pixel to calculate the amount of camera shake. This is a timeconsuming operation but it does work reasonably well.

There are several new titles, transitions and effects to chose from including things like black & white and cartoon effects.

The edit to music feature allows you to sequence some music to your video clip and automatically adjust the timing of the video to match the music.

GarageBand 09 now includes a feature that will appeal to all wanabee musicians.

You get ‘learn to play’ music lessons for guitar and piano.

Garageband will guide you through the lessons with HD video clips showing you how to position your fingers on a virtual instrument. The teacher

review: iLife09 explains things like notes and chords. There are two lessons included, with the rest available for download. The downloads are quite big, a problem for us South Africans with our ridiculous restrictions and data caps. Another great feature, again not available in South Africa, is the Artist lessons where popular artists teach you to play their hit songs. Never mind, we live in hope.

The question I asked earlier was, is the upgrade worth the money? The answer, in my opinion, is yes. There are several additional improvements that I haven’t mentioned here.

If, however, you are in the market for a new Mac, keep your hand in your pocket, the new machine will already have iLife 09 installed.

Mac Action rating : 4/5

Summary: Definitely worth the upgrade. Click here for more information.

Mac Action

41

navigate contents page

speak to your people. mac people.

42

Mac Action

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

admin advertising sales contac us

Advertise Here Call: Sean Tingle Mobile: 082 568 62 14 email: sean@plutonic.co.za Speak to your people. mac people.

MAC

action

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

the apple lover’s magazine Mac Action

43

review: iTrip

navigate contents page

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

t Pi l o o t u p A w w. i r T i fin r: w . co m Grif upplie ology S chn 1099 e t n R fi g r i f Pr i ce :

Griffin, for those of that you that don’t know, is a privately owned company in the USA that makes Mac and iPod accessories. iTrip is a little accessory that enables you to transmit music from your iPod to the FM radio in your car, thus enabling you to listen to your music on the car’s audio system.

The AutoPilot version is a little more advanced than the basic model in that it connects to your cigarette lighter, which charges the iPod while you drive. Not only that, you can skip forward, backwards or even pause the music using a little button on the top of the cigarette lighter attachment.

It also has a better aerial than the standard model, which reduces interference and noise.

It will even display the artist and song information on your radio using RDS.

44

Mac Action

Taking the unit out of the box assures you that you have bought a quality product. Griffin products always have a “wellbuilt” feel to them.

Installation is reasonably easy and shouldn’t cause any confusion. Basically, iTrip scans through the FM range of your radio and then suggests the best frequency to use for the connection. Connect your iPod, tune your radio to that frequency and away you go. It’s as simple as that.

It should be said right from the start that if you have any other interface option available you should use that. Wire is always going to be higher quality than a radio signal.

The iTrip Autopilot does do a reasonable job and sound quality is pretty good. You can

hear a small amount of hiss between songs, particularly when the vehicle isn’t moving.

During normal driving the hiss isn’t really a problem and the music sounds as good as, if not better than, what is broadcast by the radio stations.

Controlling the iPod using the iTrip cigarette lighter attachment is a lot easier than having to pick up the iPod should you want to skip to the next track or pause the music to receive a phone call. It’s even lit so that you can use it just as effectively when driving at night.

The RDS function didn’t fare as well, certainly not in my car. There appears to be a delay getting the information from the iPod to the radio display. It isn’t even consistent.

Sometimes the display would

news

There were times that the system seemed to get completely confused and just display a single letter “E”.

It is of course possible that it’s programmed to do that if it can’t interpret the song information but I couldn’t find any such reference in the user manual.

MAC

action

update immediately and on other occasions, it would be three songs behind.

the apple lover’s magazine

All in all, the iTrip Autopilot is a well-built unit that plays your iPod music on your in-car audio system and does it very well.

The RDS issue may have been specific to my car. Even so, I’d still rather have my iPod music in my car despite the limitations.

Mac Action rating: 3/5

Advertise to your people.

Mac people.

Summary: Brilliant for iPod addicts without modern infotainment connectivity Click here for more information Mac Action

45

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.

47. iPhoto

56. Handbrake

Cataloguing, manipulating, and storing your images in a sensible fashion needn’t be an impossible task. In fact with iPhoto it is anything but, as long as you know the basics. Here, then, they are.

So, you’ve got a stack of classic DVDs that you love watching regularly but don’t want to risk being scratched-up in a DVD player, whatever the kind or brand. Enter Handbrake, an unbelievably useful free tool for ripping DVD movies straight to your Mac HD, provided you follow these instructions step by step!

52. iMovie The proliferation of digital media has many previously inexperienced movie makers budding up in homes across the planet.

With iMovie as your movie-creation weapon of choice, you can make some impressive moving pictures without studying years at an arts school. Just study this HowTo carefully and you’ll be blazing your highoctane creations over small screens everywhere in Internetland in no time at all.

46

Mac Action

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

admin advertising sales contac us

how to?: store images

How to store images in iPhoto I made the bold statement in the review section of this magazine that iPhoto is the best photo-cataloguing application in the world, bar none. So let’s have a look at how you can get the most out of this excellent application.

iPhoto is the best photo-cataloguing application in the world, bar none.

When you open iPhoto for the first time, assuming you haven’t used it before, you will be presented with a fairly uninteresting blank screen with a grey background. Yes, there are some shortcuts along the left hand side of the screen but

they don’t do anything until you have actually got some images to work with. So let’s go right ahead and get some pictures into the library.

There are several ways to import images into the library and the most obvious one is directly from your digital camera. By default, iPhoto will open when you connect your camera to your Mac but some camera software will install its own image transfer tool.

down next to the Connecting camera opens: and select iPhoto iPhoto can either store images in its own library or link to images stored somewhere else on your computer. I would always recommend that you store images within the iPhoto library in case you delete the

Open Preferences from the iPhoto menu and click on the General tab.

Click on the drop Mac Action

47

how to?: store images images inadvertently, in which case iPhoto will also have lost the images.

If you are copying pictures from your camera and you don’t copy the images to the library, iPhoto will create a link to the memory card, and naturally, you will be deleting those images so that you can take some more pictures.

Click on the Advanced tab on the preferences window and make sure there is a tick in the Importing: Copy items to the iPhoto Library Checkbox.

Plug your camera in and iPhoto will open, showing the import screen. Thumbnails of the pictures in your camera will be shown. You can either import all of the pictures or select just the ones you want.

To select images, Hold the [Command] key and click on the pictures you want to import. To select a range of images, click the first one in the sequence, hold down the [Shift] key and click on the last image.

Once you have made your selection, selected pictures will be highlighted with a yellow border. iPhoto stores your pictures in events which makes it easier to find them later. Give your event a name and, if you

48

Mac Action

navigate contents page

want, a description of the event by typing into the text boxes at the bottom of the screen. By default, iPhoto will auto split your photos creating a new event for each day. Click to remove the tick from the Autosplit events after importing checkbox if you would prefer to keep all the pictures in the same event. With all of that done, click on either the Import Selected or the Import All button.

You might, of course have a collection of pictures stored on a CD or a folder on your computer. There are two ways to import these pictures.

The easiest is the drag and drop method. Open iPhoto and then open a finder window. Navigate to the CD or folder where the images are stored. Select the images you want to import and simply drag them onto the open iPhoto window and they will be imported into the library.

You can, if you want all of the

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

images in the folder, drag the entire folder onto the iPhoto window. Again, the photos will

be split into a separate event for each day. iPhoto can split the photos into a different event for each folder that you import. Open the preferences window and click on the Events tab. Click to place a tick in the Imported items from Finder checkbox.

Each event will automatically be named with the same name as the imported folder but don’t panic; it’s easy to change the name of the event.

Another way to copy pictures to your library is to click on Import to Library item on the File menu. A window will open and you can navigate to the folder where the images are stored.

Again, you can select individual

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

images, groups of images or entire folders. Once you have made your selection, click on the Import button. Don’t forget, if you have copied the pictures into the iPhoto library, you can safely delete the files stored elsewhere on your hard drive.

If you have not copied the files into the Library and just linked to them, should those files be deleted, they will be lost in iPhoto as well.

Once you have imported some pictures, the Events may not be quite the way you want them.

Events can be renamed by clicking once on the existing name, or, if the event doesn’t have a name, click where it says “Untitled Event”, and type in the new name.

If you find that you have too many events, for example one event per day while you were on holiday, and you would prefer all of the pictures from your trip to be a single event, you can merge the Events. Hold down the [Command] key and select all of the events you would like to merge. Click on the Merge icon along the bottom of the screen. The

admin advertising sales contac us

how to?: store images

newly merged event will have taken the name of the first event you clicked on when making your selection.

Conversely, you may find that you want to split events. For example, if you photographed a pop festival, you might want to create a separate event for each act that played. Double click on the event to open it and the select the picture that you want to be the first of the new event.

You will notice that the Merge icon has now changed to the Split icon. Click on the icon and a new event will be created. You can also select pictures at random by clicking on them and holding the [Command] key and then clicking on the Split icon.

The newly split events will be called Untitled Event so you’ll have to go back and name them all

individually.

Finding a picture in a particular event is really easy. You don’t have to open the event to see all the pictures. With iPhoto open on the event screen, each event is displayed using the first picture in the event as the thumbnail. Slowly drag your mouse over the event from side to side and the thumbnail will scroll through all of the images in that event.

As your library grows, even though you have organised your events, you might find it difficult to find a particular image. Fear not, keywords and smart albums are at your disposal.

Didn’t I tell you this was a fantastic application?

Keywords are words that attach to the image file and are seen

by Spotlight when you do a global search. Keywords are also

Mac Action

49

how to?: store images quite helpful when creating Smart Albums.

Open an event or click on the Photos icon on the left hand side of the screen, which will display all the pictures in your library. Click on the Keywords item, which is on the View menu and a tick will appear to show that keywords will be displayed under your pictures.

At first, no keywords will be displayed, as we haven’t assigned any yet. Place the mouse over an image and a little Add Keyword will appear under the picture. Click the mouse on the text and type in the keyword you want.

If you want more than one keyword hit the [,] key to separate the keywords. If you type more than one word without a [,] between, all of the words will form a single keyword. Once you have typed in a keyword, it will be stored and you can use it again for any image. Typing a single letter under a picture will display all

50

Mac Action

navigate contents page

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

of the keywords beginning with that letter and you can select one of them without having to type it again.

a selection of images and then click on the word and that keyword will be assigned to all of the selected images.

There are times that you would like to assign keywords to several images at once. Select Show Keywords from the Window menu and a little popup will appear, showing all of your keywords. Click on the Edit Keywords button to add a keyword, if it’s not already there. Click on the + button to add a new word and then type the word in. Keep clicking on the + button to add more words and then click the OK button.

You can assign as many keywords as you like to an image. All of the Keywords that are assigned to the selected images will appear in blue so you can easily see which keywords have already been

assigned.

Creating Smart Albums based on keywords is really easy. You can, of course refine your search a lot more and we will go into greater depth in a future article.

At the moment we will just concentrate on keywords.

Now all you need to do is make

Click on the File Menu and select New Smart Album. A pop up window will appear and that is where you create your search criteria. Give your Album a name by typing it into the text box. Click on the drop down

next to the word Album and select Keyword. The next item will say “Contains” which you can leave or you can select Is. If you leave it as Contains, it will find any picture that contains that particular word which is helpful if for example you want all Christmas pictures but some of them have “Christmas 2006” as a keyword. Type the keyword that you want into the text box on the right hand side and then click OK. A little purple icon will appear under the heading Albums, with the name that you chose. Click on the icon to see any images that contain that keyword.

Next time you add images to your library and give them that keyword, they will automatically be placed into the smart album.

An album is just a tool for sorting your pictures; the picture will still appear in the event that it was originally in.

The pictures are not duplicated,

admin advertising sales contac us

how to?: store images

just indexed so you can have a picture in as many albums as you like.

Love your Mac?

Albums don’t have to be “Smart”, you can create an album by clicking on the + icon at the bottom of the screen. Type in the name of the album and an icon bearing that name will appear in the Albums list, this time in blue. The difference is that you will have to manually populate the album by dragging pictures and dropping them into that Album.

There is a lot more that you can do with iPhoto and we will look at other operations in future articles but don’t be afraid to experiment.

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

MAC

action

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

the apple lover’s magazine

Mac Action

51

how to?: make a movie

navigate contents page

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

Video Editing‌.

How To Make a Movie Video editing used to be a tedious process involving hours spent with the remote control, transferring from the camera to a VHS recorder.

You could, if you were really serious, pay for an editing desk but that was out of reach for the ordinary home user.

52

Mac Action

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

Fortunately, now that we have digital video cameras, life is a lot easier and for us Mac users, it’s easier still. iMovie is included in the iLife suite which is installed on any new Mac so you don’t even have to buy or install additional software.

Before you can start creating your masterpiece you will, of course, have to transfer video from your camera to your Mac. There are a number of different types of camera, some that use USB and some that use Firewire. Video cameras that use a memory card to store recordings can usually be downloaded using one of these connections although you should also be able to download using a Card reader.

I will be describing iMovie 08.

Although iMovie 09 has some really cool features, I will wait until you have all had a chance to upgrade before delving into them. Even if you are using 09, I don’t think anything has been removed so you should be able to follow the steps.

Open iMovie either by clicking on the icon on the Dock or by double clicking the icon in the application folder.

Connect your video camera and then select “import from

admin advertising sales contac us

how to?: make a movie

camera” on the File menu. Select “Import Movie” if you have already copied the movie clips to a folder on your Mac. The import window will pop up. There is a little switch on at the bottom left of the screen. By default, the switch will be set to “Automatic”. In automatic mode, all the clips will be imported from the camera. Click on the switch to set it to “Manual” and check boxes will appear under each clip. All checkboxes are ticked; uncheck the clips you don’t want to import. Click on the Import Selected button to start downloading.

Choose where you would like the clip to be downloaded. You can create a new event or add the clips to an event that you have been working

on previously. An event is a collection of related clips similar

to the events that you are already familiar with in iPhoto.

You can type in a name for your event. Should you decide not to type in an event name, the event will be named according to the date the clips were shot, with the prefix “New Event”.

Once you have named your event, click on the OK button to begin downloading. The clip being downloaded will be highlighted in yellow with a little progress bar underneath.

Mac Action

53

how to?: make a movie Once your clips have been imported, they will appear in the events library at the bottom of the screen. Each Thumbnail represents five seconds of video. There is a slider along the bottom of the screen so that you can change the length of time each thumbnail represents.

Now that we have a selection of clips, we can begin making our movie, known as a ‘project’.

Click on the “+” icon at the bottom of the Project Library.

Type in a name for your project and select an aspect ratio. If you are making a movie for a standard TV screen, select 4:3.

If you are making a movie for a more modern widescreen TV, select 16:9. You can also make a movie for your iPod or iPhone, in which case, select 3:2. Once you have made your selection, click on the Create button.

You probably won’t want to use an entire clip in your movie because there will always be the little bit at the beginning that was out of focus or a section where you forgot to switch the camera off and filmed the ground for a couple of minutes.

Move your mouse over the thumbnails and the clip will show in the preview window at the top of the screen. Slide your mouse along the clip to move

54

Mac Action

navigate contents page

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

forwards or backwards along the clip.

which type of transition effect you would like to use.

A red line shows how far along the clip you are. Move your mouse to the point you would like the clip to start and click.

A yellow box appears around the thumbnail. There are handles on either side, which you can drag to the point at which you would like the clip to end.

A transition icon will appear between the clips, right click on the icon to set the duration of the transition.

Once you have made your selection, drag the highlighted section of the clip into the project window at the top of the screen. Repeat the process for as many clips as you would like to include in the movie.

You might want to distinguish between two separate clips. You don’t, for example, want to see the bride walking out of the church and then sitting at the table drinking champagne. To divide your clips, use a transition effect.

Click on the icon on the far right of the toolbar that runs along the centre of the screen. Choose

You can even add still photos to your movie. Click on the icon that looks like a camera on the right hand side of the toolbar. Your iPhoto library will be displayed so you can choose the pictures you want to add.

Right click on the image to set the duration of each image. You can also add transition effects

between each image. The Ken Burns effect, which moves the picture around the screen slowly, is enabled by default.

If you would like to disable it, you will need to delve into the project properties. Right click on the project name in the

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

project library and select Project Properties.

Some movies will benefit from a bit of background music. Click on the icon that looks like a musical note and your iTunes library will open.

Click on the piece of music you want and drag it into your project. Move the cursor to the point where you would like the music to start. You could, for example just have music while your still pictures are being displayed.

admin advertising sales contac us

how to?: make a movie

movie a nice professional feel.

Click on the “T” icon on the toolbar and a selection of title effects will open. Chose an effect you like and drag it to the point in the movie you would like it to appear.

You enter the actual text on the preview window. A blue bar will appear above the movie displaying the text of the title.

You can slide the bar to change the position and length of time the title appears. You can add as many titles as you like.

benefit from some narration.

Click on the icon that looks like a microphone. Most Mac computers have a built-in microphone so you don’t need to buy additional hardware. iMovie saves your project automatically as you go along so you don’t need to worry about constantly clicking a save button.

There is, of course, much more that you can do using iMovie.

You can now give your movies the Steven Spielberg feel.

You can also add a voiceover to A green bar appears under your movie displaying the track name. You can slide the bar to change the points in the movie where the music starts and ends. You can also slide the ends of the green bar to adjust the length of time the music is played.

Adding a title will give your

your movie if you think it will Mac Action

55

how to?: Convert DVD’s

navigate contents page

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

How to Convert DVD’s for iTunes.

You probably have a collection of DVD movies sitting in a cupboard gathering dust. Often, it’s too much trouble to take them out of the box and put them in the machine. It is so much easier to watch a movie on the Apple TV. When you are not at home, you might want to watch a

56

Mac Action

movie on your iPod or iPhone.

Either way, the movie has to be converted to a digital file and imported into iTunes.

I find the best application for the job is called Handbrake and it’s free. You can download Handbrake from their website.

Once you have downloaded the file, open the DMG file and drag

the Handbrake icon into your Applications folder. It’s as simple as that.

Once you have installed Handbrake, open your Applications folder and double click on the icon to start the application. Insert a DVD, usually DVD player will open so move your mouse to the top

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

of the screen and the menu bar will appear. Click on Quit DVD Player from the DVD Player menu.

Go back to the Handbrake screen and click on the source icon.

A finder window will open. Click on the DVD icon on the left and then click on the Open Button at the bottom of the window.

There is a drawer on the right hand side which has presets for file formats and so on.

I find it easier to use one of them instead of trying to manually configure the output file. If you don’t see the drawer, click on the Toggle Presets icon. Click on the little arrowhead next to Apple to see all of the options and select the one you want.

The presets you select will determine the output file.

Selecting iPod, for example, will create a smaller file optimized

admin advertising sales contac us

how to?: Convert DVD’s

for the smaller screen. Selecting Apple TV will create a larger, higher quality file.

The name of the output file will be created using information that Handbrake got from the DVD. You can change the filename by swiping across it with your mouse and typing in the filename that you want. Once you have set the filename and output destination click on the Start icon. Be patient. It takes quite a long time to complete the task.

The destination file will by default be copied to your Movies folder on your hard drive. You can change the output location, to an external hard drive for example. Click on the Browse button, a finder window will open and you can navigate to the location you want to store the file.

Remember, assuming you are creating the file for an iPod or Apple TV, the location will be temporary as we’ll be copying it into iTunes.

All is well if you are using a movie DVD but if you have a DVD of a TV series, you will want to create separate files for each episode. Fortunately Handbrake takes this sort of thing in its stride.

Click on the drop down arrow next to the Title text.

Sometimes there are little bits of insignificant data on the DVD but it’s easy to find the episodes by looking at the running time. If there are three episodes, each an hour long, then you know that an item showing five minutes is irrelevant. The “Track” numbers, for want of a better wordm will sometimes not start at 1.

Obviously though, the first

Mac Action

57

how to?: Convert DVD’s episode will be the lowest number so click on that one.

In the output file text box, rename the file so that it makes sense, for example Friends_ S2_E1. Now click on the Add to Queue icon instead of the Start icon. Go back to the title drop down and select the second episode. Rename the output file again, for example Friends_S2_ E2 and again, click on the Add to Queue icon. Keep going until you have added all the episodes on the DVD to the queue.

Once you have done all of that, you can either click on the Start icon or the Show Queue icon if you would like to check that you have all the episodes and they are named correctly. You can create files individually but using the queue just means that you can walk away and let it do all of the episodes at once.

There is a progress bar along the bottom so you can see how much longer you have to wait but, as I said, it does take a while.

58

Mac Action

navigate contents page

Once you have all of your output files, you will want to copy them into your iTunes library. Open iTunes and select Add to Library from the File menu. A finder window will open. Navigate to the place where your movie files were stored. You can select multiple files either by holding down the [Command] key and clicking on each file or by clicking on the first one, holding down the [Shift] key and clicking on the last one. Once you have made your selection, click on the Open button.

Then, by default, everything will go into the movies folder and they will have the same name as the file name.

To change this, click on the Movies icon under the Library heading on the left. Right click on the movie name and select Get Info. The info box pops up displaying the properties of the file. Click on the Info tab, Swipe over the text in the Name field and type the name you actually want. You can skip the rest of the fields which are more relevant to music tracks.

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

You might want to change the Genre by clicking the drop down and selecting from the list.

Click on the Options tab if you have imported a TV series and you want to move the video to the TV Show category in your library.

Click on the drop down arrow next to Media Type and select TV Show from the list.

Go back to the Video tab and now you can add the information. All of this information makes it easier for iTunes to sort your movies and TV clips.

Once you have copied all of your DVDs into your iTunes library, you’ll never need to open that cupboard again.

advetorial sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

admin advertising sales contac us

AUDI DRIVING EXPERIENCE has been contributing to road safety in South Africa by means of driver training programmes.

The Audi Driving Experience (ADE) has been providing driver training programmes to South African motorists for the past 23 years. It was established in 1987 and since then has made a major contribution to road safety in South Africa.

We are the longest running programme in South Africa.

Research & development, past experience and input from Audi Driving Experience Germany, have all played a role in making us arguably the best driver programme in the country.

23 YEARS OF HIGH PERFORMANCE!

Ad FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: IRMI REIF, 4 RINGS PROMOTIONS • TEL: 011 466 0607 • CELL No 082 905 1213 • FAX: 011 466 0608 • Email 4rings@audi.co.za

Mac Action

59

gadgets

navigate contents page

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

The Little Things Just a day after our first issue was completed, official SA Apple distributor The Core Group unveiled a new distribution agreement with Griffin Technologies, a company world-renowned for making innovative extras for mobile Apple devices which extend and enhance their usage. So if you’re a hardcore Mac addict who regularly cruises past an iStore looking for new gadgets, these are the sudden “spike” in options you’ve probably already noticed.

Although ordinarily this Gadgets page will be dedicated to bits and pieces from a wide variety of manufacturers, to catch us all up on the extensive range available from Griffin we’ve focused on this accessory provider this month. Below are some of the highlights of the range.

PowerBlock Reserve Clarifi At first it looks like just another hard protective case for your iPhone, but this Clarifi incorporates a unique lens which slides over the lens of the integrated camera of your iPhone 3G as well.

With the Clarifi lens in place, close-up shots taken on your iPhone (always a difficult thing to get right) are instantly made clearer with more vivid colours thanks to this special lens. So this is a protective casing with a unique photographic twist, an ingenious touch inherent in the Griffin product range.

60

Mac Action

Already recognised as a leading third-party charger for your iPhone or iPod, the new PowerBlock Reserve now adds its own built-in, magnetically attached battery to the overall package, which charges up whenever the unit is plugged in.

So when you unplug your iPhone from the PowerBlock, simply pop the small Reserve battery out and into a pocket.

Then if your phone finds itself running out of electricity towards the end of a long day, simply connect the Reserve battery and you’ll revive the unit for a few hours of additional usefulness. With the battery life being among the most pressing consumer criticisms of the iPhone, we expect products like these to enjoy strong demand.

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

admin advertising sales contac us

gadgets

Elevator Notebooks always feel slightly less ergonomically perfect than desktops, largely due to their position on the desktop being inconsistent with the straight-in-front, slightly elevated position of a regular desktop screen.

Griffin rights this wrong with the Elevator, a decidedly anti-tech aluminium stand for your Macbook, whatever flavour you work on, which raises your laptop screen up to a height with which we’re more intrinsically comfortable, enabling a flat plane for viewing your notebook display. With just the addition of a keyboard and mouse, your notebook replaces your desktop in one fell swoop, except perhaps for the limitations of the smaller mobile screen.

TuneBuds Mobile More than merely a set of replacement earphones, Griffin’s TuneBuds recognise the availability of add-on applications like the company’s own iTalk Recorder for recording audio to your mobile device.

TuneBuds integrates high-quality, comfortable headphones with the Griffin ControlMic, and a single versatile control button, for a mobile bi-directional audio solution for the iPod range. Or if you’d rather use your own mic-less headset entirely, check out the SmartTalk, which features the same quality ControlMic but enables the user to plug in headphones of his or her choice.

PowerBlock 2 So you’ve replaced your old iPod with an iPhone, but in fact find that each device serves different purposes perfectly, the result being that you’re still constantly using both. So managing the cables littering your desktop for recharging the iPod and iPhone becomes a bit messy.

The PowerBlock 2 allows you to connect both devices to power using a single, unobtrusive docking station, charging both simultaneously off a single power point. For even more die-hard fans of Apple’s mobile product set there’s the PowerBlock 4: it doubles the number of devices the dock can accommodate simultaneously for just an extra R180.

navigate contents page

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

Fine filigreed fun

62

Mac Action

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

admin advertising sales contac us

news

When we cobbled-up our “ilovemymac” ad as we drew close to our third deadline on issue 1, vague concerns about inciting mass body-artistry in the African Apple community did, briefly, come up. But we liked the impact, and thought it illustrated the gist of our thrust quite powerfully, so we went for it, figuring as well that a large proportion of said community are actually pretty clear-thinking people capable of making up their own minds on issues of self-mutilation versus living artwork.

on these juicy treats.

“I have an iMac and an iPhone, and sometimes use my dad’s older eMac and iBook. My sister Farzanah has a MacBook Pro, and with dad’s iPhone that makes six Apples in the family. Make that eight with my iPod Shuffle and my sister’s iPod Photo,” enthuses Raeesa.

“We use Apples in just about every area of our digital lives, although I must admit to using a Seagate external hard drive supporting my Time Machine instead of an Apple Time Capsule!”

Yet lo and behold, our very first entrance into this fun page of the mag, and look what’s happening! Massive, permanent, and undeniably quite painful physical disfigurement right off the bat! And we thought we’d have to work up a bit of a frenzy first before getting people to take that particular plunge. We never thought we’d strike gold just off the bat like this...

Okay okay before you have me up for inciting hooliganism or something, this isn’t quite the real deal, which is to say it isn’t permanent but henna. Raeesa Vawda, Creative Junkie at RV Brand & Design (www.rvbd. co.za) came up with this to show his appreciation of the brand and, beyond being a lone fan of the Fruit, comes from an entire family completely hooked

Raeesa works as a graphic and Web designer so uses the creative suites, as well as the regular productivity apps like iCal. In a more personal capacity, iTunes of course being the natural extension of the various iPods in the Vawda family is heavily used, with iPhoto the natural application of choice for managing the digital photo libraries.

So thanks Raeesa of Zimbali for kicking this fun section off for us! And we do hope you’ll enjoy your new Griffin iTrip Autopilot with Smartscan for sending us this cool entry – thanks very much to Core and Griffin for supplying the prize, and raising our bar of expectations of Mac addicts across the continent.

Mac Action

63

macs in action

navigate contents page

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

Inspiring the inspirational When we originally got rolling on the creation of Mac Action, one of the skills hurdles we immediately faced as a startup publisher was that of a talented designer, one capable of producing the kind of design that would make our readers go “wooooaahhh”. As a pro photographer and editor in turn, Steve and I knew what we were looking for, just not how to get the mag looking anything like that by our own hands.

64

Mac Action

Luckily, our chosen industry has no shortage of talented designers keen to get involved...

When Joey Khuvutlu, creative director of growing African design powerhouse Plutonic (www.plutonic.co.za) came to see us with his design concept, we were immediately sold. Unfortunately imminent deadlines saw us foregoing the full beauty of this clean yet versatile, funky yet serious style

until this issue, but we do hope you enjoy - and come join us on those social networking links for some increasingly spirited interaction soon.

‘Course, it really didn’t hurt that he demoed the site on a MacBook, nor that his offices runs almost entirely Apple.

Visiting the Plutonic offices in Rosebank, nestled in the old firehouse on Bath Street, it’s

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

a businesslike atmosphere as the sevens Macs go about their business, some with more than one designer working together on projects. It’s a pretty eclectic mix, everything from Joey’s new Macbook through the Mac Pro server and down to older-generation iMacs, each of these machines continues to perform well for the needs of this studio. Khuvutlu says that when he opened the design house, which has several large

admin advertising sales contac us

contracts and offices across the country, there was simply no question.

The infrastructure had to be Mac. “It’s about more than just the fact that, as creatives the designers I work with tend to gravitate towards the platform anyway. But it’s also about projecting the right image as a credible business. And about ensuring reliability. And

macs in action

about providing the team with the best tools to do the best jobs they’re capable of.

And even about inspiration from this powerful brand and it’s excellent products,” says Khuvutlu.

There’s even a PC, but it’s packed away in the squarest corner of the entire office, and the talented designers walking around try not to make very much use of it.

Mac Action

65

macs in action

It’s a perfect example of the ideal workplace for Apple products in general to really strut their stuff, to shine their brightest. Plutonics team of talented artists want a workstation which frees their minds from concern about technicalities, gives them the tools and the environment to explore their most fantastic design concepts, and acts as an inspiration, a homage to the power of superb design, when the juices pause in their flow.

The results of this professional emancipation are clear to see in the company’s final deliverables. Regardless of the project they’re working on, the final production is invariably 66

Mac Action

navigate contents page

rich in stylistic subtlety, housing powerfully defined messages in an instantly eye-catching package, whichever medium is being utilised for delivery.

With all of this appealing to our sense of Macness, as well as the innovative and eye-catching language of style oozing from that initial demo and, we hope you’ll agree, this very issue of Mac Action, Plutonic proved to be an ideal outsourced design “fit”. And Joey’s appreciation of the Apple way gave him something of a soft-spot for our little African Apple magazine startup, and the relationship which produces monthly issues of Mac Action was born in part out of a mutual appreciation for

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

the strengths of the brand we both, in our own ways, project and to an extent represent.

After all Plutonic services the needs of many a high-profile, big-money client, so at the fees our startup could afford there’s little doubt that a large portion of the design work on Mac Action is done out of love!

Which matches the editorial content to a “T”.

An all-Apple team for an allApple publication. Nothing else would have seemed at all right, after all.

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

admin advertising sales contac us

news

plutonicAd

Mac Action

67

gaming

navigate contents page

mac action community 2 mac action facebookr Nights e t re win www.macaction.co.za ve r t wa sof : Ne

x tle db eni e ti or te Pho p : , r G am e e r pli owa Sup : Bi r e p yr elo RPG Asp D ev sed ce n i l ly Ful re : n e G

Neverwinter Nights 2

68

Mac Action

y

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

admin advertising sales contac us

gaming

RPG

Neverwinter Nights 2 is hardly the latest-and-greatest Mac games title out there we know, having been released about a year ago now, but as someone who played the PC version heavily when it launched back in 2006 and as an avid follower of the series, it was one that I was keen to “compare” on the Mac, so in it went.

Installation takes a while, but is typically painless, although the DVD did cause the Superdrive to start making one hell of a racket towards the end of the install process. Nevertheless with the CD-key duly entered and this Aspyr port of the classic AD&D-based game loading up for the first time, I was hoping for something quite impressive.

Now before taking another step, I must go back to those hours spent playing NWN back in ‘06/07. An excellent game if slightly disappointing in certain elements, the one thing which always marred the NWN 2 experience was the instability of the software. This bugginess yielded a raft of patches, each progressively larger than the last, and finally most of the included bugs were righted.

About 6 months after everyone had stopped playing, of course.

Straight away, that has to be an

advantage of the more leisurely gestation of the Mac release.

Aspyr had the time to ensure that any hiccups had been cured, and for the few hours I spent reacquainting myself with the fantasy world, it appeared to have done just that. Perhaps it also references the inherent stability of the OS and hardware platform, but I had not one issue while playing.

In terms of content, it isn’t quite original NWN 2. It’s the base of the equation yes, but NWN 2 for Mac also includes some content which had to be bought after the release of the initial game in expansion packages, such as several nice elite character classes extending playability dramatically, with appropriately matched high-level items in the game itself.

The story they ported straight over naturally as well as the mechanics, although the graphics of the cut-scenes especially, rendered as they are by the in-game 3D engine, look slightly crisper. Again, possibly attributable to the quality of even this entry-level iMacs 20”-display. You start in a village under attack by uknown assailants, and must quickly become familiar with combat and basic navigation as you mobilise the militia

and ultimately beat back the bandits.

It’s quite honestly a graphical and gameplay experience which differs barely at all from the PC version on which it’s based, Aspyr have done a good job there. However I was surprised to find that my entry-level iMac didn’t have the processing power to run this title at full graphical detail, it’s integrated 9400M graphics chipset made any kind of combat with the detail options slid up to High impossibly lagged.

Cranked back to the recommended “Medium” settings for all of the quality, it remains a gorgeous RPG game even today, gratuitously filled with nice spell effects and undeniably manly character models regardless of the gender of the actual character you’re looking at. Any attire or weapons changes you make in the inventory reflect on your avatar naturally, while levelling up is a detailed task which can be simplified through the “Recommendations” button if you’re happy to let the computer decide your development path itself.

It’s a rich world NWN and this comes through well in this version. The game makers

Mac Action

69

gaming

have done an excellent job of melding the staccato, rulesdriven world of AD&D with smooth, flowing real-time gameplay. Dice are invisibly rolled in the background each combat turn and the results duly portrayed without impinging upon the user very much, although the roleplaying aficionado appreciates this adherence to the complex ruleset at the back end.

One element which does date the title quite obviously, is actually the control interface more than the graphics. More modern RPGs (Sacred 2 for instance) have streamlined their controls nicely, and NWN 2 feels a bit “old school” in its approach after these.

It still delivers a nice mix of 70

Mac Action

navigate contents page

fireball-flinging action with the odd puzzle (although decidedly action-oriented ultimately), with some solid adventuring underpinned by an engaging and richly-woven storyline. Like I said, there’s a lot to draw from in the world of Neverwinter, and the developer’s strict adherence to existing world inhabitants and locations makes the AD&D ruleset even more appropriate, while in reciprocal the following of this ruleset makes any lack of imagination entirely acceptable.

This is, simply, AD&D’s Neverwinter Nights on a screen.

So, you’ll find newer RPGs, with better graphics, easier controls, and potentially even less demanding of high-end hardware, than NWN 2. But if you’re among the few “hardcore” RPGers out there, well you

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za

probably already own a copy. If you don’t, go get one. It’s true digital RPGing right here, with some nice visuals and a solid story thrown in for free. Oh, you also get full multiplayer functionality in NWN2, with a fair variety of game modes.

And playing coop with friends through the entire NWN2 campaign is deeply engaging, and will keep several of you off the streets for many hours on end.

Rating : 3/5

Summary: Fully-licensed AD&D RPGing comes to our preferred platform. Very anorakky yes, yet still, quite cool.

sponsored links secondhand Mac.co.za apple.co.za

Steve Allisons MacBook This month I have been experimenting with some excellent new applications and upgrading the memory of the little white workhorse.

Being the sort of person I am, I always like to have the latest software so I upgraded to the new iLife 09 suite as soon as I could get my hands on a copy.

There wasn’t a huge difference in terms of look and feel but there are several new features, which you can read about elsewhere in this issue.

The feature I enjoyed most was the new Faces in iPhoto.

I spent hours naming people and letting iPhoto find more pictures of the same people.

The only problem that I did find was that it took quite a long time to sort through my rather large image library.

I decided that the best solution

admin advertising sales contac us

was to add more memory to the Macbook. This is something that I have been considering for a while but now I was prompted into action.

Replacing the memory modules is clearly an operation that Apple is happy for you to carry out yourself. There is a stepby-step guide in the small user manual that came with the computer. I think they would prefer that you bought the memory modules from them but that is an expensive option.

I decided to go to my friendly local retailer, although I did stick to a recognised brand name: SODIMM. All I had to do was flick the battery out and, armed with my little novelty screwdriver which I mentioned last month, remove the ‘L” bracket. Flick the two little levers and pop the chips out. I slid my new 2 GB SODIMM into one of the slots and just as I was about to replace the ‘L” bracket, I had an idea. I slid one of the old 512MB modules back in to the empty slot just to see if it would work.

Hey presto! It did. When I switched the computer back on, it had recognised both chips and I had 2.5GB of memory. So, if you are worried about using mismatched chips, don’t be. It

staff macs works in my computer.

I was given an episode of Top Gear in AVI format which I wanted to look at on my Apple TV. The Apple TV doesn’t understand AVI so the file had to be converted. The best piece of software to use for the conversion is Toast but looking in my applications folder, I realised I was still using version 7 of Toast so I got hold of a copy of version 10 which we will review in next month’s issue.

Toast 10 is a brilliant application and the conversion was done in next to no time.

So, if you are worried about using mismatched chips, don’t be. It works in my computer.

Last but not least, I installed iWork 09, which is the Apple office suite. I must confess I haven’t really had time to delve into the new features.

Pages 09 is a first-rate word processor, but then so was the 08 version. So my task for this month is to discover the power of the new version as well as what’s new in Keynote and Numbers.

Mac Action

71

action

MAC

navigate contents page

the apple lover’s magazine

72

Mac Action

mac action community mac action facebook www.macaction.co.za