MacBook Air “takes portability to ethereal levels”

“The MacBook Air is so sleek and elegant,” writes Etan Horowitz (orlandosentinal.com) “that pulling it out of your bag and using it is as easy and seamless as taking a small notebook from your pocket.” “Wowed by its razor-thin design,” Horowitz “wanted to bring it everywhere.” Horowitz says “it’s a pleasure to sit with the Air on your lap while watching TV on the couch, listening to a speech at a conference or riding in the car. In fact, I wrote much of this column on the Air while riding in a car at night.”

One to One program creates bond with customers

“One grandmother,” explains John Boudreau (mercurynews.com), “used a tutorial to learn how to make podcasts with Apple’s GarageBand software so she could read bedtime stories to her grandchildren, who live on the other side of the country.” It’s just one of the examples Boudreau uses to explain how the One to One personal training sessions available at the retail Apple Store have become “one of the most powerful marketing tools for the Cupertino company.”

Time Machine offers a no-click backup solution

Long an advocate for backing up the data on your Mac, Glenn Fleishman (seattletimes.com) believes he’s finally found the “no-fuss backup system.” It arrived with Time Machine. Part of Mac OS X Leopard, Time Machine “lets you back up your Macintosh with the least fuss combined with [the] greatest access of any archiving system I’ve ever used.”

Quick Tip of the Week: Open all my PDFs in Preview

You may already know that your Mac can open some documents — PDFs, RAW photos, Excel spreadsheets, text files — in a variety of applications. But did you know that you can tell Mac OS X that you’d prefer to open all Excel documents in Numbers, all text files in Pages, or all PDF documents in Preview? Find out how by watching the latest Quick Tip of the Week.

Macworld’s advice: Use Safari

In his review of Safari 3, Jason Cranford Teague (macworld.com) awards the “solid, streamlined browser” 4.5 (out of five) stars, and he offers this recommendation: “Mac users who need a streamlined Web browser for simply browsing the Web should use Safari 3. (So should their Windows counterparts, since Safari runs on both platforms.) Safari has all of the features that most Web surfers will ever need, it’s extremely fast, and it integrates seamlessly with other Mac applications.”

Apple leads Fortune list of “Top 20 Most Admired Companies”

Fortune surveyed “more than 3,700 people from dozens of industries” to assemble its list of America’s Most Admired Companies [of] 2008. “This year’s winners all have strong records of innovation, leadership, and financial strength,” and Apple leads the 20 selected companies and also ranks number one in computers.

Pro Tip of the Week: Take a Quick Look

With Quick Look — just one of the great new features in Mac OS X Leopard — you can get a sneak peak at the contents of a document without opening it. A single click lets you satch a video, peruse a multi-page PDF, scan a folder of photos, or enjoy an entire Keynote presentation without launching any applications. How can you take advantage of Quick Look? Find out in the latest Pro Tip of the Week.

Aperture 2 “amenable to amateurs and pros”

Ian Austen (nytimes.com) takes a look at Aperture 2 and finds that it “offers a more accessible, streamlined facade and makes it easier to handle photos in full-screen mode. It is also much faster.”

Quick Tip of the Week: A reminder about To Do’s

Spend lots of time in email? Then wouldn’t it be great if you had a quick and easy way to create a convenient To-Do list when you get a message about something you need, well, to do? In Leopard Mail, you’re just a right-click away from creating a new item for your To-Do list. Find out how in the latest Quick Tip of the Week.

Now shipping: Time Capsule

According to Jim Dalrymple (macworld.com), Time Capsule, the wireless hard drive you can use to back up multiple Mac computers using Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard, has begun shipping. “Notifications of the shipments began reaching customers that pre-ordered the device early this morning,” he reports.