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Janet Copenhaver, director of technology for Virginia’s Henry County
Schools, had a plan: Have students invite their parents to school
one night a week, so the kids could show the adults how to use the
school’s AirPort-equipped iBook computers.
But Copenhaver’s plan hit a bit of a snag: “We couldn’t get the
parents to go home!” she says.
Copenhaver, of course, couldn’t be more pleased. Henry County has
one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates, and the director
hopes that if parents are able to improve their computer
skills, they can also enhance their job prospects.
So for one night a week, Copenhaver has a problem she can be proud
of.
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Used to be, you’d race over to Starbucks or Le Boulanger in the
morning just to pick up your favorite morning brew. But—talk about
accommodating—now you can pick up your email right along with your
double, tall, lo-fat, latte, no foam.
That’s because more and more places we frequent—terminals, hotels,
eateries, and coffee shops—offer wireless access to the Internet
via Wi-Fi, the wireless standard on which AirPort is based.
Exactly how easy is it to connect on the go? We cut the Internet
umbilical cord from one of our intrepid reporters and sent her out
to fend for herself in the wireless wilds of northern California. No
babe on the web, she connected all around the town, even filing
her story remotely.
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Did you see “Chicken Run”? The thigh-slapping animated film—that
pays homage to “The Great Escape” and “Stalag 17”—is a prime example of
stop-motion animation, a technique filmmakers use to make
inanimate objects appear to move.
But it’s not just the big studios that employ the technique, and you
don’t need million dollar studio bays to pull it off successfully.
Just ask Marc Atkin. Using iMovie, Final Cut Pro, and his PowerBook,
he’s enjoyed considerable success with the technique. One of a legion
of budding digital filmmakers, Atkin turned stop-motion animation on
a collection of LEGO building blocks to create a paean to one of his
favorite filmmakers, Stanley Kubrick.
His opus—”2001: A LEGO Odyssey”—has become a hit on the Internet,
and you can get a behind-the-scenes tour.
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Like Robert Frost, Don von Rotz of DVR Consulting took the road less
traveled, and that decision has make all the difference.
Von Rotz creates and deploys Macintosh-based business solutions, and
if he had to point to one reason for his unabating enthusiasm for
the Mac, it would probably be reliability. Take, for example, the
Macintosh-based inspection system he developed for an automobile
manufacturer. Ten years after its initial deployment, it’s still
going strong. The company also sells a Mac-based security badging
system called Badger, a system so reliable that he rarely
hears from his customers.
“Many times we have to call them to see if they’re still going
okay,” von Rotz says. “From our perspective, we’d much rather have Mac
customers than PC customers, because there’s much less support on
our end, and a happier customer on the other end.”
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Don’t be surprised if little Lenka and Garr come home from their
first day in class with the news that their teachers went to camp
this summer, too.
No, their teachers probably weren’t learning how to swim and make
crafts. But they may have been attending the Apple Teacher
Institute. That’s where lots of teachers camped out this summer,
learning how to integrate technology into their classrooms with the
help of iBook computers and software applications like iMovie.
True, quite a few were wary of technology when they first arrived,
but by the time of the final campfire, teachers like attendee Henry
Finch realized that “computers should be like pencils and paper or
books,” an everyday part of the classroom experience.
Come take a look at what “arts and crafts” was like at this year’s Apple
Teacher Institute.
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Thank you for reading this issue of iMac Update.
Look for your next issue on October 4.
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In the coming weeks, we’ll share some of the letters you wrote
telling us how iMac changed your lives. We hope you enjoy them
as much as we have.
This letter comes from Bill H.:
My 89-year-old mother, who died in March, 2001, learned to compute
using an original iMac. Here was a woman who had seen the first
automobile in her rural community, the first airplane fly over that
community, heard the first radio, looked at the first television in
her community and now at the age of 87 decided to learn about using
computers. She taught school for 35 years and the most advanced word
processor she had used was an electric typewriter. She was born in a
real log cabin with no inside water or toilet, no electricity and
the heat and cooking was done by burning wood in cast iron stoves
and in fireplaces. From there to iMac, what a journey.
I showed her where the Power button was, showed her how to click on
Help and she pretty much learned the rest at a very fast clip,
requiring very little help from me. She was soon surfing the web and
sending everybody she knew email about her newfound treasure, the
iMac.
It was a point of pride for her, and she was the greatest advocate
for Macintosh, telling all her friends who did not compute that they
should buy an iMac. Hers was an original Bondi Blue. I still have
it—with her story writing and the accounts of her young life saved
in AppleWorks. She loved her iMac. She was loved by all who knew
her.
I hope you can honor her by publishing this account that shows how
an older person can easily step into the Digital Age using Apple
computers.
Sooner or later, you’re going to want to capture a screen shot, a
digital picture of what you see onscreen.
With the Mac, it’s easy. You can capture a screen shot of the entire
screen, a particular window, or a particular section of the screen.
With the Mac OS X screen shot utility—Grab—you can even take
advantage of a 10-second timer, which is useful for capturing such
items as a pop-up menu.
Although simple to do, it’s also easy to forget exactly how to take
a screen shot. That’s why we’ve provided articles in our Knowledge Base
that remind you how to do so in Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X.
We’ve opened a few new stores in the past several weeks—at the International Plaza
in Tampa, Florida, the Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio, and the Northshore Mall in Peabody,
Massachusetts—and we have another Apple Store opening soon at The Shops of Saddle
Creek in Germantown, Tennessee.
If you’re in the neighborhood, be sure to come by and say hello.
“Unlike most so-called portable computers,” writes Anthony Zurcher of the
Washington Post “Apple’s iBook — weighing just under 5 pounds by
itself and measuring a slim 11.2 inches by 9.1 inches by 1.3 inches—is almost
as easy to tote to the local coffeehouse as a hardcover book.”
Writing in the Houston Chronicle, Bob LeVitus recounts his experience with Apple’s
free HomePage: “Being a hands-on kind of guy, I built a little Web page, using HomePage,
for your enjoyment and edification. It took me a whopping 10 minutes, and I think it came
out great considering how little artistic talent I possess.”
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