Jonathan Barge, World traveler. Social shutterbug.

Staying close across hemispheres.

Graphic designer and avid hobby photographer Jonathan “Jono” Barge is always happy to oblige when friends ask him to photograph their exploits. Unfortunately, sometimes he pays a price for his art.

“They’re all show ponies and love to be seen,” laughs Jonathan. “They used to bug me for CDs I couldn’t be bothered burning, and they all wanted me to waste my ink printing up photos.”

Today, thanks to .Mac and iLife ‘06, Jonathan has a stylish new place to show off his images and please his photo-hungry friends at the same time: an ever-changing personal website composed of photo pages and a blog.

From design to publication in minutes

To build his website, Jonathan used iWeb to put together a website in just a few hours using one of the customizable templates. When he was ready to publish it to the Web, .Mac did all the work for him with just one click.

“It’s just so much easier hitting one button and having everything go straight up,” says Jonathan. “And if I want to update it, I can do it in about ten or fifteen minutes. It publishes in the background so you can keep editing.”

As a graphic designer with a critical eye, Jonathan says he preferred iWeb over any of his other options, not only because it’s easy, but also because it’s so well designed.

“iWeb is much cleaner and easier, whereas with sites like MySpace, you don’t know where to look,” he says. “It’s just not designed properly. But iWeb allows you to create everything just the way you want it.”

Feeling close a world away

Along with many photo pages, Jonathan’s website includes a regularly updated blog that details his travels and activities, and allows comments from viewers. This is especially important because he moved recently from Australia to London (vacationing a month in Thailand along the way), leaving behind family and scores of fun-loving friends down under.

“It’s the easiest way to keep in touch rather than sending out mass email,” he says. “People can just check back to the web page whenever they want.”

Photocasting: A practical alternative

Another way Jonathan uses .Mac and iLife ‘06 to communicate efficiently is through Photocasting — an easier alternative to emailing photographs.

Roni Blak, Choreographs her studio with .Mac

Apple and .Mac keep a dance studio on its toes

Watching their beaming faces and athletic dance moves, you’d never guess that the young students at MnR Dance Factory ever had trouble coordinating anything at all. But behind the scenes, Roni Blak, owner of the award-winning Los Angeles dance studio, explains that making well-choreographed order out of chaos can take quite a bit of fancy footwork behind the scenes.

Or at least it used to.

That was before Roni decided to use .Mac to solve some of her biggest administrative headaches when she moved her dance studio across town nearly two years ago. Since then, she’s discovered quite a few ways for Apple to help out creatively as well.

Tackling communications challenges

One of her first and toughest challenges was to find a better way to let students and their families know about any changes in rehearsal dates and times — sometimes made at the last minute.

Whenever her staff had to communicate a schedule change, they’d have to make 60 phone calls and hope the information got through to everyone. But today, Roni uses a combination of Apple’s iCal calendars and iDisk, the online data storage system in .Mac service, to keep everyone apprised.

It’s a system easy for everyone to use. “We keep a folder for dance team rehearsal schedule updates within our Public folder on our iDisk,” she says. “Even the kids themselves can access it to find out, ‘Oh, my rehearsal’s been switched from 12:30 to 1:30 on Saturday,’ This frees up a lot of time for my assistants in the office. They aren’t having to make phone calls or getting angry calls saying, ‘I didn’t know I was supposed to be there.’”

Roni and her staff also publish other dance class schedules using iCal and .Mac. Students can subscribe to the calendars or access a web page with the calendars on it.

A commitment to community

Roni and her friend Molly founded MnR Dance Factory nearly 13 years ago.

Kristin Boden-MacKay, Woman with a full plate.

Keeping it all together with .Mac.

Mother. Coach of three sports teams. Amateur photographer. Business owner. Kristin Boden-MacKay has a lot on her plate. And she has nearly a dozen different websites, public and private, that cover her vast range of interests. To help her manage it all, she turns to .Mac and iLife ’06.

With iWeb, Kristin can create professional-looking sites and publish them with one click. And .Mac makes creating dedicated Groups a snap. All of these are indispensable tools to help Kristin keep it all together.

Big image. Small budget.

A former technical webmaster for Nike.com, Kristin is quite familiar with the pros and cons of getting things done in a big company.

“At Nike, we had teams of people and a multimillion-dollar budget,” she says. “But the time it would have taken me to do as many sites as I do now with .Mac and iWeb — it would have been absolutely impossible.”

Using iWeb and .Mac, Kristin can create and publish robust websites by herself — quickly, easily, and inexpensively. She even used them to create a professional-looking website for the family business, K+C Performance Automotive. “It gives us a good professional image,” says Kristin. ”People see our website and think we’re spending thousands of dollars on it, but we’re not.”

Flexibility to customize

Because iWeb sites are customizable, Kristin can adapt her website to include custom content specific to the family’s automotive business.

“Customers love the ability to just pull down a service menu or a status,” she explains. “We’re just a small shop, so they might get voicemail if they call. This will mean they can just check the website instead of calling.”

Other features on the K+C Performance Automotive website include a blog page with car news, as well as a page that offers audio podcasts on car care.

Rene Bruce, A fetching business idea.

Building a Business on .Mac

Entrepreneur Rene Bruce of Long Beach, California, had a dog and an idea. Practically over a weekend, .Mac helped him turn that idea into a fetching online business.

Inspiration over lunch

Rene always ate lunch in the park while throwing a disc for his Jack Russell terrier Kia. “People would stop and ask me, ‘What kind of dog is that?’ and ‘How old is she?’ and 50 million other questions,” he says. “By that point, I would end up eating cold pizza.”

So Rene built a webpage on .Mac, complete with photos and information about Kia. He put the URL on business cards and handed them to the curious. Problem solved. Lunch enjoyed. But it was just the beginning.

Inventions worth wagging about

Being the creative sort, Rene had invented a special pad for Kia to ride along on his Harley. He also devised a special disc that Kia could easily pick up from flat cement. Soon passersby everywhere took notice.

But rather than settle for more cold pizza, Rene decided to turn his ideas into a business. And this business needed a website even more than his dog did.

Mike Eveland, To serve and protect history.

Preserving the memory of heroes

As a veteran police officer in Riverside, California, Mike Eveland has experienced enough in his career to know the meaning of sacrifice. And that’s why it hit him particularly hard several years ago when a class of about 15 pre — police academy students couldn’t name a single Riverside police officer that had died in the line of duty.

“They couldn’t name a name. I was shocked and thought, that’s just really sad,” says Mike.

A history worth remembering

At that moment, Mike realized that the police department’s history was in jeopardy of being lost forever because it had never been documented.

“We have really wonderful history that goes back into the late 1800s, and it was just walking away,” he said.

So for the next two years, Mike worked on producing More Than a Name, a video documentary highlighting the lives of the fallen heroes of the Riverside Police Department. It was soon picked up by local cable TV and the Riverside Press-Enterprise broadcast a clip on its website, along with a feature story on the project.

“It just really took off,” Mike says.

More stories to tell

After the video was finished, Mike realized that there were many more stories left to tell. So he decided to create an in-depth website about the history of the Riverside Police Department that could grow and evolve as more old and new stories came in.

“I thought, what a great idea to bring these guys back in and have them share photographs of their careers and the stories they remember from the early days,” Mike tells us. ”We’ve even got a couple of guys who can remember back into the 1930s.”

“We were familiar with what .Mac could do,” says Mike. “We had created our own website using iLife and we thought, this is the perfect place to start the ‘Riverside Police Department Remembers’ web page.”

Traci Havens, Military wife deploys .Mac.

.Mac and iLife bring a military family closer

When Paul Havens was deployed to Iraq last fall, his wife Traci was relieved to learn that he could use email to keep in close touch with his family and friends. This was especially important because Paul, an Air Force Tech Sergeant, would be in northern Iraq to perform a particularly treacherous peacekeeping mission: “He’s with the bomb squad,” explains Traci. “They’re the ones that make sure the IEDs — the roadside bombs — don’t blow up.”

But after Paul arrived in Iraq, Traci learned that she couldn’t easily email family photos to him because the images took forever for him to download using the military’s slow Internet connections.

“Where they are, it’s so remote that they only have satellites to use for the Internet and phone calls,” she says. “To send him pictures, I had to print and mail them because he couldn’t sit and wait in front of a computer for an hour. It was really, really slow.”

Little did Traci know that this difficulty would spur Paul to pursue another mission.

It involved enlisting a few friends to spring a Christmas surprise on his wife and daughters, and would dramatically change the way the Havens family communicated from then on.

A surprise from across the world

On Christmas morning, Traci and her daughters, Taylor, 11, and Ashley, 21, awoke to find that Santa had paid them a surprise visit, with the help of friends. Under the tree, Traci found a brand-new iMac G5, complete with its built-in camera, iLife ‘05, and a .Mac membership.

“I had no idea my husband arranged it,” says Traci. “I was shocked that they’d all been conspiring.”

Using the new iMac, Traci immediately put iPhoto — part of iLife — to work organizing the latest family photos. She then logged on to .Mac and used one-click publishing to create web-based photo albums that Paul could view by simply visiting an Internet address.

Creative emailing using .Mac Mail

Traci and Paul have come to cherish .Mac Mail for its flexibility. Because anyone with a .Mac membership can log in to their email from any computer with an Internet connection (Mac or PC), Paul has been able to use Traci’s email account in a pinch to communicate with her when his work email is out of commission.

Jason Kogler, Traveling chef gets a taste of .Mac.

Food for thought on .Mac

After graduating from culinary school, Mac user Jason Kogler left Canada to work and play across the Atlantic. Scouring the UK and Europe for good eats and a classy peg to hang his chef’s hat, Jason used .Mac to keep in touch with friends, family, and business prospects — no matter where he happened to be from day to day.

Internet cafés abound

Jason was pleased to find internet cafés just about everywhere he traveled, making it easy to get online. It didn’t matter if the cafés had Macs or PCs, .Mac gave Jason a built-in home base on the Web.

Jason used .Mac Sync to keep his personal data files, like contacts, bookmarks, and iCal, current and complete online and on his Mac. On the road, he could get to his contacts or bookmarks from any computer connected to the Internet, and any changes he made while away from home were synced back to his Mac.

“Logging in to .Mac is almost as good as being at home,” says Jason. “Having information at your fingertips is so important. I never have to worry about remembering complicated long web addresses or contact info.”

Backup helps you move

Jason finally settled down for a year in Edinburgh, Scotland. Thankfully, he was able to get DSL service in his new flat. But he also had four other flatmates, none of whom owned a computer.

“I created multiple user accounts on my Mac, so they could have their own preferences,” he says.

When Jason moved back to Canada, he decided to perform a clean install of Mac OS X, rather than just deleting the other users and their files. He started the process by backing up his personal data and settings using .Mac Backup, and used this backed-up data to restore his computer once he completed the installation.

“The end result was seamless,” he says. “I could not tell that I had reinstalled. Every preference, setting, and file was intact and restored. Little things in Mail, such as the way I like my folders organized — all of that restored itself. Everything was done for me with the click of a button.”

Nancy Leamy, Takes her house in her own hands.

Even realtors need a little help

When putting her vacation house on the market in early 2006, Nancy Leamy found that many others had the same idea.

“In this area, there are four times as many houses on the market and only half as many sales compared with last July,” she says.

So she hired a top real estate firm to list her property — a 1950s home with a lot of character, but character doesn’t come across well on paper. When she saw the realtor’s online listing for the house, she was pretty underwhelmed.

“The page layout was so dull. The pictures were really tiny, and two of them looked distorted,” says Nancy. “Because this was a home with a lot of visual impact, this just wasn’t going to cut it. So I took matters into my own hands.”

Curb appeal with a few clicks

Nancy had just gotten iLife ’06 and started experimenting with some of the tools.

“I launched iWeb and started dragging pictures of the house into a web page template just to get a feel for it, and suddenly it hit me,” she explains. “I could use this to put together a really nice-looking website about the house.”

So she just kept going, picking an Apple-designed theme to complement the house, adding more photos and descriptions for each section of the house, and pages with detailed information.

“It was so compatible with the style and even the colors of the house,” she says. “It was both classy and casual at the same time.”