MacFest

Sat, 23 Feb 2008
EpiCentre, Pavilion KL, Bukit Bintang
8:00 - 10:00pm

Report : Azul Adnan
Photos : Azizi Khalid & Azul Adnan

After the cancellation last month, the first MacFest of 2008 finally took place and it started off with Wei showing his modified 'Solid State Drive' iBook G4.

Wei had bought this second hand iBook which the previous owner had sold without the hard disk. Instead of installing a new hard disk, Wei decided to create his own SSD laptop by installing two 4GB Compact Flash cards.

Wei demonstrated the robustness of this 800MHz 640MB RAM iBook by playing video clips and shaking the laptop! The videos played smoothly without any hitches. He then showed some 'gruesome' photos of the insides of the iBook during the installation of the CF cards.

The next speaker was supposed to be Ian but he couldn't make it so Firdaus stood in his place and spoke about Quicktime Pro. He showed how video clips could be edited and how sound could be extracted, which can't be done with the normal Quicktime player.

He played a few clips including one consisting of several videos which he edited together into one file. With the installation of a freeware called Perian, Firdaus also showed how non-Quicktime format files like wmv and asf could be played in Quicktime.

I was the final speaker of the evening and I started off by showing PicLens, a free browser plug-in which provides a cool 3D interactive interface for viewing photos on websites like Flickr, Picasa and also Google Images search results.

Next I demonstrated GarageBand 08. I showed Magic GarageBand by playing around and replacing different musical instruments within a selected genre of music. Then I showed how a song can easily be created by building it track by track using Apple Loops. I played a 'guitar solo' on my MacBook Pro keyboard as the final track.

To finish off my demo I played a song which I wrote and recorded for a friend's motivational company. Throughout my presentation I highlighted some of the new features of GarageBand 08 like Arrangements and Visual EQ.

After GarageBand I briefly talked about a photo technique I recently experimented with where photos are taken in a totally dark room and the subject is lit by a single moving flashlight over a shutter speed of 20 to 30 secs.

For the lucky draws three books as well as three Apple pen/pencil sets were given away. After the event some of us went down to Starbucks on Level 3 for coffee where we chatted away until 11:30pm.

Thanks to EpiCentre for the venue and drinks.