Blog Posts from MacWorld Expo

Posts Tagged ‘Presentations’

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One last Best of the Booths

I do believe one final Best of the Booths post is in order.

There was so much to do and see this week, I didn’t even get a chance to take a nap in one of the sleeping pods Pzizz had been kind enough to set up for us.

January 18, 2008 at 10:57 pm by Michael Gaworecki. | 1 Comment.

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Make Your Own Mac Games

Macworld Senior Editor Peter Cohen gave a presentation at MacWorld Expo today providing resources for Mac users to learn how to make their own games. The sites that he suggested were mostly for the creation of simple games but provided some options for more advanced users as well.

Here are the five sites that Cohen suggested would be good for guys (or gals) interested in making their own Mac games:

January 17, 2008 at 9:59 pm by Kathryn Vercillo. | No comments.

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Tech Tips for Teachers

There have been two presentations at MacWorld’s Users Conference which have focused on using today’s technology to be a better teacher. The one I went to yesterday was about Web 2.0 and its impact on e-Learning. The one I just came out of was on Teaching the Cybernetic Teen. Both of these presentations provided some great tips about how teachers can make use of the way that kids communicate through technology today to improve the way they educate those kids.

Here are some tech tips for teachers to take advantage of:

January 17, 2008 at 8:31 pm by Kathryn Vercillo. | 2 Comments.

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David Pogue at the O’Reilly Media booth

You never know what you’ll see as you cruise the show floor. I noticed a fairly large crowd around the Oreilly Media booth so I stopped by to take a look. All the commotion was over a speaker they had in their booth, none other than David Pogue – New York Times columnist, sometime reporter for NPR’s Morning Edition, and CBS news correspondent – sharing a few tips from the latest in his Missing Manual book series, Mac OS X Leopard Edition: The Missing Manual.

He’s a very personable speaker. He regaled the eager throng with one especially interesting anecdote about the time a retailer told him that if he packaged a CD of software with his Missing Manual books he could charge $5 more for them. Since, from what I gathered, all of the software he discusses in the book is either free or comes with Leopard (and hence you already have it if you’ve bought the book), he simply had a CD graphic printed on the back page, along with a URL for downloading the software, and a quick note letting his readers know they just saved $5.

Pogue said that writing the Leopard Missing Manual was “the ride of my life,” and spat out a few statistics to explain why. The stats that really caught my attention were that Mac market share has gone from 2.3% to 7.9% since his last Mac book, and that Macworld attendance has increased by 10,000 people since last year.

There was too large a crowd for me to be able to listen closely and record a few of his tips. Oh well, guess you have to buy the book.

January 17, 2008 at 5:54 pm by Michael Gaworecki. | No comments.

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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.

January 17, 2008 at 12:04 pm by Kathryn Vercillo. | No comments.

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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.

January 16, 2008 at 8:31 pm by Kathryn Vercillo. | No comments.

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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.

January 16, 2008 at 6:17 pm by Kathryn Vercillo. | 1 Comment.

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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).

January 16, 2008 at 3:32 pm by Kathryn Vercillo. | 1 Comment.

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