Born in China’s Sichuan province, the highly innovative illustrator and graphic designer Qian Qian uses Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and other Mac software to create art that merges Eastern and Western influences from different eras—from classical Chinese painting and 1930s Shanghai advertising to Cultural Revolution aesthetics, pop art, and the Japanese manga-inspired Superflat movement. “Other people might have training from an early age with pens and brushes,” Qian says, “but the Mac is my main tool.”
Aperture customers can now install the Aperture 1.5.6 Update, either by running Software Update or by visiting the Aperture Download page. Recommended for all those using Aperture, the Aperture 1.5.6 Update addresses issues related to performance, improves overall stability, and supports compatibility with Mac OS X v10.5. The update should be installed before first use of Aperture with Mac OS X Leopard.
“St. Olaf sophomore Peter Holt, a longtime PC user, has just made the Mac switch after working in the school Mac-support department and realizing how seamlessly Apple hardware and software work together. He also likes having the option to boot into Windows as needed. He uses a desktop iMac for schoolwork and software development, as well as to play Windows games with his brother over the Internet.” Holt is not alone. As Julio Ojeda-Zapata (St. Paul Pioneer Press) points out, Mac use has surged “on campuses across Minnesota” and the rest of the US, as well, with some schools—like Pennsylvania’s Wilkes University—going all Mac.
That’s the one-word assessment Rob Griffiths (macworld.com) offers for Time Machine. “Perfect for nearly everyone,” Griffiths points out that “Time Machine attempts to turn the complex and sometimes confusing world of backup and restore into a simple, visual operation. Backing up is simple: attach a drive of sufficient capacity.” And when the fateful day arrives and you need to rescue documents from oblivion, “ you launch the Time Machine application—Apple has added a Time Machine icon to Leopard’s Dock—and simply move backward through time to find the files or folders you wish to restore.”
Mac OS X “Leopard is powerful, polished and carefully conceived. Happy surprises, and very few disappointments, lie around every corner. This Leopard has more than 300 new spots — and most of them are bright ones,” declares David Pogue (New York Times). He points, for example, to two “routine-changing” features. Time Machine, which offers “the shortest setup of any backup system in history.” And Quick Look, which lets you “view the contents of a document’s icon at full size, right at the desktop, without having to open the program that created it.” Pogue says “it’s fantastic.”
Writing for the Telegraph, Claudine Beaumont tells us that “Leopard is slick, shiny” and offers any number of features that deliver the “wow factor.” Like CoverFlow, which in Leopard allows “you to whiz through files and documents, with the album covers replaced by mini-thumbnails showing the front page of documents. You can hover over these thumbnails to scroll through multi-page documents; if it’s a movie file, you can even play the film clip in Finder.” Stacks “another useful addition to Leopard, is a virtual ‘stack’ of documents that lives in the dock area, giving you one-click access to files.” “For me,” Beaumont states, “the stand-out feature is Time Machine,” but she’s also impressed that with Boot Camp built-in, Leopard becomes “the first Apple operating system that will also allow you to install a Windows operating system alongside it.”
“With Leopard, Apple’s operating system widens its lead aesthetically and technologically,” states Ed Baig (usatoday.com). Baig “migrated to Leopard” from Tiger “without pain on a MacBook laptop and my own iMac desktop; there’s mercifully none of the software driver and other hassles associated with a Windows operating system upgrade.” Calling Leopard “one cool cat,” Baig praises Time Machine with its automatic backup and effortless file retrieval; the new videoconferencing features in iChat Theater; stationery, notes and To Do options in Mail; Cover Flow, Spaces, Stacks, and the ability to “highlight and copy any portion of a Web page inside the Safari browser and turn it into a live Dashboard widget.”
“I’ve been testing Leopard,” reports Walter Mossberg (Wall Street Journal) and, “I believe it builds on Apple’s quality advantage over Windows. In my view, Leopard is better and faster than Vista, with a set of new features that make Macs even easier to use.” Among the more than 300 new features available in Leopard, Mossberg singles out as “marquee features” Time Machine, Cover Flow, and Quick Look.” And he was impressed that “every piece of software and hardware I tried on two Leopard-equipped Macs—a loaned laptop from Apple and my own upgraded iMac—worked fine, exhibiting none of the compatibility problems that continue to plague Vista.”
This Friday, October 26, Apple retail stores will open from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. to celebrate the availability of Mac OS X Leopard. Visit a store near you, and you’ll see live demos of Leopard and have a chance to be one of the first to test drive the most impressive version of Mac OS X yet. There’ll even be free T-shirts for the first 500 guests to visit an Apple Store.
One day, Jason Russell, Laren Poole, and Bobby Bailey bought a camera on eBay, jumped on a plane, and began filming a documentary. The next day, they were saving lives. Invisible Children, the documentary the three produced, has become a highly successful film alerting millions to the plight of the children of Uganda. But the three filmmakers weren’t done yet. They also founded an international nonprofit organization, also called Invisible Children, that’s one of the fastest-growing nonprofits on the planet. And it’s built around Mac computers.
