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MacMania 9 Seminars

Far East • July 11th – 17th, 2009

The conference fee is $995 and includes all MacMania 9 courses below, two parties, and the MacMania Ingenious Bar.

Leo Laporte

60 iPhone Apps in 60 Minutes

With over 10,000 applications in the iTunes App Store it might be hard to find the best of the best. Leo's picked 60 fun, useful, and sometimes mind-boggling applications, many of which are not well known. Fasten your seatbelt for a fast-paced ride through the wonderful world of iPhone applications.

Here is the list of the 60 apps: text file. And here are the presentation slides: Keynote file.

MacGems — the 60 Best Freeware Programs in 60 Minutes

One of the things that makes a Mac extra special is the excellent variety of useful free programs available for OS X. You won't be bored with this whirlwind tour through 60 useful, entertaining, and unexpected freeware programs. You'll get a DVD with all the programs so you can try them right away.

Here is the list of the 60 apps: text file.

The New World of Social Media: Using Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Other Sites to Learn, Socialize, Market, or Build an Audience (90 minutes)

With 130,000 followers on Twitter, 30,000 on FriendFeed, and the maximum 5,000 friends on Facebook, Leo knows social networks. But what good are they? And how can you use them to keep up with friends, build new networks, promote yourself, and your business. Leo will introduce you to social networks like Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, My Space, Linkedin, explain why they're all the rage, and how you can get the most out of them.

Audio recording of this talk (2 hours). This is a must-listen-to talk. Here are the slides (27mb file).

Turning Your Mac Mini Into a Media Center (90 minutes)

Leo takes you beyond the AppleTV by showing how you can use a full-blown Macintosh to create the ultimate home entertainment center. Topics will include software solutions like Front Row, Boxee, XBMC, Plex, and EyeTV plus hardware solutions from El Gato and Pinnacle, and useful accessories like remote controls, cable box interfaces, and wired and wireless video distribution systems. You'll leave this hour ready to create your own system perfect to fit your needs.

Audio recording of this talk (1:19 hours).

Don McAllister

Practicing Advanced Productivity Workflow (90 minutes)

Transcend from power user to deadly ninja with an action-oriented Mac system. Don gives you an advanced look at specific apps for getting organized and productive on your Mac and iPhone — with a heavy focus on implementation of an integrated Mail and Action management system.

Here are the presentation slides: pdf file (24mb).

Mac Productivity Bootcamp (half day)

Ready to learn the applications, Preference Panes, scripts, and hacks that can shave an hour off every day? The Mac has always had its share of time-savers and time-wasters (anyone remember "Talking Moose"?). But since the introduction of OS X in 2001, we’ve seen an explosion in the creation of smart tools for increasing productivity and using our Macs more efficiently. We’ll look at a few of the very best chunks of functionality you can put on your Mac, and how to use them to start saving time, starting today.

Here are the presentation slides for Part 1: pdf file (30mb).

Here are the presentation slides for Part 2: pdf file (30mb).

Backing Up Your Mac (90 minutes)

Apple have made backup super easy with the launch of Time Machine and Time Capsule but are you using Time Machine effectively? How can you be sure you’ve got everything you need safely backed up? Once you’ve got your backups, how do you go about about restoring files or emails, and how do you handle your iTunes library?

Time Machine isn’t the whole story! When should you use online services for backup? And what about off site backups? What about .Mac backups? This seminar will take you through all you need to know about backing up your Mac safely and effectively using software provided with OSX. .Mac and third party utilities and services.

Here are the presentation slides: pdf file (30mb).

ScreenCasting 101 (90 minutes)

Acknowledged as one of the most effective ways to teaching computer based material, this seminar will introduce you to the powerful medium of screencasting and enable you to make your very own screencasts. Whether teaching friends, family or business colleagues or if you just want to simply share a quick hint or tip, screencasting allows you to record a mini lesson right on your Mac and produce a simple video to post on your website or distribute via iTunes. In this seminar you’ll learn:

Here are the presentation slides: pdf file (13mb).

How to Manage Your Mac Data (90 minutes)

We’re all familiar with Address Book to store our contacts and iCal to store our calendar and task information. You’ve probably even got lists and lists of information stored in Excel or Numbers spreadsheets. This seminar will show you how to bring all that information together into one single place and organise and control your information from a single application. No database experience required as the session will be focussing on Bento — the personal database from FileMaker. In this seminar we’ll cover:

Here are the presentation slides: pdf file (29mb).

Derrick Story

10 Ways to Make Your Pictures Look Better than Everyone Else’s (half day)

Do you feel like your vacation shots look the same year after year? Photographers often develop habits that confine their creativity. In this 3-hour class on shooting technique and post processing, Derrick Story will show you 10 techniques that will infuse new life into your photos. Learn how to:

And much more. Be sure to bring your camera and the owner’s manual to this session. The pictures you take on this trip may be your best ever!

Beginning iPhoto (half day)

iPhoto is a feature-rich image management application. But many photographers on scratch the surface of its capabilities. But now you can delve deeper into its powerful tools and take control of your photo library. In this 3-hour class you’ll learn:

By learning these techniques, you’ll take control of your pictures and get more out of them.

Advanced iPhoto Techniques (90 minutes)

For a consumer image application, iPhoto has some very sophisticated tools. In this session you’ll learn how to tap some of iPhoto’s most powerful features. Some of the techniques you’ll learn include:

This class is for those who are already familiar with iPhoto and want to get the most from it.

Introduction to Aperture (half day)

Even though Aperture can meet the needs of the most demanding professional photographer, it is very accessible for amateurs — especially if you take this 3-hour introductory course by Derrick Story. You’ll get an overview of the entire application, including:

Once you get the feel for Aperture, you’ll discover that it is as friendly as it is powerful. Derrick will get you headed in the right direction.

Andy Ihnatko

Making a House Network Into a Home Network (half day)

Your Mac makes networking simple. Maybe a little bit too simple. It takes just seconds to get a new Mac on the Internet and too many people stop there, never imagining how simple it is to build a network that delivers a titanic array of services to your whole home.

In Part 1, we’ll be talking about setting up and expanding your network using switches and WiFi base stations, so that everything can talk to everything else and do so securely. In Part 2, we’ll learn all about the glorious array of features built into the Mac OS that allow you to share files, printers, music and video libraries, and even connect to your home Macs from anywhere in the world.

Finally, we’ll go shopping and take a look at some extra hardware you can buy to expand your network’s capabilities even further. Like dedicated file servers that put all of your family photos, documents, media, and backups in a safe, central repository. And gear that shares the handiest hardware in your house with any computer in the home … the video camera in the baby’s room, the hi-def TV and 200-watt stereo in the living room … even your cable box and its 400 channels of programming can be freed from its perch.

1000 Tips in 90 Minutes (90 minutes)

I have a lot of love to give, ladies and gentlemen. But that’s not relevant. I also have thousands of tips, tricks, and techniques to share. You don’t need to buy movies from the iTunes Store, you know; you can just convert the DVDs that you already own into video files that you can play in iTunes and sync to your iPod and iPhone. There are special times in the year when you should never buy a Mac. Do you know what they are?

And if you can build a tactical heads-up-display in-car navigational device for less than 2 cents, then that part of it probably won’t interest you. Otherwise, it’s pure tabasco.

I’m not entirely sure we’ll get through all 1000 in 90 minutes, but hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

Life After iLife (half day)

Apple’s done some fab work with the iSuite of apps. They’ve consistently taken staid, dull, and familiar programs and reinvigorated them, bringing unprecedented creative opportunities to people who don’t want to invest $1,800 in an image-editing app and three months into learning how to get the most out of it.

Just don’t think that iPhoto is the only photo editor out there, Pages is the only word processor, Safari is the only browser, and iMovie is always the best tool for editing video. This session will give you a practical guided tour to all of the alternatives available. Audio and video editors that handle simple jobs far more quickly and with less overhead than GarageBand and iMovie; photo editors that will break you through the sometimes depressing limitations of iPhoto; the greatest word processor ever created for any platform … and none of them have names that start with a lower-case vowel.

Getting It All Out There: Sharing your photos, video, and other media with relatives, friends, and selected enemies using the Internet (half day)

As a newspaper columnist, I’m part of the class of people being thrown out of work by electronic publishing. And even I’m thrilled by the huge range of tools and services that allow the average civilian to break the seals on a new iMac at 2pm and have a TV show (encode your video and post it to YouTube or Vimeo … or broadcast live via Stickam!), a radio show (create a podcast and publish it to the iTunes store!), a syndicated column (establish a blog!), a photo gallery (private and public photo albums on Flickr!), and even an online store by dinnertime.

Even if all you want to do is send your kids a 20 minute video of your day, there are ways of sharing it privately without simply sending it as a horse-choking 500-megabyte email attachment. Or why even wait until you get back to your house, hotel room or cabin? Services like Twitter and Tumblr let you post observations and media straight from your smartphone.

The Nooks and Crannies of the MAC OS (90 minutes)

You never know what’s in the house until you start rummaging through the closets. iTunes and Safari and Mail get all the glory … but didn’t you know that there’s a utility in Leopard that lets you create tiny pockets of encrypted, password-protected storage vaults on your hard drive to keep your sensitive information far from prying eyes? An image utility that can automatically take a whole memory card full of photos and turn them into an album in your iPhoto library, a set of snapshot-sized JPEGs published to your personal website, and a burned backup DVD automatically, while you’re off somewhere eating waffles? A Microsoft Word-compatible word processor that can serve the needs of most casual users?

This session will be a guided tour through the Greatest Hits of all those apps you get for free that you’ve never heard of.

264 S. Meridith Ave., Pasadena, CA 91106 • 650-787-5665 • Copyright 2009 © InSight Cruises