Posts Tagged ‘Macworld 2008’
MacWorld Best-of-Show
This year was the first year that the MacWorld Expo featured a presentation of their “Best of Show” awards with live on-stage demonstrations of the products that were selected as outstanding by their team of Mac experts. Unfortunately, with all of the running around that I was doing from presentation to show floor and back again, I didn’t get a chance to make it to the presentation. I did, however, make sure to read up on what other people said took place there. The best summary of all of the awards is, of course, over at MacWorld.
Looking over the list, I’m not at all surprised to see two of the items with which I’m most familiar: the MacBook Air and the Eye-Fi card. There’s been a lot of talk about the MacBook Air all week and despite that it’s got some flaws, I can say from carrying around a heavy laptop all week that it also looks to have some benefits. As for the Eye-Fi card, I’ve read tons about this in the last couple of months. It’s a simple tool which takes the middleman out of your digital photo uploads (adding them wirelessly to your Mac); simple but anything that we can do to save time on a regular basis is something that sounds good to me.
As for things that I wasn’t familiar with before reading the list, the two that grab my attention are BusySync and Flow. I think that the reason I’m focusing on those is because the presentations that I attended yesterday were really all about enhancing the effficiency of working in groups. BusySync is a tool which improves iCal group scheduling so that it’s easier to make plans with co-workers. And Flow helps to organize all of the files associated with one project which sounds like it would be a great tool for working back-and-forth on project version changes with a team.
There are a lot of interesting things on the Best-of-Show list. Makes me wish I’d managed to make it over to that feature presentation yesterday! Maybe I’ll get a chance to check out the one happening this afternoon – a trivia game show for the MacWorld community.
How to keep your Mac running smooth
By far the best and most useful session I attended today at the Users Conference was “Running Your Mac Lean, Clean, and Mean” by Dave Hamilton. He presented his qualifications as follows:
• Mac Observer – 9 years
• Mac Geek Gab Podcast – almost 3 years
• Geek … forever!
Microsoft Blogger Lounge
Probably one of the coolest places at the show. Thanks MS for the free M&M’s, water, and WiFi! 
TidBITS: Resource for the Mac User
One of the MacWorld presentations that I checked out today was Tools for Collaboration by Adam Engst, the publisher of TidBITS. Although I’m new to Mac, I have some familiarity with the publication because I’ve researched Mac news for different articles that I have written over the years. However, when Adam asked the people in the room how many of them were readers of TidBITS, the number of hands in the air was fewer than I would have expected. Perhaps this was because it was just after lunch and everyone was a little too sleepy to put their hands up. But it might mean that some Mac users are unaware of this great resource for Mac news and information.
TidBITS has been around for nearly two decades, providing information and news about Mac goings-on. The basic premise of the site is that it takes the news that is coming out from various sources and applies it to the real life issues faced by the average non-technical Mac user. In addition to updates that are applicable specifically to the Mac OS, the site provides fun educational stuff about Apple’s gadgets and about entertainment as it applies to Mac. There’s a little bit of something for every kind of user to be found here.
Incidentally, Adam co-founded TidBITS with his wife Tonya. She is one of the six bloggers for the site as well as the site’s senior editor. She’s also one of the few women speaking at MacWorld this year. For gals who like to support the other women in the industry, a trip over to Tonya’s TidBITS blog might be in order.
Office:mac 2008
As I sit in the Microsoft Blogger Lounge, I thought it would be appropriate to spend a minute to give you my very early first impressions of the newest version of Office for Mac.
I don’t want to go into too much detail, as I hope someone from the Mac-Forums will volunteer write a full review. But I will say that I’m impressed. Not only is it faster on Intel Macs, but the completely revamped user interface just provides such a better experience using Office on the Mac.
I’m going to to be honest, I have been using iWork exclusively for the last few months since I found Office 2004 just too slow to use on a daily basis. And while I do love iWork and think it has promise, it just doesn’t compare to the power and versatility of Microsoft Office. At $149.00 for the Home and Student edition, it’s definitely more than worth the price.
The Mac-powered digital studio
The John Lennon Educational Tour Bus made a stop at Macworld Expo 08 and offered tours, plenty of digital music equipment to play with, and a very helpful guy named Nick to talk about their amazing digital studio setup.
Wikis: Where Collaboration Is Happening Today
The first two presentations that I went to today both focused a bit on collaboration. First, I went to Web 2.0 and E-Learning which had a segment about how online collaboration can benefit the classroom environment. Then I went to Collaborative Editing Tools and Techniques which focused on collaboration options for the publishing world, be it web publishing or print publishing. Although each of these presentations focused on multiple types of collaborative environments, they shared one strong suggestion in common. Both said that wikis could be successfully used as collaborative tools for essentially any environment.
Girl Gamers at MacWorld
The first presentation of the Users Conference that I attended was this morning’s Vision Track presentation on the relationship between Web 2.0 and e-Learning. One of the things that speaker Nick Floro talked about was that educators can use gaming, especially interactive gaming platforms such as Second Life, to engage students who are used to dividing their attention amongst multiple things at once. (He explained how you can create classrooms in Second Life and use them to present video materials in a sort of online virtual interactive classroom).
MF Exclusive: Interview with Jeremiah Cohick
During this week I was fortunate to spend some time with one of my very good friends and one-time Apple Switch commercial star, Jeremiah Cohick. I sat down with Jeremiah after the keynote to ask him his thoughts.
B: On a scale of 1 -10, how would you rate this keynote overall?
J: I’m going to go with a 7. I’m not at all interested in movie rentals through iTunes because I have Netflix. I am not going to buy an AppleTV, there wasn’t any hardware update to it to make it better than the PS3 I already have which does what AppleTV already does and it has Blu-ray. iPhone update is great (but I still want an IM client). But the MacBook Air is pretty sweet.
I’m disappointed Apple is charging for an update that hackers made available for free to Touch users months ago.
(more…)
MacWorld Gear and Accessories
Walking around MacWorld this week, I’ve rapidly learned that the laptop bag I use to hold my computer and notebooks and all of the other junk that I tote around isn’t really very comfortable. As a result, I found myself drawn to the many booths in Moscone West that were selling laptop bags. Once I’d turned my attention to that, I found that I was also pulled towards all of the different cases and accessories for other gadgets.
Here were some of my favorite accessories finds:
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