“If you thought it was cool to record music CDs on a personal computer,” an enthusiastic Walter S. Mossberg suggests in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Mossberg recently had the opportunity to review two systems—one from Compaq and one from us—equipped with Pioneer’s new “combo disk drive” (what we call a SuperDrive) that “reads and writes CDs and CD-ROMs and also reads and writes DVDs” that you can play in most standard DVD players.

What did Mossberg conclude? “When it comes to the actual experience of creating a DVD, Apple wins hands down. Apple has created a beautiful and simple DVD recording program. It’s called iDVD and looks a lot like Apple’s brilliant iMovie program for importing and editing videos.”

Exactly how easy is it to create your own DVD titles? Visit the iDVD website to see exactly how easy creating your own DVD titles can be:

The Internet is truly amazing. Who’d have thought, just a few years ago, that one day soon, you could pay a casual visit to eBay and wind up buying a new table lamp from someone in Lyon.

Or—when your new transcontinental friend sends you email, exclaiming, “J’attends votre réglement!”—that you could turn to a handy but powerful resource like Sherlock to get an almost instantaneous translation of their heartfelt gratitude.

This new Sherlock service comes thanks to a recently added plug-in for Systran. Simply type in a phrase in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese and Systran will translate the phrase into up to six languages, displaying the result in Sherlock.

But that’s not all. Joining Systran in Sherlock’s Reference channel are a slew of new searching resources from Bartelby.com, including the American Heritage Dictionary, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, the Columbia Encyclopedia, Gray’s Anatomy, Roget’s Thesaurus, The Oxford Shakespeare, and World Factbook.

To use one or more of these new plug-ins, rouse Sherlock, click the Reference channel, make a selection, and search away.

Whether you’re a photographer with a growing library of digital images, an art director with thousands of Adobe Illustrator files, a filmmaker with raw and edited footage to keep track of, or a musician with terabytes of digital tracks in your collection, you know how long it can take you to locate a particular file when a client calls or a need arises.

It’s time to learn how to manage your digital assets—easily and effectively. Join us for a free seminar, the Managing Digital Assets seminar, now touring the country, and we’ll show you how you can organize, archive, and access all types of media files (created on any platform) using the Mac you already own, AppleScript (to help automate the entire process), and off-the-shelf or customized software.

What if we told you that as a reader of Apple eNews, you could play a demo version of a cool new Internet game on your Mac for free.

It’s true. The game is Tranquility, and it will take you on a sensual, meditative journey the likes of which you’ve never seen before. Start a new game, and you find yourself drifting in a three-dimensional space filled with thousands of tiny stars of varying shapes, sizes, and colors. Mesmerized by the sights and sounds, you float around, occasionally bouncing off objects. In fact, you can even learn how to make music yourself by bouncing off the objects the right way.

If that sounds like fun, wait till we tell you about the platforms, spinners, and game levels, and how you can get a free three-day trial subscription just by entering the magic word, eNews.

Ready for a pop quiz? What holiday did former Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson create in 1970? Don’t know? That’s okay, we’ll give you the answer. Earth Day—to be observed on April 22—has grown from a small, grassroots affair to a global celebration, leading to such significant legislation as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.

“Isn’t it great?” asks Kim Moon in her article, “The History of Earth Day.” “One person had an idea and kept working until everyone began working together to solve it. See what happens when people care about our world?”

To learn more about Earth Day, pay a visit to EdView—part of Apple’s “iTools for Education.” Among other KidSafe-approved educational websites, EdView offers an enchanting collection of Holiday sites, giving parents, teachers, and kids a chance to share and learn together.

Don’t you just love fonts?

Us too. Choose the right set of fonts for your documents, and your presentations can be easily seen, even from the back of a large conference room; your proposals mean business to the eyes reviewing them; your invitations convey the sense of warmth and cordiality you intended.

Yes, we really appreciate fonts at Apple, so when it came time to choose the fonts to include with Mac OS X, we chose a beautiful assortment of typefaces—both Roman and Japanese—that we think will serve your needs extremely well. But, that’s not all. We also wanted to make it even easier for you to use and manage your collections of Mac OS X typefaces and to make certain that the fonts you choose look their absolute best—both on screen and on paper.

So what did we do?

If you use an AirPort Base Station at home or in the office, you know how great it is to be able to stay connected to your network or the Internet, even if you pick your computer up and take it to another room.

But what if you want to move more than 150 feet from your base station? What if you need a larger coverage area in your home, business or school than a single base station can offer? Can you set up multiple base stations and move between them seamlessly?

Sure you can. It’s called “active roaming,” and setting up your AirPort network for it is easier than you might think. In fact, we have an article in our Technical Information Library that explains exactly how to configure your AirPort Base Stations and Macintosh computers for active roaming.

Active Roaming

For a limited time, you can receive an instant rebate of 50% on select memory upgrades. Simply order additional RAM when you purchase a qualifying Apple computer at the Apple Store.

It pays to get more memory.

Would you like to see Final Cut Pro 2 in action? During the month of May, you can see how broadcast professionals use Final Cut Pro 2, Matrox RTMac, and Power Mac G4 and PowerBook G4 computers to produce ESPN’s The Life. Sign up for “Ready for Prime Time,” a new Apple seminar for the video professional.

In a survey cited by The State Journal, the number of law firms using Macs jumped more than 250%—up from 9% in 1998 to 23% this year. “The latest study is a combined study that looked at small, medium and large firms together,” the American Bar Association said in issuing the report.

Mac OS X on Tour. Whether you live in Ottawa, Canada, Phoenix, Arizona, Largo, Florida, or Houston, Texas, visit an Apple User Group in your area and see a lively presentation on Mac OS X by an Apple representative.

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