“For sheer multimedia portability,” croons Arik Hesseldahl (businessweek.com), “it’s hard to beat the new iPod nano.” “The image quality,” he reports, “is gorgeous, especially with animated fare like Japanese anime.” That’s because “the screen density,” Hesseldahl explains, “is the highest of any iPod that Apple has ever shipped, and the end result shows it.” Of course, “the nano sounds as good as any iPod.” “And browsing albums on the screen with Apple Coverflow—a special effect that makes the covers look like they’re whizzing by as you scroll through them —is incredibly cool.”
Naming it an Editors’ Choice, Sascha Segan (pcmag.com) awards iLife ‘08 four (out of five) stars, explaining that it’s “the easiest way to turn your digital photos, movies, and mumblings into beautiful online and DVD content.” While Segan singles out iPhoto (“the best program out there for organizing and ordering prints of your photos”) and iMovie ‘08 (an “almost unbelievably easy video editor”) for special praise, he calls iLife ‘08 “a great value,” noting that “each of the individual programs is worth the price for the package.”
Want the text you copy from one document to match the formatting of the document you’re pasting that text into? SImply use the “Paste and Match Style” command. We show you how in the latest Quick Tip of the Week.
You’ll find the world’s largest video wall—120 feet long and 11 feet tall—in the lobby of the Manhattan headquarters of InterActiveCorp. A dazzling montage of images fills its vast dimensions day and night, mesmerizing passersby. Yet the deceptively simple visual messages that fly effortlessly across this wide video canvas took massive computing muscle to render. With some sequences requiring as much as an hour per frame to render, designer Jakob Trollbäck and his can-do crew leveraged the power of their Mac-filled office to bring the panoramic wall to life.
On November 1, Daniel Cooperman, senior vice president, general counsel and secretary at Oracle Corporation, will join Apple as the company’s senior vice president, general counsel and secretary, reporting to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Apple today announced.
You might be creating the film that wins the 2007 Insomnia Film Festival. Open to high school and college student filmmakers in the US (see terms and conditions), the festival invites student teams to write, cast, shoot, edit, score, and upload a 3-minute, original film just 24 hours after we release a “top-secret” elements list to all registering teams. We’ll post the entries online, encouraging all film lovers to cast votes for their favorites. The top 25 films will then be screened by such fellow filmmakers as Barry Sonnenfield, James Mangold, and Nora Ephron.
In PC Magazine’s 20th annual survey of tech support, Eric Griffith (pcmag.com) reports that customers continue to praise Mac desktops and notebooks and the tech support Apple provides for them: “Apple’s high marks extend even into areas we don’t have room to print charts for, such as the 85 percent rating for the reliability of software included on the computer, the 93 percent score for new desktops working right out of the box, and the 9 out of 10 score for the attitude of the tech-support provider.” So pleased are owners with their desktop and notebook Macs, surveys indicated, that 9.4 out of 10 would recommend them to others. “And readers scored Mac notebooks a full 100 percent for ease of setup. Simply amazing.”
“Of the more than 100 million iPods Apple Inc. has sold,” exclaims Tom Rose (Bostonherald.com), “not one of them has been as polished and unblemished as the new iPod nano.” Rose praises the “vastly improved user interface” and the brighter, larger display: “the result is crystal clear video, games and menus.” Rose calls iPod nano “a perfect fit”: “there’s enough space for a few TV shows and a good selection of music, the price is hard to beat and it won’t take up much space in your purse or shirt pocket.”
How do you examine a 2300 year old mummy without causing any harm to an important biological, historical, and cultural antiquity? MAAT3D—a French organization of scientists, doctors, and educators—uses the Mac and VGStudio Max 2.0 to scan mummies and other valuable biological objects noninvasively and to create 3D visualizations of incredibly rich (and revealing) detail. “The Mac platform is an all-in-one solution for us. We create VG models on it, then use it for video and movie postproduction for museum presentations that will eventually be presented on iPods,” explains MAAT3D co-founder Benjamin Moreno.
To promote its relationship with Apple and the new iTunes Wireless Music Store, Starbucks “plans to give away 50 million free digital songs to customers in all of its domestic coffee houses.” According to a CNNMoney.com article, baristas will “hand out about 1.5 million ‘Song of the Day’ cards” that customers can redeem at the iTunes Store. The cards feature the work of artists—beginning with Bob Dylan and “Joker Man”—on the Starbucks’ Hear Music label. The promotion kicks off on October 2, the day Starbucks will begin introducing access to the iTunes Wireless Music Store at participating store locations.
