As soon as you plug the iPad into your Mac, iTunes 9.1 will open and you’ll see a welcome message. Be sure to upgrade to the latest version of iTunes before hookup.

Click through that and there’s that license. Does anyone actually read these things? If you say no, does it self-destruct?

Next up is where you tell the iPad about your iTunes account. If you are new to the world of iDevices, you also have the option to set up a new account here

Apple doesn’t miss a chance to up-sell its MobileMe service.

OK, finally we are in the final stretch here. On the next screen, you get to choose whether to set up your iPad from scratch or restore from a previous backup. The dialog allowed me to to select the backup from my iPhone, which would presumably be a big time-saver if you have an extensive collection of apps (and their settings) you want to transfer over to the iPad. I saw a cute bug here: the message says “An iPad has previously been synced with this computer” — unless your name is Steve Jobs, it is very unlikely you have synced an iPad with your Mac before today! And if you did, you probably are violating an NDA by telling us this fact.

Now it’s time to name your new baby. This year’s hot names include the always-popular “Michael” and “Clohe.” Sharing this iPad is going to be an issue I know.

Ah, finally, the main screen. It is very similar to the iPhone management screen in iTunes. You can see at a glance how much disk space is on your iPad, and what version of software it is running.

The “Info” tab is where you will see your detail sync settings for things like contacts, email, and address book entires. You can also set up MobileMe from here if you didn’t earlier.

The next set of tabs are familiar to anyone who has used another iDevice. The apps tab allows you to sync and arrange apps. Unfortunately, when I told it to sync apps, it selected every app I owned, well over 100 of them, making me manually un-select the numerous apps I didn’t want to install. The other tabs, like music, movies, iTunesU, podcasts and photos are exactly what you’d expect. If you sync photos, the software will have to optimize them for the iPad, which can take quite a while if you have a large photo library. In retrospect I would recommend avoiding this step for initial setup. Lastly, we have a brand new tab: Books. This is where you will manage books you by with the iBooks app or iTunes. I don’t have any yet — but this will soon change!

One interesting quirk I noticed while doing my initial sync is that the iPad didn’t charge while syncing. I have my iPad’s USB cable hooked to my Apple Keyboard rather than directly into my Mac, so I suspect perhaps not enough power is available for charging. When I plug it directly into the Mac via the USB cable, it charges as expected.

There you go, start to finish it was about half an hour. If I would have avoided the Photo sync it would have been less than five minutes.

Today I’ll be briefly showing how easy it is to create a beautiful calendar using iPhoto, complete with all your important dates for the year and some seasonal photography.

Choosing a calendar

Once you’ve opened iPhoto and asked to create a calendar (via the small plus icon in the lower left), you’ll be presented with the following window:

Apple offers a selection of 10 different calendar styles to suit your needs. My favorites are the classic ‘Picture Calendar’, which puts the most emphasis on your photos, and ‘Colored Paper’, with a more relaxed and colorful feel. There are also a few great themes for obligatory events such as a wedding, holiday, or a new baby.

What then follows is a very handy dialogue for automatically adding some useful dates to your calendar:

You’re able to not only create the standard ‘January to December’ calendar, but can start the calendar on any month and have up to 24 months included (obviously for an extra fee!). It is also possible to pre-load your calendar with the national holidays for your country, any birthdays you’ve added to contacts in Address Book, and the events from any other of your iCal calendars. If you have already populated iCal with all the year’s birthdays, holidays, events and work it is a simple procedure to have them all added to your printed calendar without needing to copy them across by hand when it arrives. National holidays are also useful to have added, as the exact dates generally change from year to year.

On to Designing

Now it is a simple case of choosing the color scheme of each page and adding your own photos. To add an image to your calendar, you’ll need to find it in iPhoto and drag it over the calendar name in the left pane. Once you’re editing the calendar project, all the photos you’ve added will be displayed to the left, easily drag-able into the photo placeholders.

For each month, you’re able to select the number of photos you’d like to be displayed, and the color scheme (if the calendar template supports it). iPhoto has an ‘Autoflow’ feature, which will take all the images you’ve added to the calendar project and automatically fill each month of the calendar with a different layout and style. It’s a time saver, but personally I enjoy crafting each month myself!

Once you’ve added a photo to a grey placeholder, clicking it will bring up a menu allowing you to zoom the image in and out, or drag the image to reposition it within the frame. Take care that you don’t zoom in too far, as this can lead to the photo not being of a high enough quality to print. If this problem occurs, iPhoto places a yellow warning sign next to the photo to alert you.

A great tip for sourcing some extra photography to add a seasonal touch (I’m thinking Halloween, Christmas, Easter etc) is to browse through a stock photography site. Having a few photos of friends and family, coupled with a great Christmas scene can look fantastic. A few of note are:

• Stock.XCHNG
• iStockPhoto
• StockVault

Adding and Editing Events

No doubt there are events you’d like to add to the calendar which were not imported from iCal originally. This can be done by double clicking a date and entering your text. Fonts, colors and sizes can be changed by bringing up the font toolbox (press Command+T). You can also add an image to any given date — great for events and birthdays, and adding a personal touch.

Ordering & Pricing

Once you’ve gone through every month, added your photos and typed in the relevant events, it’s time to upload all that content to Apple and let them start printing your beautifully designed calendar.

Prices of calendars can be found at the iPhoto site. They cost $20, not including P+P, with an extra $1.49 per additional month (over a year). It’s worth keeping an eye open for offers run in relation to calendars — it’s common to have a percentage knocked off around Christmas time, or into the New Year.

Uploading all your photographs and calendar information can take a while, particularly on slower broadband connections, but the process is automatic and you’ll receive an email after the order completes. Delivery takes a couple of weeks, so make sure you plan ahead if you require delivery before the Christmas rush!

If you have any further calendar-related questions, please feel free to ask in the comments. In addition, do let me know if you have any other great Christmas gift ideas which can be ‘Made on a Mac’ — I’m still undecided on what to buy my Grandma…

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