First, clear your dance card next Tuesday night for the monthly meeting of MMOOS (Maine Macintosh Owners & Operators Society), our local Apple User Group. That’s Tuesday, June 19th, at 6:30 PM in the large meeting room in Bldg. 25 at Thornton Oaks Retirement Center in Brunswick (see our website at mmoos.net for directions). Whether you’re a seasoned “MacHead”, or a “switcher” who’s recently turned away from the Dark Side and into the light, there’ll be something at MMOOS for you.

Next week in our “Updates & Rumors” segment we’ll focus on the “Top Secret” features of Apple’s “Leopard” operating system upgrade revealed in the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote address this week, and demo a little bit of Leopard that you can use today – you don’t have to wait until October. Then, we’re going to dig into a heaping helping of “R.I.B.S.”

No, we’re not being catered by Beale Street BBQ. We’re going to talk about Ripping, Installing, Burning, and Storing files and applications on the Mac. We'll answer juicy questions like "What’s the best setting to use to import songs from a CD into iTunes?", "How can I get DVD movies I own into my Apple TV or iPod?", "What in the world is a .dmg?". "Where did that program I just downloaded go to?", "How do I burn a CD?" (you'd be surprised how many people are a bit fuzzy in this area), and "Where's the best place to back up my important data?", to name a few. We're talking serious meat here. Come hungry. Hope to see you there.

On to current events. This week at Apple’s WWDC “hell froze over” again. To date, there have been two significant “hell freezes over” events that have turned out to be big winners for Apple. The first – iTunes for Windows, which opened the iPod (and the experience of Apple’s trademark easy-to-use software) to millions of Windows users. The second – Apple’s move to Intel processors, which allowed Apple to bring big computing power both to the desktop and the thighs (notebooks, silly). A third event, which could have equal significance, occurred this week when Apple brought their excellent web browser, Safari, to the Windows platform.

Apple claims that Safari for Windows renders (displays) web pages up to two times faster than Windows’ Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox. The public beta version is available at apple.com. Check it out.