Mac OS® X Leopard™ All‐in‐One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 1. The World According to Apple

In This Chapter

• Doing things the hub way

• Digitizing your life

• Making your digital devices work together

Huzzah! After years of empty promises of professional‐quality media features for home and school — most of them coming from that silly Gates person in Redmond — Apple has taken on the challenge and developed a recipe for digital success.

By using tightly integrated hardware and software (where everything works smoothly together), Apple gives you the ability to easily organize and produce your own multimedia with the iLife suite of digital tools, which includes iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, GarageBand, iWeb, and iTunes. That same software also provides fantastic editing capabilities. Finally (and this is very important) — to paraphrase Will Smith in the movie Men in Black, “Apple makes these programs look good”.

First, Sliced Bread …and Now, the Digital Hub

In today's overloaded world of personal electronic devices, people can try to juggle as many as five or six electronic wonders. Each device typically comes with its own software, power adapter, and connectors to the outside world. Although managing one or two devices isn't terribly difficult, as the number of devices increases, so do the headaches. When you have a half‐dozen cables, power adapters, and software to cart around, the digital life can become pretty bleak. (And quite heavy. You'll need more than a backpack to lug all that gear around.)

To combat this confusion, Apple came up with the idea ...