ATPM 13.02
The February issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure. Kudos to Lee for this month's cover art. He ran the idea by me via IM one night, I thought it was great, and Michael gave it the final thumbs-up. Our thanks to Steven Frank for playing along. In case you missed the link, you can also get the cover art as a desktop picture this month. Well, well, well, well, well. What's that? Steve Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld Expo last month? You don't say. Why, I believe that means Wes has to eat his hat. And given how another ATPM staffer is resident in the city Wes currently calls home, I'm sure we can arrange a photo shoot of the happy event, because let's face it Wes, tasting is not the same thing as eating. I'm sure we can find a nice Rachel Ray recipe wherein we substitute the meat of choice with the hat. Perhaps former ATPM staffer and amateur chef Tom Bridge can help us out in that regard. While we hammer out all of those details, Wes does have the blogosphere's coverage of Apple's next paradigm-shifting product, as well as weigh-ins on MacHeist and MacZOT. iPhone fever has certainly set in amongst the ATPM staff, as Mike Chamberlain attests to in this month's Mac About Town. He talks about some other stuff, too. I think. Did I mention the iPhone fever settling amongst the staff? Angus takes us on a safari of the Apple landscape, including, yes, the iPhone, but oh so much more as well. We welcome Ed Eubanks to the staff as we present Next Actions, a column devoted to to using your Mac to get things done. Lee presents the third chapter in the ongoing saga of Photoshop for the Curious, with a look at the application's menus and a tutorial on getting better grayscale (viz: "black and white", even though that's really a misnomer) photos from your color pics. Chris Dudar has a beginner's guide to the UPS, and no, he's not asking what brown can do for you. Reader David Kettlewell was kind enough to share some photos from Sweden's "Little Leaf Sea" for this month's desktop pictures selection. Cortland has junior-high flashbacks after a night of swing dancing with Angie doesn't go like he planned. Meanwhile, the chameleonesque Agent Smith arrives in town, palming a familiar-looking comm device... Ellyn isn't very smitten with Arctic Quest, but David is quite taken with MoRU. Our eastern seaboard surfer, Eric, tries out NetworkLocation, while Frank Wu beats me to a review of Booq's Python XL System. Matthew wraps up this month's reviews with a look at Eltima's SWF Movie Player. I remarked to Michael that this month's issue was our most content-packed out of the past few months, and we still had four writers unable to submit this month! (Hey, we have real jobs outside of ATPM, you know?) We're both very pleased, and our thanks go out to the staff for their efforts. As usual, this issue is available in a variety of flavors for your reading pleasure.