Well, today I went to Macworld for the day. My general impression of it was that there were fewer exhibitors this year than in years past, but those that were here were the bigger companies. There was, however, one notable exception: IBM. If they were there, I couldn't find them.
I had a chance to use Keynote and the 17" and 12" PowerBooks. Great stuff, really great stuff. Keynote is so easy to use, it's amazing. I could build a new presentation, and in about 5 minutes, had a 5 slide presentation done that was superior to anything I could have done in PowerPoint. The transitions were smooth and good looking on a 17" iMac. The textures in the various themes were quite realistic; better than I expected. The 17" Powerbook is incredible. The screen is crisp and bright, it's fast as Hell, and the array of features is very impressive. But if the 17" was incredible, the 12" was out of this world. The sides of the case hug the keyboard even tighter than on the 12" iBook, the port arrangement is great, and the screen is simply amazing; brighter than my iBook, very clear, and, of course, it's incredibly fast. My only real gripe: it doesn't actually have a speaker! You can't actually get any sound out of it without an external speaker set or headphones.
But enough about Apple. With a few exceptions, most of the booths were quite informative and impressive. There were also a few deals to be had; there was the (insert mouse company name that I can't remember here) PocketMouse, a relatively small, 2 button + clickable scroll wheel optical mouse for $10. And a guitar company or something selling Logic 5 (big box version) for less than $300. One other thing that was impressive was Virtual PC 6. Despite the bad rap that it got here, some of the features were quite interesting, such as a dock-based Start button (actually quite amazing... though I personally wouldn't want to Windows-ify my Mac in that way, it's good for running PC's at full res [but not full screen] where the taskbar isn't visible.). And it really is much faster than VPC 5, to the point that you might actually be able to play games on it (I'd say anything up to Total Annihilation, or Starcraft, and possibly somewhat beyond... needless to say, the more RAM and VRAM you [and the PC] have, the better).
Then, there was the MacBrainiac challenge, hosted by David Pogue; essentially two teams of 3 mac gurus and one volunteer from the audience. It was hilarious, so funny in fact, that I was surprised the thing wasn't rehearsed, something I'm not completely sure of. Regardless, the teams competed for apples instead of points, and won apple-shaped trophies and books (well, the volunteer won the books... the gurus wrote some of them). Some of the questions were quite difficult, but some of them were remarkably easy: there was "Who was Steve Jobs' girlfriend in 1982?" and "Steve Jobs said 'Microsoft has no _____'". Those were multiple choice questions, worth one apple. Then there were the challenges for three apples. These included things like "Using only the programs on the computer and downloaded from the internet, what is the creator code of a Word file saved as an HTML document?" The contestants then had one minute to find out the answer, which turned out to be too short a time. Either way, several people in the audience were whispering the obvious answer before the question was even finished being read: MSIE. Another of the challenges was to find the lowest price on a Nikon camera. The last questions were 20 pictures of Macs that had to be identified. The audience actually got to participate in those, correcting the judges in a few instances. The final score: XFL - 19, Mad Dogcows - 12. All in all, very fun to watch.
After that and lunch, I visited some of the smaller booths. I did actually see a few that hadn't been there in previous years, so far as I could tell - Panic and the Omni Group to name a few. One other thing that I found amusing: whenever I went by, the Microsoft booth was nearly empty, even during the presentations, there were several empty seats. I guess everyone's sick of learning about Entourage and Office.
In the end, a good Macworld. The new Apple products are spectacular, and most of the booths were informative and impressive. Should be a good year for the Mac world (pun semi-intended).
I had a chance to use Keynote and the 17" and 12" PowerBooks. Great stuff, really great stuff. Keynote is so easy to use, it's amazing. I could build a new presentation, and in about 5 minutes, had a 5 slide presentation done that was superior to anything I could have done in PowerPoint. The transitions were smooth and good looking on a 17" iMac. The textures in the various themes were quite realistic; better than I expected. The 17" Powerbook is incredible. The screen is crisp and bright, it's fast as Hell, and the array of features is very impressive. But if the 17" was incredible, the 12" was out of this world. The sides of the case hug the keyboard even tighter than on the 12" iBook, the port arrangement is great, and the screen is simply amazing; brighter than my iBook, very clear, and, of course, it's incredibly fast. My only real gripe: it doesn't actually have a speaker! You can't actually get any sound out of it without an external speaker set or headphones.
But enough about Apple. With a few exceptions, most of the booths were quite informative and impressive. There were also a few deals to be had; there was the (insert mouse company name that I can't remember here) PocketMouse, a relatively small, 2 button + clickable scroll wheel optical mouse for $10. And a guitar company or something selling Logic 5 (big box version) for less than $300. One other thing that was impressive was Virtual PC 6. Despite the bad rap that it got here, some of the features were quite interesting, such as a dock-based Start button (actually quite amazing... though I personally wouldn't want to Windows-ify my Mac in that way, it's good for running PC's at full res [but not full screen] where the taskbar isn't visible.). And it really is much faster than VPC 5, to the point that you might actually be able to play games on it (I'd say anything up to Total Annihilation, or Starcraft, and possibly somewhat beyond... needless to say, the more RAM and VRAM you [and the PC] have, the better).
Then, there was the MacBrainiac challenge, hosted by David Pogue; essentially two teams of 3 mac gurus and one volunteer from the audience. It was hilarious, so funny in fact, that I was surprised the thing wasn't rehearsed, something I'm not completely sure of. Regardless, the teams competed for apples instead of points, and won apple-shaped trophies and books (well, the volunteer won the books... the gurus wrote some of them). Some of the questions were quite difficult, but some of them were remarkably easy: there was "Who was Steve Jobs' girlfriend in 1982?" and "Steve Jobs said 'Microsoft has no _____'". Those were multiple choice questions, worth one apple. Then there were the challenges for three apples. These included things like "Using only the programs on the computer and downloaded from the internet, what is the creator code of a Word file saved as an HTML document?" The contestants then had one minute to find out the answer, which turned out to be too short a time. Either way, several people in the audience were whispering the obvious answer before the question was even finished being read: MSIE. Another of the challenges was to find the lowest price on a Nikon camera. The last questions were 20 pictures of Macs that had to be identified. The audience actually got to participate in those, correcting the judges in a few instances. The final score: XFL - 19, Mad Dogcows - 12. All in all, very fun to watch.
After that and lunch, I visited some of the smaller booths. I did actually see a few that hadn't been there in previous years, so far as I could tell - Panic and the Omni Group to name a few. One other thing that I found amusing: whenever I went by, the Microsoft booth was nearly empty, even during the presentations, there were several empty seats. I guess everyone's sick of learning about Entourage and Office.
In the end, a good Macworld. The new Apple products are spectacular, and most of the booths were informative and impressive. Should be a good year for the Mac world (pun semi-intended).