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?
"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."
"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."
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?
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."
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.
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."
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 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.)
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?
"Given the impressive value of Time Machine and improvements to existing programs such as iCal, iChat, Mail, and the Finder, most active Mac users will find more than enough reasons to consider [the] upgrade cost money well spent," reports Jason Snell (pcworld.com). Leopard delivers, Snell declares, "a major alteration to the Mac interface, a sweeping update to numerous included productivity programs, a serious attempt to improve Mac OS security, and a vast collection of tweaks and fixes scattered throughout every nook and cranny of the operating system."
"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."
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.
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."
"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."
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.