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 . | No comments.

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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 Macs pose some problems. There’s a presentation here at MacWorld in about an hour on how to protect yourself from those risks. I’ll be missing out on it myself because I’m more interested in learning how to make games for the new Mac I’m going to get. But it’s nice to know that just getting one is a step closer to being more secure!

January 17, 2008 at 5:38 pm by . | 6 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 . | No comments.

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Mac-Forums Flickr Group

And to build on Mike’s last entry regarding digital photography, if you are a member of Flickr, don’t forget to join the Mac-Forums Flickr group.

January 17, 2008 at 3:03 am by . | No comments.

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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 emptiness of heart” (Rodney Smith); and “The chief enemy of creativity is common sense” (Pablo Picasso). The remaining third was dedicated to Photoshop tips that I’m sure were fantastic if you could follow them. Chris Orwig certainly knows what he’s doing because many of his photos were absolutely beautiful. He continually stressed finding new uses for the tools you have available to you. “Color Balance,” for instance, is a Photoshop tool considered by many to be low-quality, but Chris considers it quite useful if you find other ways to use it than what the tool is intended for. Another tip he had was that the Unsharpen Mask tool (Filter > Sharpen) was really good for deepening contrast in your photos.

Macworld senior contributor Jim Heid gave a presentation on “Flickr in the Mac World” that was mostly an introduction to the hugely popular photo sharing site. I did pick up a few tips on uploading photos without having to use the uploader on Flickr’s page. For instance, you can email your photos to your Flickr photostream. You have to set this up when you create your account, at which time you’ll be given a secret email address to send your photos to. Or you can use the Flickr Uploader, a free widget that lets you drag and drop photos from iPhoto, give them names, captions, and tags, and upload away. You can also upload your photos directly from iPhoto or Aperture with plug-ins available from Connected Flow, but those cost money.

January 16, 2008 at 11:06 pm by . | No comments.

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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!

January 16, 2008 at 10:31 pm by . | 1 Comment.

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My second day on the show floor

I thought I’d share a couple more interesting products and booths that I came across today.

We’ve all been in a situation where our iPod has run out of juice, leaving us tuneless and videoless at the worst of times. Which is why I think the iZAP R08-IV for iPod Video is a great product. The literature claims that it can give your iPod up to 10 hours of video playback and a whopping 36 hours of audio. But the guy in the booth told me he thinks the 36 hour estimate is “soft”! ZAP!, whose name stands for “zero air pollution,” also makes the Recharge-It-All Universal Battery, which has connectors for every mobile device you can imagine. Plus there are actually four rechargeable AA lithium-ion batteries inside that you can take out and use in your digital camera. It’s convenient and it can help you be more environmentally friendly!

IntelliScanner won a Best of Show award at last year’s Macworld Expo for their IntelliScanner mini, which is a miniature barcode scanner that lets you scan all your books, music, and movies and manage your collections in their proprietary software. This year they’ve come out with the professional-grade IntelliScanner SOHO for managing inventories and other bigger cataloging jobs. The software has an interface similar to iTunes, and it even lets you create the equivalent of iTunes playlists so you can organize your audio, video, and book libraries by genre. Before you say “You’ve got to be a serious neat-freak to want one of those,” consider this: The software also has a function that lets you track who you are lending a book, DVD, or CD to simply by scanning it in! My friends would probably think I’ve finally lost it if I started checking out my books to them, but I’ve lost so many from “lending” them to friends that I really don’t care at this point.

I wrote about the Modbook yesterday, but I didn’t get any pictures. I happened to cruise by today and got a couple of great pictures of one of their demo guys drawing a bluejay on the Modbook, so I thought I’d share them.

January 16, 2008 at 9:28 pm by . | No comments.

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Microsoft Blogger Lounge

Probably one of the coolest places at the show. Thanks MS for the free M&M’s, water, and WiFi!

January 16, 2008 at 8:52 pm by . | 4 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 . | No comments.

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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.

January 16, 2008 at 6:35 pm by . | No comments.

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