Free database solution for students

Designed expressly for college students, the new FileMaker Campus Productivity Kit helps students get more organized and be more productive. A free, ready-to-use database solution, the Kit includes five modules, allowing students to manage contacts, organize research and lecture notes, track project assignments, coordinate events, and assemble to-do lists. Students will find complete instructions and an informative podcast on the FileMaker Campus Productivity Kit website. [Oct 10, 2007]

“iWork ’08 offers a sweet office suite”

“Benefiting from Apple’s tireless design and integration efforts, iWork ‘08 gives users an easy, intuitive interface, beautiful templates and tight integration with Mac OS X and iLife,” reports Paul Vaughn (San Antonio Express News). He praises numerous new features in both Pages ’08—which he calls “a very capable word-processing program, a quite viable alternative to Microsoft Word”—and Keynote ’08: “Apple keeps making it better.” And Numbers ’08, Vaughn says “is designed intelligently from the ground up.” Comparing it favorably to Excel, he concludes, Numbers seems “brilliantly elegant.” [Oct 10, 2007]

“In some schools, iPods are required listening”

For most Spanish-speaking students attending José Martí Middle School, it takes four to six years to achieve sufficient English-language skills to move out of bilingual classes. In contrast, most students in Grace Poli’s classes make the leap in just a single year. That’s after media specialist Poli introduced an innovative education tool: the iPod. “The school here in Hudson County,” writes Winnie Hu (New York Times), “has been handing out the portable digital players to help bilingual students with limited English ability sharpen their vocabulary and grammar by singing along to popular songs.” [Oct 09, 2007]

Visualizing 20 million years of climate change

By studying ice cores extracted from deep within the Ross Ice Shelf, scientists with the Antarctic Geological Drilling Program hope to learn how this area of the Antarctic has responded to climate change over the past 15 to 20 million years. The cores have much to reveal, and thanks to their Mac Pro computer and two tiled 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays, scientists can now study high-resolution enlarged images of those cores. [Oct 08, 2007]

Quick Tip of the Week: Saving custom styles

Once you’ve created a shape, chart, or table in Pages ’08 and have assigned it custom colors and styles, you can save what you’ve done and apply it to inserted elements. You’ll learn how by watching the new Quick Tip of the Week on the Small Business site. [Oct 08, 2007]

Just seven days before the Insomnia begins

If you’re a high school or college filmmaker, you have just seven days to register for the 2007 Insomnia Film Festival. Just seven days before the Insomnia begins. Then your team has 24 hours to write, cast, shoot, edit, score, and upload a 3-minute film. Voting to identify the 25 most popular films begins almost immediately. Find out how you can enter (terms and conditions apply)—and what you can win—on the official 2007 Insomnia Film Festival website. [Oct 05, 2007]

Keep Adding: Wrekage

To Keep Adding, the Santa Fe-based artist group that has been creating multimedia and installation art together for more than a decade, the Mac has become integral to the evolving nature of their work. Explains Keep Adding partner Noah MacDonald, “I might work on a painting, then take a photo of it, put it in the computer, open it in Photoshop, digitally rework it, and from that get a sense of what I want to physically do next on the actual painting. The computer influences the physical end of what I do, because I can work on the paintings offsite, then come back and paint what I’ve envisioned on the Mac.” [Oct 05, 2007]

The Mac matriculates on campus

At Princeton University, sales of Mac computers have increased for each of the last four years. In fact, reports the Daily Princetonian’s Doug Eshleman, “this year, the University’s Student Computer Initiative has sold more Macs than PCs. Students were offered a selection of Dell, IBM and Apple computers, and 60 percent chose Macs, up from 45 percent last year.” Nor is the trend an isolated phenomenon. Princeton’s manager of support, Leila Shahbender “found that Mac sales also had significantly increased at MIT, Columbia, Dartmouth, Penn, Duke, Stanford, Cornell and Brown over the past few years” when she attended a recent college technology conference. [Oct 05, 2007]

Richard Walch: “The mountain is my studio”

Skiing and snowboarding photographer RIchard Walch can’t afford to leave the mountain behind until he knows he’s bagged “the perfect light, the perfect snow, and the perfect trick or turn.” So he takes his studio with him whenever he hits the slopes. Aperture running on a 15-inch MacBook Pro forms the foundation of the mobile digital darkroom that carries in his backpack on a shoot, allowing him to import images when his crew breaks for lunch. “This is great for me,” Walch says, “because I can isolate any shots I’ve missed during the morning session and get them in the afternoon.” [Oct 03, 2007]

“iPod nano packs a punch”

“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.” [Oct 03, 2007]

iLife ‘08 a “Triumph”

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.” [Oct 02, 2007]

Quick Tip of the Week: Perfect pastes every time

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. [Oct 01, 2007]

Trollbäck + Company: Wall of Vision

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. [Sep 28, 2007]

Daniel Cooperman to Join Apple as General Counsel

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. [Sep 28, 2007]

While the world sleeps…

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. [Sep 25, 2007]

Apple earns “top honors in both business and home PC categories”

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.” [Sep 25, 2007]

iPod nano “a perfect fit”

“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.” [Sep 25, 2007]

Medical Visualization: Egyptology in 3D

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. [Sep 24, 2007]

Starting the day with a latte and a tune

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. [Sep 24, 2007]

iPhone excels in usability tests

When Austin-based Perceptive Sciences, a usability consulting firm, tested the usability of an iPhone, an HTC Touch, and a Nokia N95, the results, according to David Haskin (Computerworld), were clear: “In terms of usability, iPhone blew away its two competitors. Its overall score in the usability tests was 4.6 out of 5. The HTC Touch was a distant second at 3.4, and the Nokia N95 scored 3.2.” And that wasn’t the only test at which iPhone excelled. [Sep 21, 2007]

• Daniel Cooperman to Join Apple as General CounselSeptember 28, 2007 5:27 AM PDT
• Apple and T-Mobile Announce Exclusive Partnership for iPhone in GermanySeptember 19, 2007 5:13 AM PDT
• Apple Chooses O2 as Exclusive Carrier for iPhone in UKSeptember 18, 2007 4:07 AM PDT
• Apple Unveils Logic StudioSeptember 12, 2007 5:34 AM PDT
• Apple Sells One Millionth iPhoneSeptember 10, 2007 5:41 AM PDT
• Apple Sets iPhone Price at $399 for this Holiday SeasonSeptember 5, 2007 11:49 AM PDT
• More press releases...