This week I rise to sing the praises of not one, but two fine organizations. The first is our local Apple User Group, appropriately called MMOOS (Maine Macintosh Owners & Operators Society). We will meet next Tuesday, August 21st, at 6:30 PM in the large meeting room in Bldg. 25 at Thornton Oaks Retirement Community in Brunswick (see our website at mmoos.net for directions).

The second is The Portland Camera Club (PCC). PCC has been welcoming, encouraging, and instructing photography enthusiasts of all levels since 1899. Meetings are held on Mondays from September through May in the American Legion Hall in South Portland. This month PCC is holding its first public exhibition of members’ work in four years, entitled “Essence of Light”, in the large meeting room in Bldg. 25 at Thornton Oaks Retirement Community in Brunswick.

See the connection? Next Tuesday at MMOOS we will be surrounded by the beautiful photography of the PCC exhibit. What better setting in which to demonstrate the exciting new features in iPhoto 7, part of Apple’s recent major upgrade to their iLife digital lifestyle application suite. iPhoto 7 is chock full of improvements, including (but not limited to): a new organizational hierarchy, which groups your photos the way you shoot them – by Event; more powerful editing and search capabilities; and great new ways to share your photo masterpieces (or just pleasant memories) with family, friends, and the rest of the world, through web galleries, cards, calendars, “coffee table” photo books, and theme-based home printing.

So, come early and check out the “Essence of Light” exhibit, then stick around for iPhoto 7. If, for some unexplainable, unfathomable reason, you can’t come next Tuesday for the MMOOS meeting, the PCC exhibit runs through August 30th. The room is open Monday through Friday from 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM.

In related news, last week Apple also introduced iWork ‘08, a major upgrade to its $79 productivity suite. iWork ’08 moves ever closer to muscling MS Office off the Mac for good. Keynote, Apple’s “PowerPoint on Steroids That Actually Looks Good” presentation application, gets even more cinematic and “moving”, and will be on display at the MMOOS meeting (it’s what we use, naturally). Pages, the desktop publishing application, besides creating dynamite brochures, newsletters, and flyers, gets Word-like word processing tools, including change tracking. New in iWork ’08 is the much-anticipated Numbers, a spreadsheet with the power of Excel displayed in a classy Mac way.