First, a date to mark on your calendar. Our local Apple User Group, MMOOS (Maine Macintosh Owners & Operators Society), will meet next Tuesday, May 15th, at 6:30 PM in the large meeting room in Bldg. 25 at Thornton Oaks Retirement Community in Brunswick. See our web site at mmoos.net for directions. After we get caught up on the latest Apple news in our “Updates & Rumors” segment, we’ll launch into our featured program, entitled, appropriately, “The Making of Updates & Rumors: Powerful (and Pretty) Presentations in Apple’s Keynote”. We'll go "behind the scenes" with Keynote's gorgeous graphics, tantalizing text, and cinematic transitions. We'll explore the many ways you can share your presentations, and see how some of Keynote's unique capabilities can be used to spice up other multimedia projects. Should be loads of fun.

We’ll also hold our first annual Spring Cleaning Swap Meet. It’s an excellent opportunity to bring hardware, software, cables, and media you don’t use anymore, and “recycle” them in the nicest way – by either giving or selling them to someone who can still put them to good use. We’ll also have receptacles available to collect your “tech trash” and discard of it appropriately. Hope to see you there.

On to some tech news. Seems the portion of people surfing the web using a Mac has doubled in the last eight months, according to two internet metrics analysis firms. Both WebSideStory of San Diego, California, and rival Net Applications of Aliso Viejo, California, report that Apple’s Mac OS X powered a little over 6% of all computers that connected to the web last month.

Windows-based computers were the web portal-of-choice for 90% of web surfers, pretty much unchanged from the previous data period. Of that 90%, over 33% of surfers using Windows were using a browser other than Internet Explorer – specifically, Firefox or another Mozilla-developed browser. That’s an increase of close to 10% in the last year, and continues the slow but steady erosion of Internet Explorer’s browser share.

In some heartening news for Microsoft, the percentage of web surfers using Microsoft’s Vista operating system rose to 3 in April 2007, up from just 0.2% in January. Either few upgraders to Vista are browsing the internet, or not that many folks are taking the Vista plunge. I suspect it’s the latter.