MacFest

Sat, 27 Oct 2007
EpiCentre, Pavilion KL, Bukit Bintang
8:00 - 10:00pm

Report : Azul Adnan
Photos : Jovi Yeong

The latest Apple reseller, EpiCentre, opened its store at Pavilion KL recently and it was a good opportunity to hold our MacFest there in their cozy presentation room. EpiCentre was not only kind enough to allow us to use their room, they also provided us with some light refreshments!

Originally Ian was supposed to talk about FileMaker 9 but he couldn't make it due to illness. Hopefully he'll present at the next 'Fest.

But coincidentally Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was just released the night before and thus it was expected that this long-awaited new version of Mac OS X should be the main focus for the evening. So I decided to use the whole session to go through its main cool new features.

I had just installed Leopard in my new Mac in the afternoon and hadn't really had the time to play with this new Cat very much. But I needn't worry because a few of the attendees had already explored it and so the evening was a wonderful interactive session where several people not only gave feedback on some of Leopard's features but also helped me by telling me where to find them on my machine.

We more or less went through the highlights mentioned in the Apple Leopard Walk Thru video which many had already seen on Apple's website. We started with the Desktop and Finder and moved through Spaces, Mail and iChat. We didn't do Time Machine because obviously we would have needed to use and back up our Mac for several days first before we could see its usage.

Other new features that we went through included:

• Dictionary (now incorporating Wikipedia and Apple Dictionary)
• Safari (clipping web pages and making them 'live' widgets, highlighted matching terms in Find)
• DVD Player (new image bar at the top, time slider at the bottom)
• Preview (improved PDF annotation, more image manipulation options)
• Screen Savers (Word of the Day, photo collage)
• Spotlight (advanced searches, dictionary definitions, calculator)

For the lucky draws, there were official "Hello I'm a Mac" T-shirts and a couple of books, including the hardcover "Cult of Mac".

Thanks to everyone who came, especially those who shared their Leopard knowledge. A special thanks to Jovi at EpiCentre for the venue and refreshments (and photos!).