Why does the Mac figure so prominently at the state-of-the-art Carl E. Hirsch Media Lab at Kent State University?

Because today’s journalists have to be able to do it all. Shoot video in the morning. Edit the footage in Final Cut Pro, and post the Desktop Movie on the school’s e-newspaper in the afternoon. They have to be proficient with the written word. Adept at digital video. Able to manipulate digital photographs in Photoshop. Rip a background track and cut it into a Desktop Movie.

They have to be comfortable, in short, with all forms of digital media. Which is why the Hirsch Lab relies on the Mac—the hub around which all digital media revolves. Says manager of student media Jeff Fruit, “Taking print, photographs, and video and moving them all into one project — Convergence is where everyone wants to go.”

A clinical psychologist at Temple University, Dr. David Fresco often finds himself up to his elbows in data. Which is not at all unusual for physical and social scientists. For such empiricists, finding truth means wading through a huge amount of data.

And to find order within that chaos of data, scientists like Dr. Fresco turn to statistical programs like SPSS. That’s why Fresco was thrilled by the recent return of SPSS to the Mac platform. “All of us in psychology and in science who have remained committed to the Mac platform have just been very ecstatic that SPSS brought it back,” says Dr. Fresco, speaking of SPSS 10.0 for Macintosh, the first Mac version of SPSS’s top-selling statistical software since 1995.

Visual effects artist Dav Rauch is impressed. “I thought you’d need a Ph.D. to do this. But it really was a piece of cake.”

His achievement? Creating—in just five days—an interactive DVD portfolio that showcases the groundbreaking work of his company, the Orphanage, in time for the Sundance film festival. What’s more, he accomplished the feat —on his very first attempt— without having to rely on the expensive authoring facilities he would have turned to in the past. All thanks to DVD Studio Pro.

“DVD Studio Pro is cheaper [than those facilities] by a huge factor,” says Rauch. “And it’s so easy to use. It’s very drag-and-drop, very graphical. It finally closes the loop for someone like me—who’s a designer, not a technician.”

“Will upgrading my computer really make me more productive?”

That’s a question Pfeiffer Consulting (the highly respected independent consulting group) recently addressed in its “Design and Publishing Workflow Benchmark Report.”

Pfeiffer consultants compared the performance of stock shipping configurations of two systems: a 400-MHz Power Mac G3 and a 733-MHz Power Mac G4 computer. What did they find?

You might say that Liam Lynch—creator of the hit MTV puppet show “Sifl N Olly”—considers his Mac an essential component of his digital lifestyle.

“Ten years ago, if you asked me, ‘If your house was burning down, what would you grab if you could only save one belonging?’ I would have said my guitar,” says Lynch.

“But now there is no question that I would run for my Mac—it has all my ideas, my images, my sounds, my scripts, movies, schedules. It’s my other brain,” he adds. “What an amazing, magical machine... all my work, ideas, entertainment, tools, and art happening in one box.”

“Mac OS X will be the best plat- form for games.”

A strong statement, to be sure, but Omni Group President Wil Shipley knows what he’s talking about. His company has already developed such useful Mac OS X applications as OmniWeb and OmniPDF. And now Shipley wants to let everyone know that the Omni Group is hard at work bringing some of the most popular game titles—Oni, Heavy Metal F.A.K.K. 2, and Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force—to Mac OS X.

How’s the work coming? Says Shipley, “We’re finding that we get better frame rates for every game we port. The sound latency is lower and the graphics are faster. What more do you want?”

Find out how Shipley and the Omni Group are doing in “Worth the Wait: Omni Group and Mac OS X Games.”

If you’d like to use Mac OS X Mail but find daunting the prospect of importing all of your contacts and email from your current email applications, we’ve got some good news for you.

You’ll find two articles in our Technical Information Library that will help you make the move to Mail. The first explains how to import your contact information into Mail from Outlook Express.

The second offers a series of AppleScripts you can use to import email messages into Mac OS X Mail from Netscape Communicator 4.x, Eudora 5.x, Outlook Express 5.x, Microsoft Entourage, or Claris Emailer 2.x.