MacFest

Sat, 27 Jan 2007
Skilz Digital Arts Experience Centre, Bangsar Shopping Centre
8:00 - 10:00pm

Report : Azul Adnan
Photos : Azizi Khalid, Azul Adnan

The keys to the place arrived a little late and there were some last minute scrambling to move the furniture around. The usual number of chairs were unavailable so some of us had to sit on the floor. But it was fun!

The first presentation of the year was by David who demonstrated a freeware called Quicksilver, a sort of application launcher. He showed how he could launch almost anything quickly and easily with a only few keystrokes.

Then David continued by showing two useful Automator workflows: renaming filenames and resizing photos.

For those of us who want the services provided by a .Mac account but don't want to pay for it, Shah highlighted free alternatives, mostly from Google. These include:

• Gmail
• Address book to CSV Exporter
• gDisk
• Picasa
• Google Video
• NVu
• Rapidweaver

Of course, using all these applications can be cumbersome but hey, they're free! (except Rapidweaver)

The final presenter of the night was Zalee. He started off by giving a brief talk on the video editing process and the messy cleaning of files that need to be done later. Then he showed a software he is currently working on with a programmer from Germany called FCP Project Cleaner. It was the world premiere of this beta(?) application! The progress of this software can be found on Zalee's website.

Because of the ever increasing number of attendees at the MacFests, we had to start looking for an alternative venue and Shah had suggested a cafe called Hoxe's. I made a brief announcement about this before going on to the lucky draws. Apart from the books we also gave away an Adobe Acrobat 8 polo shirt.

After the event some of us adjourned for our usual caffeine intake at Coffee Bean.