MacFest

Sat, 25 Apr 2009
Machines, 1Utama
8:00 - 10:00pm

Report : Azul Adnan
Photos : Azul Adnan, Jeyadev

This month's MacFest had an iPhone flavour to it, appropriately so because the iPhone was just recently launched in Malaysia.

Jeyadev started off the evening showcasing the iPhone 3.0 beta software. He demonstrated some of the new features, including changing the language to 'Bahasa Melayu', the voice recorder app, etc. And yes, forwarding text messages.

Next, an introduction to Keynote and Pages was presented by Law. He started with a brief history of Apple's first 'Office' suites, ClarisWorks and Appleworks. Then he created a Keynote slide, selecting theme, transition and text effects.

For Pages Law created a newsletter from a template and easily added photos and pasting text.

The third speaker for the evening was Chris and he gave a very interesting talk on developing apps for the iPhone and iPod touch. He shared statistics on iPhone/Mac trends and sales and talked about there being big opportunities for developers to make money from writing and selling such apps. You can easily have your app on the Apple App Store - Apple simply takes a 30% cut.

Chris covered the resources and tools developers can refer to or use, like the Apple Developer website and XCode and iPhone SDK. He strongly recommended signing up for the iPhone Developer program. He logged into his company account and went through the developer website and showed the benefits and privileges you get.

The programming skills required for writing iPhone apps include knowledge of JAVA, HTML and CSS, but not Flash.

As there was still some time left Shah came up to demonstrate iLife 09 in 10 mins! He even started off with Keynote, creating a slideshow of photos, and recording a voice-over. In iWeb he used a template to create a web page, dragging and dropping different media. Then he opened iPhoto, sending photos to iWeb for a gallery web page.

In GarageBand Shah created a song from loops. In iMovie he made a quick video of himself through the iSight videocam, dragged in photos and the song, did a voice-over and showed how to export to YouTube.

Even though he took 15 mins instead of 10, it was amazing to see how much can be achieved in such a short time!

Ending with the lucky draws, Ian and Faiq won Apple logo merchandise, courtesy of Apple, Shah won a iPod book and Alvin won an iPhone SDK book.

Thanks to Jeyadev and machines for the venue.