(For those new to the column, Forward Migration is our term for companies moving from Wintel machines to Macs — or at least adding or increasing the number of Macs they use. A Forward Migration Kit is an overview of Mac OS products for a particular occupation, such as photography, optometry, etc.)
A couple of Titanium PowerBook computers, a video camera and a satellite telephone are among the essential items on board Kijana, a 16.5-metre yacht that has set off on a two-year voyage around the world, according to an article at SMH , an Australian news Web site.
Jesse Martin, a Melbourne man, now 20, circumnavigated the world in 1999 in a yacht called Lionheart. He’s the youngest person to complete journey. And he is using Apple’s Final Cut Pro on his PowerBooks to make a series of adventure documentaries about the odyssey and sell them to TV networks. Discovery Channel, one of the world’s most popular cable channels, is among those likely to carry the programs, according to SMH.
“Martin, a very straightforward lad, says he and his team spent a couple of months training on Final Cut Pro,” SMH reports. “They might have done their editing in iMovie and avoided the fairly steep learning curve to reach proficiency in FCPro but decided the professional program’s much greater power is what they need for a product aimed at the commercial market.”
You can follow Martin’s progress online.
And speaking of Australia, if you want to absorb a little of Melbourne’s devotion to the iMac, head over to Les Posen’s Web page and see his clip of the iMovie tram.
Posen told MacCentral that a recent National Geographic show, Dogs at Work, featured the work of William Wegman, who photographs dogs, with videos for children’s learning, too.
“The show featured Apple laptops as Wegman’s personal computer, with the videos made using Mac desktops,” Posen said.
Have a Forward Migration story? Send it our way.
Requests for help
Now it’s time for our weekly requests for help from folks who need your advice and/or assistance in forward migrating — or at least being able to keep the Mac platform alive and thriving in their businesses. Contact the requesters directly at their e-mail addresses.
Dan Bailey: “I am currently in the research process, looking into opening my own bike shop. As part of my shop, I plan to have a Web storefront; I’ll be hosting on a Red Hat server running MySQL and PHP. I’d like to keep my entire inventory database on the aforementioned database.
“Being a long-time Mac user, and a huge proponent of Mac OS X, I’d like to use a pair of the new iMacs as my point-of-sale systems. I’m hoping that there’s a) a source for cash-register drawers that are usable with the new systems, and b) a point-of-sale software package that will interface with a remote mySQL database. Clearly, this wouldn’t be a problem on a Wintel machine, but I’d prefer not to have one of those things uglying-up my shop. Does anyone have any suggestions?”
Robert de Bie: “I’d like to find out if there is real, usable, integrated software packages available for the real estate business.”