1. Let Us Be Your Guide
2. Dear Diary
3. Mac.com—One Email Address that’s Yours To Keep
4. See iTools in Action
5. On Location Around the World
6. Built for Mac OS X
7. Technically Speaking...
8. Quick Takes

1. Let Us Be Your Guide

This holiday season, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for you to find just the right gift for that special Mac person on your list.

So we created the Apple Holiday Gift Guide.

Do the Mac enthusiasts in your life travel around a lot? Play games to the break of dawn? Make videos? Make music? Play music?

Whatever their interests, we’re sure to have a gift just right for them on the Apple Holiday Gift Guide. Filled with over 70 gift ideas (some for as little as $24), the guide has games, printers, utility software, scanners, speakers, MP3 players, and lots more.

Don’t be a last-minute shopper.

Visit the Apple Holiday Gift Guide today.

2. Dear Diary

On a recent hike, twelve-year-old Nicole Wineland-Thompson kept a diary. That’s not unusual.

Nicole kept her daily journal on her Blueberry iBook. That’s not that unusual either.

This next part, however, is a bit out of the ordinary: Nicole’s ten-day “hike” took her to the top of Africa. To the blustery peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro, to be exact, a chilly 19,340 feet above sea level.

“I put the entire trip in the iBook each day,” she recalls.

What prompted Nicole’s hike in Tanzania?

Read “Climbing Kilimanjaro,” a new story on our website.

3. Mac.com—One Email Address that’s Yours To Keep

What happens when you leave one Internet Service Provider (ISP) for another?

Usually it means that you have to change your email address. And that means re-subscribing to mailing lists, notifying friends, family, and colleagues about your new address, and changing account settings at the Apple Store, Amazon, and other online vendors.

But it doesn’t have to be painful to switch ISPs. Not if you have a Mac.com email account. One of the four Internet services that are part of iTools, a Mac.com account is a snap to set up and easy to remember. That’s because you use your member name (“ulysses”) as part of your email address (“ulysses@mac.com”), so as long as you remember your name, you’ll remember your address.

Mac.com also provides all the features you need in an email account, including auto reply and mail forwarding. What’s more, you can keep it as long as you like and use it with any ISP you sign up with, so even if you switch—from AOL to EarthLink, let’s say—you can still get your mail delivered to your Mac.com address.

How do you get a Mac.com account?

4. See iTools in Action

Mac.com is just one of a suite of free Internet services, called iTools, that also includes HomePage, iDisk, and KidSafe.

We could tell you all about them, but wouldn’t it be cool if you could see them all in action, demonstrated by someone who knows them inside and out?

That’s what we thought, so we arranged for demonstrations of iTools during the Apple In-Store Events scheduled for every weekend through December 24.

Find a reseller hosting an Apple In-Store Event in your area.

5. On Location Around the World

The reporters filed stories from all over Europe. Their assignment: investigate cultural identity and diversity in Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, and a number of other European countries.

A bit on the dry side? Not to the host of young journalists reporting for Children’s News, an online multimedia project that’s part of this year’s Netd@ys Europe 2000. Children’s News included 13 teams of school children who created their news reports as Desktop Movies using iMovie on iMac and iBook computers.

Said Belgian project co-coordinator Dominique Rosar: “It was a very enriching experience, and because iMovie is so intuitive and easy-to-use, the editing could be done just as well by the 7-year-olds as by the 11-year-olds.”

Apple and iMovie plays key role in Netd@ys Europe.

6. Built for Mac OS X

We hope you’re keeping up with what’s available on the Mac OS X Downloads page (www.apple.com/macosx/downloads). Just recently, we added a number of interesting applications to the site, including Napster (the program that gives you access to the well-known MP3 file-sharing system), Quake 3 Arena (the exciting multi-player first-person shooter), and SETI@home, a program you can use to aid the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (aka SETI).

The SETI project at the University of California Berkeley scans the skies for radio signals that may have originated from intelligent sources, amassing a huge amount of data. By running the SETI@home screensaver, you help analyze that data by “lending” your computer’s processing power to the SETI project while you’re not using it.

If you want to help out—and get a free Mac OS X screensaver in the process—click the link and follow the instructions from there:

Download your free Mac OS X screensaver.

7. Technically Speaking...

Has this ever happened to you? You’re trying out some software you downloaded from the web and your computer freezes. Whether you type on keys or run your finger across the trackpad, you get no reaction. Even attempting to force the application to quit (by holding down the Command, Option, and Escape keys) doesn’t help.

At times like this, you have to force the computer to restart. The good news is that we designed iBook with two clever ways to regain control of your system—via either a “soft reset” or a hardware reset.

How do you perform soft and hardware resets? Which should you try first? To find out, take a look at this informative article in our Technical Information Library:

Need to recover from a freeze? Here’s how.

8. Quick Takes

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