One quick note for your calendar. At next week’s meeting of MMOOS, our local Mac user group, yours truly will present an in-depth look at iPhoto and its management, editing, and sharing features. That’s next Tuesday, April 19th, at 7:00 PM in the Multi-Purpose Room at Brunswick High School. I look forward to seeing you there.

Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger” will be available at 6:00 PM on Friday, April 29th. You can pre-order Tiger from Amazon.com ($94.99 after rebate), or from the Apple online store for $129 with free shipping and access to an exclusive online seminar called “Inside Tiger”.

Now, let’s take a sneak peek at another part of Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger” – QuickTime 7. QuickTime is more than the movie player you may have used to view a film trailer on the internet. It is the Mac’s “media layer”. Without getting too geeky, practically everything on your Mac that has anything to do with digital images, music, or movies uses some part of the QuickTime media layer. QuickTime 7 takes the media layer to another level.

The “biggest” feature of QuickTime 7 is its use of the new H.264 compression/decompression “codec”. H264 provides extremely high quality video, and has been adopted to be the foundation of both the Blu-ray and HD DVD high definition DVD formats. H.264 is also “scalable”, meaning that it can (and will) be used across the full gamut of digital media from cell phones to high definition TV. Here’s a short list of other QuickTime 7features.

If you have a big enough source file, you can watch video in full-screen splendor. With QuickTime 6, if you wanted to, say, fast forward to another point in the video, you had to get out of the full-screen mode, make the move, then jump back in. With QuickTime 7, move the cursor and on-screen controls are appear in an opaque palette.

24 Channel Surround Sound. Although most people can’t make use of 24 channels, the system will mix down to however many channels you have, including DVDs with 5. 1 surround sound.

One-button audio and video recording. With QuickTime 7 Pro (most likely a $30 upgrade), you can quickly record video (using an iSight or other FireWire-based camera) and audio (with your Macs’s built-in microphone). Great for video or audio postcards.

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski