Steve Jobs is taking a 6 month leave for health reasons, what the real codition that he has is a mystery so far.
Itunes is now DRM free. You don't have to worry about if you buy a player that is not an Ipod or activating and de-activating each computer you want to hear music on.
Ilife 09 and iwork 09 are out. The big feature of iphoto is that it will try to automatically tag you photos whith who is in them.
Skinit.com will sell you a sticker to attach to your laptop or phone so that you know which one is yours...
Garageband is mostly the same, but it now lets you create a quick and dirty song from a genre
If you have some midi files on your computer, (here is a website that has free midis and sheet music)
If you got rockband or guitarhero for christmas, the microphone will work as is, just plug it into your mac!
The guitar and drums will work if you download a little program called GamePad Companion There is a youtube video that will explain it.
You can import the song into garageband and do a whole bunch of neat tricks.
There are several hurdles to cross the barrier if you use programs that won't work on the mac. There are 3 programs that will let you run any PC program on the mac.
There is a free program called virtual box..
Both are arond $80, BUT you need a copy of windows to install on them in order for them to work at all, XP is around $100.
If you don't want to run a mac in your PC there are alternatives....
Even today with safari being used by everyone with an Iphone, some apps don't work with anything except internet explorer.
There is an option called Wine that works on a mac that lets you run windows programs without windows.
This website shows you how to do it, it is not that hard, you need your original Leopard install DVD to insall X11, then you need to install darwine, then install the program that packages up internet explorer. The only problem is that it's IE6 and they are up to IE8...
Firefox will sometimes work with websites that don't like safari.
One problem with office is that they changed the file format for office 2007 so that the files would be more than twice as big as the old version of office.
If someone sends you an old office file and your having trouble opeining it there are lots of choices on the mac:
You can always buy office for the mac, Microsoft has a list of products and price ranges that you can buy them for. Right now the cheapest price for the home and student version is $97 from officemax.
If you like your old office there is some help from other places:
Microsoft makes a Converter to convert new office files to the old format
Open office 3.0 will open any office file just fine and is a free download.
You can import office files into google docs. While google docs works very well it is very basic in features.
Lastly apple's Iwork 09 will open the new office files.
XBMC stands for xbox media center, and it lets you play movies, music, look at pictures much like Itunes, only the interface is not as nice.
It will work on apple TV, pc or powermac. The main feature that XBMC can do that itunes cannot is play any file you throw at it. So while you have to carefully re-encode all your files to play on an appleTV. This program will play anything you throw at it.
Handbrake just keeps getting better, but it still doesn't have a pre-set that has really good quality and will still play on my ipod video.
To make your own preset just follow these instructions:
Start with Ipod high quality.
Be sure to check ipod 5g support or Ipod atom, whichever one is on the screen.
Click constant quality, and set it for 52-53 for average quality, 60 for great quality, or 40-45 if the movie your re-encoding is animated.
Click on the amorphic button, select "anamorphic strict" then "anamorphic loose"
If there are sawtooth patterns on the movies, select de-interlace here.
Under audio select aac and 128 kps
Under advanced, change the text at the bottom from vbv-maxrate=1500 to vbv-maxrate=2500
You can now save this as a preset, and it will remember everything except the amorphic which you have to re-do for every movie you encode.
Also sometimes is misses the 128 AAC for the audio.