The new iMac. Ooh. Aah.

Well, they did it again. Early this year, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled
the new iMac
redesigned from the ground up to be the kind of computer we've never seen
before.
That dome on the bottom is the computer itself, with a hard drive, various
ports, an optical drive (your choice: CD/DVD, CD burner, or the SuperDrive
which burns CDs and DVDs) and a fast little video card.
That video card drives the monitor but it's not the hulking cathode
ray tube we've all been used to. Instead, an LCD screen seemingly floats
in mid-air, suspended at the end of an arm that lets you adjust it at
the touch of a finger.
It has the same liability as its older, less powerful siblings: upgrading.
You can replace the hard drive and increase the RAM, but forget about
a better video card (or a second one, which you'll need if you want to
spread your work onto a second monitor). And for us, that might
be a deal-breaker.
But still. Ooh. Aah. We want.
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OS
X: Maybe you should make the jump
Changing operating systems isn't something you do lightly. In fact, it
should be on those lists of high-stress life events, right up there with
moving, changing jobs, having a child and driving your car into your neighbours'
swimming pool. (Doing all of these at once.)
But Windows and Mac users are all facing that prospect, with major revisions
to both operating systems. The climb to Windows XP is a steep one, and
Microsoft customers who've wondered about using a Mac might find this
is the time to make the leap. After all, if you're going to learn a whole
new operating system anyway, why not make it the one you really want?
OS X (Apple would like you to pronounce that "Oh Ess Ten,"
by the way) has an interface that's dramatically different from previous
versions of the Macintosh operating system. Dubbed "Aqua," the
new interface uses transparency and the illusion of depth to convey more
information to the user. Design elements look like little blobs of luminous
gel; the whole thing is full-on gorgeous.
Peel back the interface, though, and you'll find something unexpected:
the ultra-stable Unix operating system. For the first time, a Macintosh
can genuinely multi-task; you can burn a CD while you surf the web, without
experiencing a massive slowdown or turning that blank CD into a coaster.
Memory management is dramatically improved as well. And when a program
crashes, it doesn't take the entire system down with it; OS X keeps each
program in its own little compartment.
That means system crashes are rare, and program crashes are nearly non-events
(provided you back up your data). If Internet Explorer dies, you usually
don't even consider restarting your Mac; instead, you just launch Explorer
again and pick up where you left off.
There's a lot more that's new graphics rendering, font handling,
a galaxy of free software from the open source community. Check it out
yourself at www.apple.com/macosx.
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Ah-ahh... saviour of the universe!
The good folks at Macromedia
never saw fit to use Queen's theme to Flash Gordon to sell the
company's flagship animation software.
Too bad.
Flash,
now in version 5, might not be the "saviour of the universe,"
as the song says.
But it's a godsend to web designers who want to offer rich, smart, snazzy
animations to their sites' visitors, without forcing them to wait hours
while the damn thing loads.
It's fast and easy to learn. And the newest version introduces a powerful
revision of the ActionScript scripting language, making it ideal for creating
games and highly interactive web site tidbits.
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Mondo
video
Like many camcorders these days, the Panasonic DV910 comes with FireWire
a technology that lets you download video clips to your computer
very, very quickly... and digitally.
Why does that matter? Because digital data can be copied and recopied
indefinitely, without losing quality. Compare that to, say, a VHS tape.
Make a copy of it, and then make a copy of that copy, and you'll find
muddy sound and a lousy picture.
Digital video, on the other hand, never degrades. You get exactly the
same video and audio from a first-generation copy as you do from a 10th-generation
copy.
Once you download your video to the computer, you can edit it together
and add effects, titles and transitions easily. Then you "print"
it back to videotape or save it as a QuickTime or RealMedia file
for the web.
The upshot? You'll be seeing a lot of video clips of Sisko on this site
soon. :-)
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