Category Archives: Software

More Mac games at the Expo, Part 1

I promised more coverage of the game offerings here at Macworld 08, and I’m delivering. This is going to be a three-part series of blogs detailing the plans that various companies have for games on the Mac in 2008.

I’m going to start with Aspyr. You may remember from my last post on Mac games at the Expo that they specialize in porting games from the PC to the Mac. They’ve got a huge year coming up, as their new releases are all big gaming franchises being made available for the first time on the Mac.

Aspyr booth at Macworld 08

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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:

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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. …

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Quote of the Day

I just walked past a couple of guys talking near the presentation rooms at Moscone West and overheard one say to the other: “Having a Mac is protection from problems.” This seems to sum up what people have been telling me all week as I’ve discussed with them my reasons for switching from a PC to a Mac. Even before I came to the MacWorld Expo, I was being told that Macs rarely require tech support and that they have a much lower security risk than PCs. Of course, even …

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A few digital photography tips

I am an atrocious photographer, so I thought I’d attend a couple digital photography sessions and learn a few things. Turns out the first one I attended was way over my head, and the second was almost too basic. All the same, I picked up a few tips that I thought might come in handy to someone else. Chris Orwig did a session on “The Art and Craft of Digital Photography” that was nearly two-thirds an inspirational speech centered on two quotes: “Stillness of hand does not make up for …

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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!

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Office:mac 2008

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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 …

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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).

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