MacFest

Sat, 24 Oct 2009
Machines, 1Utama
8:00 - 10:00pm

Report : Azul Adnan
Photos : Azul Adnan, Jeyadev

After a long break because of Ramadhan, MacFest was back with three speakers and lots of goodies for giveaways.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was recently released and it was timely for Shah to highlight what was new with Apple's latest cat. It was not a matter of having many new features but rather of refinements and improved technologies.

Among the improvements: Exposé has a nicer and neater look; Preview is faster and we can now select just one column in a multi-column PDF file; the Trackpad can be used for writing Chinese characters; Javascript is 50% faster; Quicktime X can record video and screen captures and can trim clips.

Shah's favourite feature is Finder telling us which app is causing the problem when we have trouble ejecting something.

After Snow Leopard, Shah took us through the latest hardware refresh just announced by Apple: Airport Extreme, Time Capsule, Mac Mini, MacBook and iMac. As expected, everything is faster and more powerful. The new iMacs are especially sweet, its screen size having expanded to a humongous 27".

But there's bad news for those looking forward to the new MacBooks: no Firewire or SD card slots and no infrared.

The second speaker was Zaki. He demonstrated Papers, a personal research library application: it allows you to organise, search, download and archive PDF articles on your Mac.

Amongst the many features, you can access thousands of research papers online, read PDF files in full screen mode and you can easily email the metadata of articles which links to the full document. Papers cost US$42. There is also a US$9.99 version for the iPhone/iPod touch.

Jeyadev rounded off the presentations for the evening by showing the latest version of Handbrake, the famous open-source video transcoder. We were reminded of how fast and easy the software is, perfect for converting and ripping DVDs.

As in the last MacFest, Gameloft and Apple kindly sponsored goodies for our lucky draws in conjunction with the recent Mac+iPod Discovery Week. There were three iPod shuffles and Gameloft merchandise (cap, shirt, thumbdrive, etc.). As the turnout tonight wasn't large, almost everyone walked away with a prize!