MacFest

Sat, 26 Apr 2008
EpiCentre, Pavilion KL, Bukit Bintang
8:00 - 10:00pm

Report : Azul Adnan
Photos : Azul Adnan & Peter Lim

April's MacFest had four speakers lined up. Shafiq was first and he talked about InvisibleShield, a film for covering and protecting your Mac gadgets.

Shafiq had ordered an InvisibleShield from the US for his iPhone and he talked about his ordering and shipping experience. Then he went through the process of applying the film to his iPhone, showing photos he had taken. Finally he asked for two volunteers to try and pierce the film. Lau had a go but was unsuccessful. InvisibleShield truly is a tough little product.

The next presentation was arranged by EpiCentre and it was on Kingsoft's Office 2007. This is a Windows office suite which is very similar to Microsoft's product but costs a lot less. Before Carol from Kingsoft could start the presentation proper, there was a technical glitch in trying to get the Windows-running iMac to sync with the projector. Needless to say, we weren't surprised Windows was involved when there's a problem!

Carol finally talked us through the three products of the suite: Writer, Spreadsheets and Presentation. They were very much like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The only difference seems to be the price (and no Mac version!).

Azizi continued the talks with an introduction to Numbers. He went through the basic features and demonstrated setting up a spreadsheet. It seems like quite a few people already used Numbers but I learnt a couple of tricks watching Azizi's presentation.

Ian, who was supposed to show FileMaker Pro 9 the past couple of MacFests, finally managed to make it. He talked about the different flavours of FileMaker as well as the new features of version 9 such as Quick Start Screen and Enhanced Layout Objects. Because of the delay caused by the Kingsoft/Windows problem, time was short for Ian so he had to rush through his presentation.

During the lucky draws, Ian won an Olympics 2008 cap and Samuel won a FileMaker trial CD brought in by Ian. Other prizes included three Apple pen/pencil sets and two Mac-related books.

A group of us convened at Expressamente for coffee after the event (Starbucks was full).

Thanks to EpiCentre for the venue and drinks.