There are a wide range of techniques to design and print business cards, the number one rule is to combine a great design with high quality print finish to give you and your business a professional look.

Choosing the right printing finish will give life to your business cards, for example an Embossed Business Card will create a raised print effect and can add texture to a business card by keeping it clean, simple and stylish.

Talking about giving life to your business cards, James Alliban just created the world’s first augmented reality business card. James added to the back of his business cards a graphic that can be captured by a webcam and reproduce a cool 3D grid of coloured planes pop ups.

This video will help you get a better picture of this new business card printing technique.

AR Business Card from James Alliban on Vimeo.

While this business card printing technique is in its early days, it will be interesting to see what other improvements can be made.

The first ever computer made by Apple was the hand-built Apple I, Steve Wozniak was its creator and market minded Steve Jobs had the idea of selling it. But it was only in 1984 that the first Macintosh came to life.

Back then, Apple Macintosh personal computers made history as the first PC’s to feature a mouse and use images (graphical user interface) rather than text (command line interface), which helped the company build market shares through the second half of the 80’s.

The first ever Mac to go on sale back in 1984, had 128 KB RAM in form of sixteen 64 kilobit (Kb) chips soldered to the logicboard, even though there wasn’t a memory slot at the time, the RAM was expandable to 512 KB, which meant soldering sixteen chip sockets to accept 256 Kb RAM chips, the final product also used the complete QuickDraw picture language displayed via a 9-inch 512×342 pixel monochrome display and microprocessor speed was at remarkable 8 megahertz.

If we compare it to the soon be to released Mac OS X Snow Leopard, the first Macintosh OS looks more than obsolete, I would say pre-historic, even though all those features were pretty advanced for their time.

It is quite clear how much Apple’s OS evolved since then, but let’s compare a few features.

The new Mac OS X V10.6 will have support to 16TB RAM, that is 16×10⁺⁶ times more than the 1984 Mac offered with its support to 512 KB RAM.

A new graphic system has been implemented, since the Mac OS X v10.4 QuickDraw had to be deprecated mainly for not been able to make use of the 64-bit support, QuickDraw than gave space to Quartz a more modern graphics system which can handle 64-bit applications, 64-bits apps will be the core of the new Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

What about the display options available compared to the 9-inch 512×342 pixel monochrome display that came with the 1984 Mac? Now that is something with no margin for comparison. How can we compare the LCD and Plasma displays of today and their trillions of colours to a monochrome display?

The new Mac OS X v10.6 is set to be an OS for generations to come, can you imagine how it will look like 20 years from now. Think about it and leave your thoughts in our comments section

During last month’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, Apple announced the prices and official release date for the Mac OS X Snow Leopard (Mac OS X v10.6).

Back in June 2008, right after Steve Jobs announced the new version of the Mac OS X Snow Leopard was to be released some time this year, we previewed it here and highlighted some of the improved features.

As we get closer to its official release date, the Mac OS X Snow Leopard or if you prefer Mac OS X v10.6 is due to a more detailed preview.

First things first, Apple’s “refined” operating system will be available from September 09 with prices starting at $29 (for users updating from Mac OS X Leopard).

The Mac OS X Snow Leopard is not a brand new OS by Apple, it is simply, as Apple like to call it, a refined version of the Mac OS X Leopard, prove to that is Apple focus on improving and simplifying built-in applications to make it faster, more reliable and most importantly easier to use.

The first major improvement was to make the Mac OS X V10.6 installation faster, easier and more reliable, upgrading from older versions just got 45% faster and in case of a power cut, it can start again without losing any data. Disk space usage has also been reduced by half, freeing about 6GB.

A completely new QuickTime Player has also been included, which will feature optimised support for modern codecs, new trimming interface, easy uploads to YouTube and MobileMe and hhtp-based live streaming, all with improved colour accuracy.

But without a doubt the biggest refinement is the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit, this means a support of up to 16 TB RAM, you might think that Apple exaggerated a bit on the RAM support, but it wasn’t just the other day when we were happy with our 256 MB RAM PC’s and look at them now, obsolete.

Nearly all built-in applications are now 64-bit which makes them faster and more responsive.

For the printing industry the good news is the ZFS File system with support for storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion and snapshots, this will allow applications like Photoshop to make better use of multi core systems and larger memory configurations.

No doubt Apple has built the Mac OS X Snow Leopard thinking away ahead of its time, this new OS is ready for the next generation of professional and personal computers.

What do you have to say about Apple’s refined operating system, will it stand up to expectations?