Time for a New Year's rejuvenation for author, coach and lecturer Gitte Jørgensen's fun and informational website. A love of pink and a desire to shake things up from the simple and clean lines of her previous site, Gitte provided the background for a fun, lively new look. If you are looking for inspiration to shake up your own life, inside or out, consider one of Gitte's personal development courses and books. Read more at www.gittejoergensen.dk

Conductor Peter Ettrup Larsen, currently a coach on Danish Television's popular "Maestro" program, chose JetSetNet to revamp his website while he was busy doing more musical things. We're proud to announce the launch of his site, with great photographs by Jes Eriksen. This one here, however, is by JetSetNet's Ann Powell Groner. Check it out: www.ettruplarsen.dk

A new bride, a new office and a new website were Kansas CIty wedding videographer Bill Groner's New Year's resolutions this year. Or if not, at least that's what the fates had in store. The new website, complete with new product line and pricing structure, was released yesterday. Congratulations Village Video Productions.

See it here: www.villagevideoproductions.com

In connection with the announcement of their 2009 course program, Støvring Højskole - a music and musical "high school" in Denmark - changed the style of their posters, brochures and letterhead. JetSetNet was asked to make over the website accordingly - and fast! In less than 10 days, a completely new look and feel was applied to the site's many pages and a sizeable portion of the content rewritten.

The school also wanted to feature its teachers more prominently and to make clear that the website shows at a glance that what's important to Støvring Højskole is music, passion, energy and the joy of creating music together.

Jette Harthimmer took the first ever Danish Podcaster Prize by a convincing margin for her excellent podcast Claircast. Podcaster prize is a listener prize, and Jette beat out over a hundred other nominees. The award was presented today in connection with the Media Internet Awards held by the Danish Interactive Media Association FDIM. It was the first time that a podcast award was part of the program. The Podcast award was established by Danish podcast promoter Karin Høgh. Hopefully this will become a recurring annual event.

Jette began podcasting over 60 episodes ago and has developed a popular and fascinating interview format. Her guests comprise elite personalities and experts in a wide range of fields, primarily under the umbrella label of new age, but also technology and other areas. The podcast is in Danish, but there are a few episodes in English. Read more about Jette and subscribe to Claircast via iTunes here.

A lot of my friends and colleagues are moving to Mac, and have asked me to share some of my own tips and preferences. This is not meant to be a comprehensive "how to switch" guide and I am not an expert. Feel free to comment if you have made different choices or better advice!

The best way to approach the Mac in my opinion is to forget almost everything you know about Windows and instead meet the Mac as if it were your first computer. Instead of wondering "how to do a specific Windows-thing on a Mac think "how to I do this?". If you can't figure something out, it's very likely that you actually do not have to do it at all! Macs are generally easier and simpler. For instance, I've never had to install any kind of device driver. Even installing applications is such a simple process that it confused me at first. Just drag and drop the application icon (which in reality hides a full package of files) into the Applications (Programmer) folder and voila! Uninstall? Just drag the App to the trash.

Some key differences
Getting used to only one Delete key took a few minutes. The Cmd key on the Mac does what the Ctrl key did in Windows and the Ctrl key on the Mac seems to be a second Alt or Option key and not used as often as the Cmd or Alt-Option keys in most programs. Ctrl-click produces a right-click on a mouse, often bringing up a contextual menu. On my Danish keyboard, the @ sign is placed awkwardly, requiring an annoying combination of Alt and the apostrophy key way off to the right, next to the Enter key. I still haven't gotten used to that.

Some software preferences
Anti-virus software: I don't use it and can't see why I should. I don't want to load my machine with unnecessary software.

Office for Mac: I have Office 2004 installed but use it as little as possible. The 2008 upgrade is sitting on my desk, but I haven't felt the need to install it yet.

• Word: I use Word to read other people's Word docs. I use Google Docs, TextEdit (like Notepad), a variety of HTML editors, and Pages (part of iWorks). Pages is kind of a Word-Microsoft Publisher hybrid that I use for documents where appearance is important.
• Excel: Not often, since I rarely use spreadsheets at all. Instead I use Numbers (part of iWorks) - or for simple calculations, I just type directly into Spotlight.
• Powerpoint: Not at all. I use the far superior Keynote (part of iWorks) to create and view other's presentations. I export them as Powerpoint files when I need them to be compatible.
• Entourage: I uninstalled it. See below.

Email: I use Mac Mail. When I switched originally, I used Thunderbird as an intermediary to convert from Outlook on Windows to Mac Mail. There might be a much better way to do that today. I really loathe Entourage ("Outlook on the Mac"). I also use GMail.

Calendar: iCal is one of my favorite things about the Mac. I maintain separate calendars for various things: Home, Work, etc. I subscribe to a number of public calendars and like being able to toggle the various ones on and off. I can publish selected calendars so others can see or share them. and the printed calendars are really pretty.

Finder vs Explorer: Sometimes I still miss Windows' Explorer and think Finder is pretty annoying at times. I use Quicksilver, freeware, to launch applications and still have a lot to learn to really get the hang of it. Launchbar is another choice, but it costs money and isn't as powerful. I used it for awhile because it was easy to understand. Finder does have some great features like the ability to drag a folder into the sidebar for easy access (similar to Favorites) and particularly with Cover flow, it's very pretty.

Which browser?
As a web developer, I use almost all of them. But for my personal use, I prefer Safari. Surfing the net with Safari is like looking at the world through really good sunglasses. Everything is just a lot prettier. On a Windows machine, I use Firefox, and I still use Firefox on the Mac, because it is light years ahead of Internet Explorer. But on the Mac, it doesn't seem to me to be better than Safari, if as good. Every now and then you might meet a website that looks terrible under Safari, but that is becoming very very rare. I recommend using Safari but installing Firefox as a backup browser.

Third party software
One of the best parts of the Mac universe is the great software written, sometimes exclusively, for the Mac. On the website I Use This, you can see what I - and others - use and it's a good idea to register (free) and keep your own list, which you do by simply clicking on the "I use this" button next to the software you use. Not only does it give you a nice little inventory that you can review every so often, or if you ever need to quickly find all your programs again, but it works in connection with the excellent app called AppFresh that runs through all your installed software to see if there are new versions available and updates them automatically. A one-click update! It's a great place to browse for software.

Generally, you'll find that Mac seems to adhere to a "Small is beautiful" philosophy. Rather than huge apps bloated with features, Mac developers tend to offer great one-trick ponies - small apps that do one thing, often a very simple thing, really well.

Some final tips:
You might not be aware that you can create a .pdf of anything you can print. Simply "print" your document and then select "Save to pdf" instead of printing to a printer. So please stop sending your Word docs as email attachments, especially to another Mac user!

Screen printing: want to grab something off the screen? Learn the keyboard shortcuts Shift-Cmd-3 and Shift-Cmd-4 to grab the whole screen or a part of it to a file on the Desktop. Add the Alt/Option key to the mix: i.e. Shift-Alt-Cmd-3 to save to the clipboard, making it even easier to paste into an email or whatever.

The coolest thing I've seen this past year is Universe, It's hard to describe, so I'll quote from its own Statement:

Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world's contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move. Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world — a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, a team, a place — and moving the cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else into its orbit.

I urge you to delve into this universe, explore, search for the people and topics that interest you, and wonder about all the ways this amazing technology could be used.

Three dynamic women - three web sites. JetSetNet has had the pleasure of publishing three new sites this fall:

• singer/actress/dancer Caroline O'Connor - www.carolineoconnor.com
• author/speaker/coach Gitte Jørgensen - www.gittejoergensen.dk
• author/speaker/coach Chris Poole - www.feministiskselvforsvar.dk

Occasionally, the need arises where you need to refresh a particular website again and again. Perhaps you are monitoring real-time updates from a live event, as I am about to do for the Apple Special Event where I hope they will announce a cool new iPod. Perhaps you're in the middle of an online auction or waiting for ticket sales, testing a website during development, watching for news or some other announcement. Here is a nifty little service that you can use once or add to your browser bar for future use. It will perform an automatic refresh of a specified site at a specified time interval - 30 seconds, or whatever. You need this, unless, of course you actually HAVE a life. :-)

Jing, www.jingproject.com, is an amazing little utility for Windows or Mac that lets you capture your screen, either as a still image or as a video. Have you ever wanted to show someone else what's on your screen, either to have them help you or to help them from a distance? I have a friend who likes to send me big fat Word documents into which she's pasted an enormous .bmp screen shot. I'm going to turn her on to this. It will save us both a lot of bother. Niels, a colleague of mine, likes to spice up his Powerpoint presentations with video demos of various software features. I think he might enjoy trying out Jing.



This sunny little wonder, currently in Beta and completely free, is really simple and intuitive. On a Mac, it downloads and installs in seconds. On Windows, it takes a bit longer because it needs to install the .net framework, if it isn't already installed. Once installed, it hovers discreetly at the edge of your screen, as a little yellow globe or sun, waiting for your mouse to hover over it. Then you can launch a screen capture or video. If you have a microphone, it will record audio as well.

Once you've captured what you want, you upload it with a single click to a site and gives you an URL you can send to your audience. The first time you do this, you are prompted to sign up for a free account with the hosting service, screencast.com that provides 200 MB of storage. Seconds later, your capture is available for sharing and the URL is handily copied to your clipboard automatically. Voila!

As an example, I made this little screen tutorial. It took about 5 minutes from start to finish. Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to use the tool to capture the tool itself, so I just found something quick to demonstrate. Seems like they might need to do something to optimize the final video, but it is, after all, a Beta version.