Mac OS X Lion online learning and courseware is now available from CustomGuide. For a look at the table of contents and a preview of lessons, view our Mac OS X Lion title page.

Lion, the seventh version of Mac OS X, was released last July and has arguably become Apple’s most successful operating system.  By November of 2011, some sources estimated that roughly 30 percent of all Mac users were already using Lion.

Lion introduces several new features to Mac OS X, such as:

• Launchpad: Launchpad lets you access and manage all of your Mac’s applications, as you would on an iPad, iPod Touch, or iPhone.  Simply click the Launchpad icon on the Dock to access Launchpad.
• Mission Control: Mission Control is the new hub of your Mac, which combines earlier versions of Mac OS X’s Dashboard, Exposé, and Spaces features. With just a single click or swipe on the trackpad, you can conveniently view everything on your Desktop.
• Full-Screen Applications: You can now view your applications in full-screen view, so that they take up the entire screen.

We also bid farewell to our existing web based training format with this new release. We feel that we saved the best for last in releasing Mac OS X Lion as the final title of our existing web based training format, as the title delivers the most interactive and detailed web based training ever produced for Mac OS X. Thanks to  all of our clients who have helped make our online training such a success.

As a salute to the web based training we’ve produced over the past decade, we’ve included a special Easter egg in the lesson, “What’s New in Mac OS X Lion.” Need a hint? Explore the end of the lesson to reveal the Easter egg.

Today marks the beginning of a new era at CustomGuide. We are officially implementing our upgraded development process, and we’re excited about the possibilities these improvements will bring.

Why change something that’s worked well for so long, you might ask? Client demand. While our clients are very happy with our product, they’d also like more titles to choose from. Our attention to detail and interactivity are hallmarks that have made us an industry leader for the past 10 years. But this has come at the expense of our library. We have great stuff, but the titles we offer are not as diverse or numerous as we, or our clients, would like. When people think about CustomGuide online learning, they think, “Microsoft Office,” and “Love it.” Our goal is for people to think, “Amazing selection,” and “Love it.”

Over the past few months, we have been testing, researching, and testing again to find ways to improve our development process and make it more streamlined, without sacrificing the look and feel our clients are used to. Compatibility with mobile devices has also been a big focus; our current process uses Flash, which isn’t supported by all mobile devices. We think we’ve found a solution, melding some of our old tools with new ones that make some use of video and are mobile-compatible.

Now we’re beginning to take all that testing and researching into the real world. We’re tackling our first title in the new format, Project 2010, right now. Look for it this spring. And for anyone looking to say adieu to our old format, get ready to sink your teeth into Mac OS X Lion, to be released in March.

The entire development team at CustomGuide attended the informative, insightful, and energizing DevLearn conference last week in Las Vegas. It was the first time we had such a large group attend a conference together, and we found that it was a great opportunity to connect and interact outside of the office; a team building exercise without the usual ice breakers, games, and activities. It has been great to return to work refreshed and equipped with new knowledge and resources.

Everyone had the opportunity to attend the concurrent sessions were full of great speakers that had excellent ideas on creating courses for mobile learning and HTML 5, designing courses that are engaging (and even entertaining), including social networks as a learning resource, as well as sessions for management, networking, and development. A few takeaways our team had from the concurrent sessions at the conference:

• Learning has always been a social activity, but social networks are a new way to learn: “Learning has always been considered a social thing, but social media is the tool that now helps broaden that learning.”
• Expectations for content are changing: “I think that as our industry gets more data on how people learn, or prefer to learn, it is changing to more free content with pay for accreditation model than a pay for content model, but I don’t buy that everything will be free in the future.”
• Content for mobile devices is becoming more prevalent: “I really enjoyed the sessions I attended about designing for mobile interfaces, and feel like I learned quite a bit about that.”
• Curating data is key: “The main thing that I took away was the amount of data that is uploaded to the Internet and the constant struggle to curate that data.”

There were also great keynote speakers. Here are a few keynote highlights for those who weren’t able to make it:

• Michio Kaku, renowned theoretical physicist and Science Channel host, spoke about a future full of new and exciting ways to access information and learning; imagine computers in your wallpaper, glasses, and even your clothes. Having computers everywhere will change the way we learn, work, and live.
• Tom Koulopoulos spoke about how the cloud is changing the way we access information and form communities. Think of the Internet as just the beginning; the primordial soup. The cloud is the complex organism that will come from it.
• Steven Rosenbaum spoke about the importance of curating information in the Information Age. Case in point: it took the human race to the year 2003 to produce an exabyte of information; now an exabyte of information is generated every day. Another statistic: If you watched every video that was uploaded onto YouTube in a single day, it would take you 8 years to watch all of them. With the abundance of data being generated, finding the most important and relevant pieces of data is essential.

The Expo was also very busy, thanks to the many clients and friends of CustomGuide that stopped by. We look forward to seeing you again next year!

A fan recently wrote to express admiration for our training materials. It was indeed wonderful to be recognized for our work. But he made an observation about other training materials that made us laugh, and it also rings true:  “It really is a pity people prefer crap over quality.”

No one goes into buying decisions thinking that they prefer crap over quality. They start out wanting to get the best product out there. Then they collect information and they see that this vendor is priced at this point, that vendor has that many titles, and so on. Unfortunately, quality isn’t a quantifiable number you can attach to a product. It requires time and effort to assess. But because no one has much time, decisions are often based solely on hard numbers, and the goal of getting the best training out there is forgotten. And thus, they end up with crap.

At CustomGuide, quality has always been our first concern. Instead of producing many titles at a lower quality, we produce fewer titles at a higher quality. We really want people to get something from their training. We want people to improve their skills and be better at their jobs. It has come at a price, having lost many sales to competitors for not having the quantity of titles that others do. But those who do choose CustomGuide us are those who have remembered to get the best training they can. They’re also the ones who, in the end, get the best return on their investment.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a way to quantify our quality as it compares to competitors. But we do have the word of our fans:

“I am a big fan of your brilliant Personal Trainer by CustomGuide books for the various Office 2003 programs. Unfortunately, I will not be able to use Office 2003 forever and now would like to learn the awful Office 2010 properly. To my very great regret, there are no Personal Trainer books for Office 2010 available and the Microsoft Step by Step guides are as bad as ever.
It is really a pity that people prefer crap over quality. I own Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Project and they are all in very poor condition because they are heavily used. My other not-so-few computer books are also in a very poor condition. That is because they were thrown against the wall, trampled upon and torn in parts by a frustrated reader (me). And that is exactly what most of them deserved.
CustomGuide has an excellent teaching methodology that enables the user to quickly get a very solid foundation of all practically important functionalities of the Office programs. What is not in there is of little relevance and can be looked up elsewhere when needed.
Like most people I have learned Office by doing with all the flaws that this approach has: inefficiency and not using 60% of the software’s potential. After having studied these guides, that changed completely because not only I was more productive but the software, now fully used, was much more productive too.”

We’re so glad to hear it, Jiri. Thanks for your feedback!