Did you know that you can easily create customized print options for your Keynote ’08 presentations? Right in its Print dialog, Keynote ’08 lets you specify how many slides to print per handout page, whether slide backgrounds or object fills should be printed, and much more. Find out what options you have available when printing Keynote ’08 presentations by watching the latest Quick Tip of the Week.
“What’s new in Leopard? A lot,” say Ken Mingis and Michael DeAgonia (computerworld.com). The pair walk you through a 12-page analysis of the newest version of the Mac OS, spending time on many of the new features introduced in Leopard, including Stacks, Quick Look, Spaces, Time Machine, and numerous others. From Leopard’s “unified interface” to major under-the-hood changes, to wholly new apps, Leopard is a substantial, albeit evolutionary, advance for Mac OS X that builds on a solid foundation and adds a modicum of eye candy to reinforce the notion that this is something new and improved. It’s also fast — especially impressive given the new graphics sprinkled throughout the OS.”
“The grace of Leopard’s interface enhancements makes productivity more pleasurable with a Mac, as more than 300 functional and fun features top off this update,” reports Elsa Wenzel (cnet.com). Awarding it an “Excellent 8 out of 10,” Wenzel maintains that Leopard not only “makes Macs more enticing than Tiger did,” but that it “makes it far easier to find documents and applications than Windows Vista. Leopard’s interface niceties made the daily mechanics of using the computer more pleasurable. Mundane chores, such as finding files and backing up data, become a visual treat.”
After putting Leopard through its paces, Dean Takahashi (San Jose Mercury News) finds it is aptly named—”It’s fast and sleek”—and concludes that the latest version of Mac OS X “gives Apple [an] advantage over Microsoft.” It offers “more than 300 new features, making it the biggest upgrade in a long time,” and “a lot of the features allow you to do things more quickly and more easily.” That includes iChat, which, he says, “got a good makeover. Besides doing video chats with the built-in Webcams on Macs, you can now use them to share any kind of file with the person you’re chatting with. You can also take over that friend’s desktop in case you’re diagnosing the machine from afar.”
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.”
