Newsletter to Members
November 2007
October MEETING MONDAY 5TH 6:30PM
Usual Venue: Level 3 Theatrette, Webster Building, UNSW Kensington.
Colin's presentations: Mac OS X 10.5 LEOPARD – AND – the brand new iPod touch!
Prizes include 'Adobe Photoshop CS3 - Classroom in a Book', valued at $60. Includes 16 movie tutorials on CD.
Leopard takes a leap
Apple Sells Two Million Copies of Mac OS X Leopard in First Weekend
SYDNEY – 31 October 2007: Apple today announced that it sold (or delivered in the case of maintenance agreements) over two million copies of Mac OS X Leopard in the first weekend since its world-wide release on Friday 26 October – far outpacing the first-weekend sales of Mac OS X Tiger, which was previously the most successful OS release in Apple’s history. Sales included copies sold at Apple’s retail stores, Apple Authorised Resellers, the online Apple Store, under maintenance agreements and bundled with new Mac computers. Leopard is the sixth major release of Mac OS X and is packed with more than 300 new features.
Leopard introduces:
- Time Machine, an effortless way to automatically back up everything on a Mac (requires an additional hard drive);
- a redesigned Finder that lets users quickly browse and share files between multiple Macs;
- Quick Look, a new way to instantly see files without opening an application;
- Spaces, an intuitive new feature used to create groups of applications and instantly switch between them;
- a brand new desktop with Stacks, a new way to easily access files from the Dock;
- and major enhancements to Mail and iChat.
Pricing & Availability: Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard is available through the Apple Store (www.apple.com/au/store/) and through Apple Authorised Resellers for a recommended retail price of A$158 inc GST for a single user license. The Mac OS X Leopard Family Pack is a single-household, five-user license for a recommended retail price of A$249 inc GST.
Leopard requires a minimum of 512MB of RAM and is designed to run on any Macintosh computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5 or G4 (867 MHz or faster) processor. Full system requirements can be found at www.apple.com/au/macosx/techspecs/
Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results
- Quarterly Mac Sales Set New Record
- Quarterly iPhone Sales Exceed One Million
CUPERTINO, California: Apple® recently announced financial results for its fiscal 2007 fourth quarter ended September 29, 2007. The Company posted revenue of US$6.22 billion and net quarterly profit of US$904 million. International sales accounted for 40 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
Apple shipped 2,164,000 Macintosh® computers, representing 34 percent growth over the year-ago quarter and exceeding the previous quarterly record for Mac® shipments by 400,000. The Company sold 10,200,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 17 percent growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone™ sales were 1,119,000, bringing cumulative fiscal 2007 sales to 1,389,000.
“We are very pleased with these record results,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’re looking forward to a strong December quarter as we enter the holiday season with Apple’s best products ever.”
iTunes Plus now offers over Two Million Tracks
DRM-Free Tracks at just A$1.69 inc GST
Apple recently announced that it has expanded its iTunes Plus offering to over two million tracks and lowered the price of all iTunes Plus tracks to just A$1.69 inc GST. All iTunes Plus tracks feature DRM-free music with high quality 256 kbps AAC encoding for audio quality virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings. The iTunes Plus catalog is now the largest DRM-free catalog in the world, and includes artists from Sub Pop, Nettwerk, Beggars Group, IODA, The Orchard and many others, along with EMI’s digital catalog.
EMI began offering their catalog on iTunes Plus earlier this year, and their impressive selection has grown to include singles and albums from the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Norah Jones, Frank Sinatra and the solo catalogs of all four Beatles.
With the expansion of iTunes Plus, customers can now download tracks from a variety of labels without limitations on the type of music player or number of computers that purchased songs can be played on. iTunes Plus songs purchased from the iTunes Store will play on all iPods, Windows or Mac computers, widescreen TVs with Apple TV, as well as many other digital music players.
Led Zeppelin Digital Box Set available for Pre-Order
Exclusively on the iTunes Store: Legendary Group’s Entire Discography for under $100.
Apple recently announced that a special digital box set containing Led Zeppelin’s entire discography, “The Complete Led Zeppelin,” is now available for pre-order exclusively on the iTunes Store (accessible from within iTunes). “The Complete Led Zeppelin” is a 165-track collection of all 13 of the legendary group’s albums, including the new career-spanning “Mothership” retrospective, for only A$98.99 inc GST.
“Led Zeppelin is a band that made albums; each one legendary from start to finish," said David Dorn, senior vice president of e-Commerce for Rhino Entertainment. “We’re excited to offer this incredible digital boxed set on iTunes, which represents one of the greatest bodies of music ever recorded and should be owned by every rock music fan.”
Led Zeppelin’s “Mothership,” a 24-track collection of the group’s best-known songs, hand-picked by Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, is also available for pre-order. Touching on every studio album, the collection contains defining songs including “Whole Lotta Love,” “Rock and Roll” and “Kashmir.” In addition to “The Complete Led Zeppelin” and “Mothership,” Led Zeppelin’s entire catalog of songs and albums will also be available for individual purchase and download – beginning November 13.
For more info on Led Zeppelin visit www.ledzeppelin.com.
FileMaker Update for Leopard
The current v.9.0v1 FileMaker (Pro and Advanced) is not compatible with Leopard. FileMaker has just released 9.0v.2 updater which restores full compatibility with Leopard.
Bad news: It’s a hefty 348Mb download! Good news: Colin has downloaded the updater on a flash drive for members to use if required – see him with your notebook Mac at either Monday night’s meeting or Saturday’s Workshop.
Free trial plus other goodies
You can download a free 30-day trial of FileMaker Pro 9 and get a free Business Productivity Kit here (broadband connection recommended).
Adobe Creative Suite 3 compatibility with Mac OS X Leopard
Thanks to close collaboration between Adobe and Apple, most of the CS3 applications and associated technologies, such as Adobe Bridge CS3, Version Cue CS3, and Device Central CS3, are compatible with Mac OS X Leopard without requiring additional updates. However, the following CS3 applications will require updates for FULL compatibility with Leopard:
- Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional
- Pro video applications, including Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, After Effects CS3 Professional, Encore CS3, and Soundbooth CS3.
Adobe expects to publish free Leopard compatibility updates for the video applications in December 2007 and for Acrobat 8 Professional and Adobe Reader 8 in January 2008.
For a complete compatibility overview of Adobe apps with Leopard, see this FAQ PDF.
Adobe Flash Player for Mobile Devices
Will deliver High-Impact Video and Dynamic Web Content
ADOBE MAX 2007, CHICAGO – October 1, 2007: Adobe Systems has announced Adobe® Flash® Lite™ 3 software, which supports Flash video for mobiles and will enable the delivery of dynamic Web content on compatible mobile devices. Flash Lite 3 will allow mobile device manufacturers, operators and content providers to differentiate their offerings by giving users the ability to watch Adobe Flash Player compatible video, the world's most popular video format, and browse Flash enabled Web sites when integrated with a mobile Web browser.
Available to operators and OEMs, customers can find out here which handsets currently support Flash Lite (mostly in Japan, United States and Europe at present).
Leopard Comment and Reviews
You will find a myriad of information and comment on the Net about Mac OS X Leopard – here are just a few of the early ones:
- “Inside Leopard: Time Machine” by Rob Griffiths, Macworld, posted October 24.
- “Apple Offers New Goodies in Leopard System” by David Pogue, New York Times, posted October 25.
- “Leopard Simplifies File Sharing” by Glenn Fleishman, TidBITS, posted October 25.
- “Spaces: A First (and Very Happy) Look” by Matt Neuburg, TidBITS, posted October 25.
- “Six Things I Hate about Leopard” by Matt Neuburg, TidBITS, posted October 26.
- “Leopard Early Fixes and Warnings” by Jeff Carlson, TidBITS, posted October 27.
iMacros for Firefox
New Firefox Add-On Makes Internet Tasks Faster and Easier
iMacros for Firefox – from iOpus, a global provider of web solutions in Heidelberg, Germany – is designed to automate online activities within the Firefox web browser. With iMacros, users can create macros to automatically check the same sites every day, remember passwords, complete web forms, and upload or download files, among other activities. As the company states in its tagline, "Whatever you do with Firefox, iMacros can automate it."
Mozilla, the software company behind Firefox, collects and categorizes Firefox add-ons. The iMacros add-on is growing rapidly in popularity and is already among the ten most downloaded extensions in the "Bookmark," "Feeds, News & Blogging" and "Privacy and Security" categories on the Mozilla site.
iMacros for Firefox pioneers a feature known as social scripting. It allows users to share macros and scripts in a way that is similar to how they share bookmarks on the many social bookmarking websites. After creating a new macro, users can make just one click to share it with their friends as a link, either by distributing the link via email and social bookmarking websites or by embedding it in a website or blog for public access.
The iMacros for Firefox software is free for personal and commercial use. Users may opt to upgrade to the business version with guaranteed response times and advanced features. Additional information: www.iopus.com/imacros/firefox/
Download via the above link or directly from the official Mozilla site for extensions.
Newspaper Digitisation Milestone Reached
National Library of Australia Project
The first 50,000 pages of Out-of-Copyright newspapers have been digitised as the pilot phase of the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program announced in May this year.
Visit www.nla.gov.au/ndp/ for an overview of the program as well as reporting on progress to date.
Take Control Ebooks Launch You into Leopard: Save 30%!
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is finally here, and the experts at TidBITS can now share with you the fruits of an incredible amount of work over the last few months: five of their most popular ebooks completely updated for Leopard, and they're all available right now, led by Joe Kissell's essential "Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard." Once you've installed, the other ebooks in the series will help you customize all of Leopard's new features, share files much more elegantly than in the past, and manage your fonts with Leopard's new font activation capabilities.
- Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard
- Take Control of Customizing Leopard
- Take Control of Users & Accounts in Leopard
- Take Control of Sharing Files in Leopard
- Take Control of Fonts in Leopard
You can buy the ebooks online as bundles for extra savings, or individually – they're all US$10, except for the 217-page "Take Control of Fonts in Leopard," which is US$15. If you've bought the Tiger or Panther versions of any of these ebooks, click the Check for Updates button in your copy to save 20%.
Follow this link to get 10% user group member discount on any or all of them.
Discount is automatically deducted when you click the “Buy” button.
Better still, from that page, follow the "buy all 5" link and get 30% off the bottom line!
Questions asked at our last few monthly meetings have been added to the Q&A pages on our web site. Use the links on those pages to view earlier Q & A pages as well. Remember you can search them all by topic or keyword with the built-in Google Search pane.
Learn Mac OS X basics in a friendly, informative environment. Presented by AMUG Sydney.
Saturday 10 November, 10am-2pm.
Room 136C (Computer Lab), Ground Floor, Webster Building, UNSW Kensington.
- One Mac per person
- No questions too silly
- Use one of the Uni's iMacs or bring your own Notebook
- Get Apple's latest Software Updates on CD, without the big downloads
- Get MacFixIt's "Year of Fixes" archive Help files
- Free for AMUG members
To book, phone Rob on 9387 2069 or email
If you do not wish to receive any future editions of this online newsletter, please send an email to AMUG Sydney.