MacFest

Sat, 18 Nov 2006
Skilz Digital Arts Experience Centre, Bangsar Shopping Centre
8:00 - 10:00pm

Report : Azul Adnan
Photos : Moriazi Mohammad, Azul Adnan

For the last MacFest of the year, people were already seated and waiting when I arrived around 7:45pm. What a pleasant surprise. It was nice to see Malaysians being early for a change. :-)

Ian kicked off the night with a presentation on FileMaker Pro. He showed how to set up a photo database by reading photos off a card reader. He then published the database: with a simple click of a button your database is online! He showed the various different types of files you can import and export from FileMaker.

Ian went on to talk about Gizmo, a rival to Skype. There are some neat features but there are also some limitations to the service. Ian finally ended his session by showing us what's at the top of his Christmas present wishlist: the Toilet Paper Dispenser iPod Dock!

Next up, Zam gave an overview of how the tools used by architects and engineers for showing plans to clients have changed throughout the years. He then went into his main presentation which was a demonstration of SketchUp, a free 3D program from Google.

With this really cool software he showed how easy it was to design your own house. He talked through the basic tools and showed a design of a grandstand which can be viewed in different ways. One nice feature is the ability to automate a moving view of your building, e.g. starting off by showing the top front view and ending up by moving to the right or left side.

Before I came on Redza asked to have a couple of minutes of the floor. With his Sony Ericsson 3G phone he showed how incredibly easy it was to connect your Mac to the Net via the phone: simply plug in and you're online!

As the last speaker for the evening, I shared some things I did for a children's carnival organised by my children's school recently. I showed how I digitally enhanced some paintings done by the kids and put them together into a book. I then demonstrated how I wrote and recorded the school's song using GarageBand. Finally I talked about how I made a slide show which was used as a backdrop during the performance of the song. I ended my session by playing the completed song together with images from the carnival.

This time the lucky draws included a digital scrapbooking software called iRemember, courtesy of Intriguing Development. The lucky winner was Firdaus. There were also 3 CDs containing the latest Mac updates that were given out, kindly put together by Wei.

As usual the night continued over coffee at Coffee Bean. There was plenty to chat about and we finally left for home around midnight.