Winds of Change

written by Charles DeVore

from Mouse Tracks February 2004

It’s time for the Macworld Expo report. What a wild week it was! Due to the unusual snowy weather conditions in Portland, Janet and I spent two extra days in hotels. This added to our little adventure, but the end result was well worth the cost. We got to see many interesting products and share experiences with other user group people.

People always ask me what I buy at Macworld Expo. Many times the answer is: not much. The cost of going to Macworld combines taking a week off work, plane fare, food, and hotel costs; this tends to cut down the amount of items purchased. In fact, this time I purchased only one item which was a new copy of Timbuktu Pro. I own older versions of the software but none that are native for System 10. Pricing similar to Macworld specials can be found in three to four months at most mail order stores as the price of new products levels out. So in truth, the biggest purchase we made was the Macworld trip itself. For those of you who have never been there, it is as close to the Disney World experience for Macintosh lovers as you’re going to get. One of the vendors summed it up for me with this tidbit: “I love coming to this show; the Mac people are always upbeat, and it’s great to talk to them.” The energy flowing at one of these things always gets the heart pumping and the vendors excited.

The first thing I can say is that wire-less connections are everywhere. The second thing is that they will empty your wallet at a very fast rate. We ran into everything from $12.99 a session to $6 a hour (minimum one hour)—if you bought a $50 card for that service. Next is the fact that each hotel and wireless hotspot tended to have different providers so you could not just buy one service and be guaranteed a connection. So you get to spend extra time looking for coffee shops or hotels that have your provider. It would be nice if all these companies got together and shared resources and connection nodes to give widespread coverage. Even better would be a service that did not demand a full one to eight hours of charges for ten minutes spent checking your email.

As it was, Janet and I ended up borrowing connections to get our email. Some were easy, like getting the password for the User Group booth (used while Janet and I were working there on Wednesday). Later in the week we borrowed a connection from a couple of PMUG members who discovered that someone had set up an Airport network in the hotel room next door. As Tom Peterson would say: free is a very good price.

The keynote speech was pretty entertaining as Steve Jobs always puts on a good show. Both Janet and I were able to attend the keynote on Tuesday morning. It’s always interesting to see what Steve has to say. There were not any new computer announcements for the average consumer, but G5 Xserves were welcome news for commercial users. Information about how well iPod sales were doing was also included. The price for the new mini iPods was a little disappointing. Most of us felt $199 would be a lot better price point for sales than the $249 Apple came up with. After all, you can get a 15 gig iPod for $50 more than the mini iPod that only holds 4 gig of music. Updates for iLife were the biggest news for software. The new music application GarageBand got everyone’s attention and was the most well received demo in the keynote. It had John Mayer doing both keyboard and guitar pieces while GarageBand supplied backup of recorded riffs that John had made up. The final song was then moved to iTunes as we watched. This product is the greatest consumer product of the show. Now don’t get me wrong; the mini iPod is very small and light weight, but it’s still just an iPod. GarageBand is a very powerful program that lots of people will be using to make their own music. There was also mention of the new version of Final Cut Express 2; its upgrade will make it feature rich.

As we were leaving the keynote, Janet noticed someone who looked familiar as we had just seen him on one of the video screens. It was the professor who had put together the supercomputer at Virginia Tech University: Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan. We asked him if he would pose with Janet for a picture and he agreed. I’m not sure that he understood how much of a folk figure he had become so quickly in the Macintosh world. After all, it’s not every day that someone puts together the third fastest computer in the world using off-the-shelf G5s.

Microsoft was at Macworld telling everyone about the new version of Office 2004 (expected to be released this spring), plus advertising that Virtual PC 7 would be coming along sometime in the second quarter of the year. Anyone stopping by to view the presentation was given a copy of Entourage. Since Microsoft is no longer updating Outlook, this seems to be the way for Outlook folks to migrate. Also on the Entourage box was a notice that anyone owning the product can get upgrade pricing on Office 2004; a nice tie-in for their upcoming product. PMUG’s secretary, Alan Watson, was working at the Microsoft booth. Microsoft paid his way there to help out as he is a MVP in their help forums.

On the showroom floor was a company called Intelli Innovations, Inc. that was venturing into the retail market for the first time. They introduced their IntelliScanner Collector at Macworld. It’s a handheld scanner that allows you to scan the barcodes off books, CDs and DVDs combined with a software application to collect the data. The program goes out to several websites and brings in the information about the item scanned including (if provided) pictures of the covers and a detailed overview of what the book/disc is about. The really good news is if you already have a database of most of your books/discs, you can export the new information to tab delimited format and import them into your existing database. The base model is around $200. For those with more needs, they have a model that can hold up to 3000 records before needing to connect to a computer for around $600. If you have any interest at all in a product like this, I advise you check them out. They were astounded at the interest their product generated at the show. In fact, they had to ship in more product saying, “We are most likely going to sell out and take orders for shipping later.” Their web address is www.intelliscanner.com.

Another interesting company was one called You Software. One of their products adds mini-applications in menus of your computer. Boy was I suprised to find out they were only about three days old. They had one of the most interesting booths and their logo was a blue smiley face that could be seen from a long ways off. As Janet sat down to talk to one of the demo people she noticed the fellow was from Portland. Yes—yet another Portland connection made at Macworld. Hopefully as soon as they get back home and catch up on orders, they will come visit us at a PMUG General Meeting. To check them out on the web go to www.yousoftware.com.

Xerox was there with both wax-based and toner-based printers. We ran into PMUG member Mike Kleschuk who was working in the booth. The fact that color laser printers are coming down to the price I used to pay for black and white models astounds me.

One of the most interesting games used an iSight camera to put you into the game. The iSight sees your hand movements and uses this as input to play the game. This game was mostly aimed at kids, but I can envision first-person games using the same type of set up. Toysight is the name of the product. Remember, you will need an iSight or other firewire digital camera in order to play the game. This new marvel is brought to you by Strange Flavour and Freeverse Software. To check it out or download a free demo copy go to www.toysight.com. If you’re a game player who needs to get up and move around, this is the one you want to play. The game won a Best of Show award from Macworld. Freeverse Software also received a Best of Show for BumperCar as the best educational software.

Another place to check out is the www.rogueamoeba.com site. Their site contains software that will allow you to get the audio you want from the source and save it on your computer as a AIFF file for playback. Many other software programs can be found at this site. Maybe you need to capture internet streams or DVD clip using Audio Hijack Pro.

Also at the show, Janet and I got to see what PMUG member Monroe Williams has been up to as a programmer porting the game Second Life to the Mac. Most of the time he can’t talk about his work, so it’s always nice to get to see the result. To check out this game go to www.secondlife.com. Please note you will need FlashPlayer 7.0 in order to view the site. In order to play the game you will need a broadband connection, OS 10.3 and a 1gHz G4 or better with 512 meg of RAM.

A Keyspan press release announced a USB Server for sharing USB devices over Ethernet or wireless networks. It enables Macs and PCs to share printers, scanners and USB hard drives. The server has four USB ports for connecting devices at 12 Mbps. It is supposed to share via static IP address, DHCP, and Rendezvous. In their release they say you will need OS 10.2.8 or above, or a PC running Windows 2000 or XP. If this device works as advertised, then USB LaserWriters will really start to sell. The one computer, one printer world most people have now will change pretty fast at $129 for the USB to Ethernet hub.

It appears that the MacOSXhints.com website is based near Portland. One of the notes there is that the site had not been updated due to him not being able to get back to Portland because of the airport being closed. It truly is a small Mac world. Here is a bit of Terminal humor from the site (please don’t try this on your own Mac)
sudo rm -rf /Users/robg/home/snow_n_ice.out
sudo install -g oregonians /sbin/normal_weather/rain.out

In addition to looking at the vendor exhibits at the Expo, Janet and I also took part in User Group University (UGU). This was an all-day session on Monday where we met with other User Group Leaders to exchange ideas. One of the sessions featured Terry White, who works for Adobe. He went to a sampling of user group websites and offered tips on how they might be updated. Granted the rules he set were from his point of view, but he was looking for things like not too much scrolling on a page, pictures of club events, and ease in finding and filling out the membership form. He actually gave the PMUG site an A+ (even though we still had the December meeting listed)—I think he really liked the PMUG hotdog picture.

There were also discussions on topics such as how to have your group involved in community projects; and how to invite students and Windows users to participate in your group. At the end of the day was a reception with some of the vendors. We got to meet Elizabeth Statmore from Circus Ponies Software, and thank her in person for the donation of their application that we gave out at last MacCamp.

Adobe was a strong presence at the user group events. At User Group University they showed how they are working with a company called SoftwareCinema to create training videos on DVD (www.software-cinema.com). I won a copy of one on Photoshop 7 featuring Eddie Tapp. Adobe also sponsored their separate user group leader breakfast on Thursday morning. There we received a whirlwind demonstration of all the updated Adobe products, and how the new Creative Suite versions closely interact. Adobe has revamped their support area, and are extending support for all current versions of their products. You should check out the Adobe web site, www.adobe.com, for more information.

They had a drawing there, and PMUG won the Grand Prize, which was a copy of the Creative Suite standard version with Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. This will be a big help in production of Mouse Tracks and other PMUG brochures.

As always, there was more to see at the Expo than can be told here. We look forward to actually seeing the new products that were announced. I expect you will see some of them in classes at the PMUG office or at MacCamp, so let us know about your experiences and interests. We hope to have presentations at the PMUG General Meetings from Adobe and Microsoft during the coming year.

You can reach me at charles@cdevsol.com.

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