Last Wednesday, we all gathered to wish iMac a happy third birthday and to reflect on how much iMac has evolved in just three years.

That first Bondi Blue iMac (powered by a 233MHz PowerPC G3 processor) came with a CD-ROM drive, a 4GB hard drive, USB ports, built-in Ethernet, and a 56K modem.

Today, iMac comes standard with a CD-RW drive, an optical mouse and enhanced keyboard, both USB and FireWire ports, VGA output, hard drives with as much as 60GB of storage capacity, and processors running up to 700MHz. The thoroughly modern iMac is also ready for wireless communications with AirPort.

What’s more, iMac is still changing minds and lives. If it’s changed yours, we’d like to hear about it. So take a few minutes and send us an email telling us how iMac has changed your life. We’ll publish some of the best stories on our website.

Stephen Gillies and Kate Jones are glassmakers, artists who create exquisite pieces of dazzling color and form.

Conjure images of glassblowing, and you may be hard pressed to see how the Mac—and a digital hub of all things—could figure prominently in such an enterprise. But so far as Kate Jones is concerned, “we couldn’t possibly run a business from a place like this without our iMac.”

Their “communications nerve center,” the iMac “earns its keep as a design and marketing tool,” allowing the couple to “push the boundaries technically and creatively.” Explains Jones, “I can scan a picture of an existing piece into the system and then play with the image, changing colours and even the form to provide a pattern for us to work from. It allows tremendous flexibility when I’m visualising a piece. The Mac is a fantastic tool for an artist—it gives me complete visual freedom.”

How would you like to walk into a computer store that stocks over 500 software titles for the Mac?

A comfortable shop where you can find up to 15 categories of software neatly organized, so you don’t have to walk up and down the aisles searching for what you want.

Where can you find such a software superstore? Online.

It’s the Apple Store, of course, and over the last few months, we’ve nearly doubled the number of available software titles and will be adding more categories by the end of the month. Now there are more games, more reference software, and more educational titles (over 100!) than ever before, including some software you rarely find in stores.

If you have a few minutes, come take a look at how much software you have to choose from at the Apple Store.

If you own an iMac—whether you purchased one yesterday or three years ago—you also own one of the most popular personal accounting packages in the world. Quicken.

Easy to use and packed with features, Quicken lets you balance your checkbook, manage your stock portfolio, download transactions directly from your bank or credit card company, plan for your retirement, prepare for tax season, and a great deal more.

In fact, the latest version of the venerable application—Quicken 2002—is built for Mac OS X, takes full advantage of the Aqua interface, and should be shipping soon.

The Acme Coaster Company was in deep trouble. With so many computers spitting out useless audio CDs, no one had to purchase coasters to protect their furniture anymore.

But, just when the company thought it would go dot.bust, sales began to pick up dramatically. ACC thought its new line of Roller Coasters had saved the day. But that wasn’t it at all. Discerning audiophiles had discovered the winning combination of iMac and iTunes. Almost overnight, producing one high-quality audio CD after another became as simple as dragging and clicking. So simple that parents didn’t even have to ask their kids for help — they could rip, mix, and burn without any juvenile supervision at all.

Thanks to iMac, the Acme Coaster Company is solvent once again, and all of us can relish the coolest way to burn CDs and the best computer for enjoying and making music.

PBS and the New York Times have several things in common.

Both have long been synonymous with excellence. Both inform, amaze, and amuse us on a daily basis. Both have companion websites — PBS Online and the New York Times on the Web — with content that’s encyclopedic in scope. (The former weighs in with over 135,000 pages of online content.)

And both now allow us to search the depths of their voluminous content via Sherlock. That’s right, rouse Sherlock, click the News or Reference channels, and you’ll find new Sherlock plug-ins that will help you search PBS Online and the New York Times on the Web, respectively. How’s that, Bert?

Like many people who own a Mac, you probably have several email accounts: your work account, your personal account, one for your home business, and so on. As you know, using the Mac OS X Mail application, you can send email from any of those accounts.

But what if you’d like to send new messages from your personal account (so you can read the replies later, after you go home for the day) but “Work” is your default email account? Or what if you have two email accounts at work, and you want to switch default accounts?

Well, there’s an easy way to do both, and we have an article in our Knowledge Base that will tell you— step by step—how to do so. Take a look.