Macworld Expo: Walking the floor (Day 2)
Macworld Expo: Walking the floor (Day 2)
Crowds The crowds at the second day of the Expo were noticeably larger than the first day's crowds. Someone told me that overall attendance was 40% higher than last year. I cannot confirm this officially, but I can believe it. I could barely walk through the crowds at lunch time. The publicity of the iBook (it was mentioned on several TV stations and newspapers, including USA Today) may have helped. One vendor told me that they cut back on staff this year because of last year's lower than expected turn out. It was a mistake. Attendance was running so high that they could have used even more staff than last year. This is good news.
Sessions The slide presentation of the session I gave on "Why Crashes Happen..." has now been posted.
New Products (many of which are not yet shipping):
Global Village was demonstrating an internal PCI card for DSL connections. It hopes to market it directly to DSL ISPs as well as to end users.
Tektronix was showing a Phaser 840 solid ink printer for as little as $2445. The Designer Edition ($3995) looked stunning and the print outs looked great - even on plain paper - although they have that solid ink "waxy" feel. Consumables are a lot less than for color laser printers.
Synthetic Software revealed Studio Artist (Graphics Synthesizer) is a combination paint and draw program that was impressing graphics artists. It has "Intelligent-Assisted" drawing to help with repetitive tasks and help new artists produce professional-looking results.
Rocket eBook from NuvoMedia looks a bit like a Newton but is primarily designed as a device to receive documents, including entire books, transferred from your computer - for reading directly from the ABC's screen, much as you would carry around and read an actual book.
We saw a demo of Fly!. Very impressive and realistic graphics.
A demo of iMagicalDesk from Magically revealed some intriguing features. This is a web-based email, calendar, contact database, data storage (and more) virtual desktop. Especially neat was an ability to upload documents (such as Word 98 files) to your web storage area and view them later from any Internet connection location - even of the application itself (e.g., Word 98) is not present on the computer.
Virtual PC 3.0 (from Connectix) features improved USB support (you'll need to run Windows 98 to use it) and the ability to share an IP address with the Mac.
Macally was showing a USB programmable iShock, a great full-featured game-pad.
iREZ CapSure Pro is designed to both import ad export streaming video.
LaCie was displaying its new CDRW-6416 drive with 6x 4x 16x performance. It also will soon be shipping FireWire hard drives and DVD (ROM and RAM) drives.
Poser 4, from MetaCreations, introduces professional-level character posing and animation features such as character customization via "closets" full of clothing, and head to toe figure "sculpting" with next generation animated deformers.