Blog Posts from MacWorld Expo

Posts Tagged ‘Software’

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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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More Mac games at the Expo, Part 2

I’m very glad EA has returned to releasing games for the Mac, because they have some of the coolest titles that are available on the platform. I already discussed Spore at length, so I’ll concentrate on a few of their other games that are demoing at Macworld 08.

January 18, 2008 at 3:19 pm by Michael Gaworecki. | 2 Comments.

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The Washington Post and the news on the net

If you haven’t ever seen any of the short videos in the onBeing section of WashingtonPost.com, you should do yourself a favor and check them out. They are incredibly funny and profound, yet the idea is simple: People from the Washington D.C. area talking on the subject of being themselves.

The web arm of The Washington Post is one of the most innovative news organs out there. Rob Curley is head of the “skunkworks” team that conceives and builds the newspaper’s creative web presence. He gave a presentation on Thursday at Macworld in which he described himself and his team as “Mac nerds from Kansas trying to save a dying industry from the Internet.” He sees that salvation coming from local and even hyper-local news delivered through a variety of inventive web tools.

January 18, 2008 at 3:43 am by Michael Gaworecki. | No comments.

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Thursday’s Best of the Booths rundown

Chris and I happened by the never-ending table of MacBook Airs and I snapped a few photos of it for you to enjoy. Enjoy.

There’s a lot more pictures of Expo booths after the jump.

January 18, 2008 at 12:42 am by Michael Gaworecki. | 1 Comment.

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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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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 Michael Gaworecki. | 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 Michael Gaworecki. | 1 Comment.

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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 Bryan Schwegler. | No comments.

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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.

January 16, 2008 at 6:27 pm by Michael Gaworecki. | 1 Comment.

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Mac Games at the Expo

Mac gamers: the phrase is pretty much a contradiction of terms. Or at least it has been traditionally. There are actually some encouraging signs at this year’s Macworld Expo that the gaming industry is finally coming around to acknowledging Macs.

For one thing, there’s a grand-looking “Mac Games” pavilion. True, it isn’t quite bursting with game demos, but at least there are enough to allow for an entire Mac Games pavilion. They were all supplied by the few game developers that have booths at the Expo, so I’ll just describe the games by company.

January 16, 2008 at 12:03 am by Michael Gaworecki. | 3 Comments.

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