MacFest (special edition)

Sat, 19 Mar 2005
Apple Experience Centre, Ikano Power Centre
8:00 - 10:00pm

Report : Azul Adnan
Photos : Azul Adnan, Jasemaine Gan

As a change from the usual monthly social gatherings, a 'special edition' MacFest was held at the Apple Experience Centre in Ikano on March 19. Four people were scheduled to give brief presentations but Hisham Hassan, who was supposed to talk about Pages, was down with flu and could not make it.

More than twenty Mac users turned up. Mustafa Mamat kicked off the night with his presentation on Quicktime Broadcaster. After explaining how it worked, Mus did a 'live' demo by broadcasting images from his videocam to the Macs in the room.

Next, I showed three video clips taken from MacAddict magazine: a unique music video called "Into the Groove" (no, not the Madonna song), a clip on how the video was put together, and some out-takes.

Then I gave a brief overview of iDVD 5 before playing a home-made DVD of my holiday in Bangkok.

The final presenter for the night was Jasemaine Gan who talked about GarageBand 2. She showed how we could create a song simply from putting together the loops, i.e. short music sequences, provided in GarageBand.

Then, 'backed' by her iBook, Jasemaine performed two of her own compositions: "She", in which she also played guitar, and "Hard to Pretend". The loud applause that was heard was testimony to how beautiful the songs and her performance were.

[Click image to view a VR panorama of Jasemaine performing]

To end the event, lucky draws were held. The prizes were books and magazines: "The iPod Book" by Scott Kelby (donated by Peachpit) and "The Missing Manual: Mac OS X" by David Pogue and "Make" magazines (donated by O'Reilly). Congratulations to the winners!

As some left for home, others congregated at Starbucks one floor below for coffee and chit-chat.

A big thank you to Mus and Jasemaine, to our prize sponsors, and to the Apple Experience Centre for providing the venue and facilities.