With Keynote ’08, you can add a shape to a slide, resize it, reposition it, and then fill it with an image from your iPhoto or Aperture library. Using the handy graphics Inspector, you can further customize it with an assortment of intuitive adjustment tools. To see how, watch the latest Quick Tip of the Week.
In addition to naming it the Invention of the Year, Time also includes iPhone among its candidates for Gadget of the Year. iPhone, Time editors say, “changed the way we think about how mobile media devices should look, feel and perform. The design is exceptional inside and out: It’s got a slick glass-and–stainless steel case and an elegant touch screen loaded with eye candy.” Ready to cast your vote?
“Boy, this baby is beautiful,” Tim Gideon (pcmag.com) says of the iPod touch. “After reviewing the freshest crop of flash-based music and video players, Gideon concluded that with its “cool-looking glass display, a built-in Web browser, and the ability to buy music wirelessly” iPod touch was “the best of the bunch.”
“The new star of Apple’s iPod lineup steals more than looks from the iPhone,” reads the description of iPod touch in Time’s assessment of the Best Inventions of the Year. “It sports the same brilliant 3.5-in. (9 cm) wide-screen video display with touch controls, and built-in wi-fi lets you surf the Web, check e-mail and even buy and immediately download iTunes tracks on the fly.”
Teachers at the Western Academy of Beijing have created a 1-to-1 learning program that’s second to none, letting students work at their own pace, collaborate with one another, or get assistance from a teacher—or the Help Desk—with absolute ease. Students from all over the world use iLife on their Mac notebooks to create multimedia projects. To share their work with friends and family back home, they use iWeb, creating online digital portfolios they can update as frequently as they’d like. And they study Chinese on the go with iPod, using digital flash cards and podcasts to augment traditional curricula.
Laying “the foundation for the next generation of personal computing,” Leopard “redefines what personal computing looks like,” according to Michael Gartenberg (computerworld.com). And Gartenberg offers a litany of Leopard features by which he’s impressed. “Cover Flow, a feature first used in iTunes, lets you browse files visually and then see a file’s contents without opening it.” He argues that “Apple’s IM client, iChat, runs rings around what’s available for other systems.” He’s always used his “e-mail in-box as a to-do list,” Gartenberg admits, “and Apple’s Mail client makes that really work.”
Using two dozen Mac minis to capture video from an equal number of video cameras mounted all around his 1,600-pound, ten-foot square Cube, Chicago-based video artist and sculptor Lincoln Schatz creates “generative portraits” of subjects who line up to spend an hour in the steel and plexiglass enclosure “surrounded by whatever objects they choose, doing whatever they feel represents them best.” When the shoots done, Schatz lets his Mac Pro server “harvest” the video he’s captured. The portraits that emerge result in an evolving montage of randomly selected non-linear images—some shot yesterday and some a year or more ago—that subvert the idea of “posing” for a likeness. Twenty-first century portraits anyone?
Calling it “awesome,” Digital Trends lavishes praise on the new iPod nano. “It’s thin, sexy, easy to use, holds plenty of music, videos and photos. The sound quality is impressive,” and the review concludes, “video quality is great, too.”
Apple didn’t invent the touchscreen,” explains Lev Grossman (Time), but “Apple knew what to do with it,” creating a “whole new kind of interface, a tactile one that gives users the illusion of actually physically manipulating data with their hands—flipping through album covers, clicking links, stretching and shrinking photographs with their fingers.” It’s implementation of touchscreen technology is one of the five reasons Grossman believes that iPhone “is the best thing invented this year.” What do you think are the other four?
Delivering enhanced storage performance and data protection, the Mac Pro RAID Card and Xserve RAID Card let you add a powerful hardware RAID engine with 256MB of cache and battery backup to your Mac Pro desktop or Xserve. The cards support a variety of RAID levels, allowing you to optimize your system for performance, capacity, or a combination of both. The cards, both priced at $999, are available today from the online Apple Store. (See Store for system requirements.)
