LAUG 2.0

Like most software programs, I missed the ship date of version 4.2 You were expecting it on Saturday…not Sunday. Also, since I have so many pictures from the show, I’m creating a MacWorld: Version 4.1a which will include the pictures can be found here.

However, you were probably also expecting iLife and iWork ‘07 at Macworld, and Apple obviously missed the ship date on that. Rumor was iWork ‘07 would have a spreadsheet component. Again, my analysis is that Steve Jobs pulled everyone off of their projects in order to have the iPhone done in time for the show.

Back to the reporting. Day 2 started out like every day when I’m in San Fransisco: Peet’s coffee. Peet’s is like Starbucks was 20 years ago A modest size regional chain that really treats people right. The coffee generally has a deeper roast than the Starbucks coffeee. I’ve limited myself to one cup of coffee a day: I just don’t say how big that cup is!

Also, like every day in SF, you take the Muni to Powell station. They have an announcement system in a woman’s voice that eventually gets permanently etched in your brain: “1 Car Inbound Embaracdero in 2 minutes.” However, it’s nice that there are both audio and visual indicators of when the next train will be and where it is going.

I got there 1/2 an hour early and finished version 4.1 post in the press room. In the press room, you hear all these different accents from all over the world. The guy next to me talking way too loud on his cell phone was saying you could see his head at one point during the keynote presentation . Geez. You can see my head in the Sandra Bullock movie The Net. That movie was filmed at the 1995 Macworld Expo.

I hit the ground running on the show floor when it opened at 11am. Speaking of hitting the ground, I and others noticed this year that the floor had lots of static. People were shocking themselves all the time. Kinda scary with all the computer equipment! I first took pictures of the stuff from yesterday I missed. I’m including that is the 4.1a version of my postings.

I then stopped right where I left off on Thursday…at the Intego booth. Their booth is the same every year: a castle. I’m sure it’s a little bit of the fact they are from the UK and the fact that a castle is a symbol of protection and power. They introduced a protection product that protects both your Mac and your boot camp/parallels Windows side at the same time. Ok, technically they are licensing a PC product and including it in the box, but still an innovative concept.

In fact, most agree that the most popular booth for it’s size was the Parallels area. They were absolutely overwhelmed by the response they got, especially since this was their first year at Macworld. Parallels for those that do not know, is the product that allows you to easily run PC software on your Mac. There was another product at Macworld that did something similiar to Parallels called VMware. They currently don’t have a shipping product for the Mac, but just a test .
version.

What is ironic is that this is also the first time VMware was there. They were bought by EMC two years ago. EMC owns Dantz, the maker of Retrospect. Remember yesterday when I said whom was missing from Macworld? I completely overlooked Retrospect. They have been there so many years, I just assumed they’d be there. Wow, talk about a gap in the Mac market. Mike noticed that means no network enabled backup software. Ouch.

I figured something was up with EMC/Dantz/Retrospect, when this press release came across my desk that stated Other World Computing was dropping Retrospect, and choosing Prosoft Engineering’s Data Backup to include with their drives. This was a big deal. OWC is one of the biggest resellers of external hard drives in the Mac market and for them to drop their relationship with Retrospect is big. It’s probably been at least 5-10 years Retrospect has been included with OWC drives.

Prosoft has always been great to the user group. They had no new shipping products at the show, but will have a new version of Data Backup designed for Intel based Macs as well as a program that acts like widgets for your iPod called Jax. I’ll honestly say that Jennifer Bell, their PR person, is about the nicest rep I’ve dealt with. They’ve got their act together, which is good for a company that protects and recover data.

However, the company that impressed me the most was Drivesavers. First their booth is cool. Each year they’ll show off computers which they’ve recovered data from as well as plaster their booth with thank you’s from famous customers that don’t bat an eye at data recovery that cost thousands of dollars. The reseller rep saw my name tag and immediately said, “How’s your little dog. Isn’t she a beagle.”. WOW, Tova is actually a Jack Russell beagle mix, but of the thousands of websites she views as a reseller rep, she remembers a detail like that! They have an amazing reseller program that gives both the reseller and the client a deal. If you go through a reseller, Drive Savers waives their $200 estimate fee. If you ever need data recovery services, contact me and I’ll give you my reseller code so you can save some money. Any commission I get, I’ll donate to the LAUG.

While Drivesavers had the coolest Mac that had been repaired, the coolest modified Mac was a toss up. Other World Computing had modified a Mac to actually make a Macbook into a tablet based Mac with a touchscreen called the ModBook. It won best of show. I can see some very practical uses of this product. Tablet computing allows you to use your screen to “write” on, was going to be the hot thing in computers a few years ago on the PC side. It never really caught on because people got use to their keyboards, at least on the PC side. It’s a risky move by OWC, but has a greater chance of success because so many Mac people are artists and appreciate using a stylus to modify something rather than a mouse.

Other “macmods” were the TechRestore booth. They repair Macs and iPods and are a competitor to our local friends at Macresq, so I don’t want to give these TechRestore people too much space! They did have a cool business card that looked just like a little Macbook Pro.

For people “serious” about making their Mac look cool, MacMod had a booth there of people showing off how they modified their Mac. Wow. Their “unofficial” slogan is “Pimp my Mac.” They have to be the next generation of the human race because as far as I know you either have technology skills or practical skills not both. Since when does a computer geek know how to use ….. geez I can’t even think of the names of the tools they use. Moving on to areas I feel more comfortable in.

Backups. Protecting your Mac was definitely the theme of this show. Maxtor had their little kiosk things around they show, but it was more than just backup hard drives provided by places like Maxtor and LaCie. Prosoft had their Data Backup software and Apple’s new Airport extreme will integrate with Leopard to provide backup via USB external hard drives. Many companies at the show wanted to make your backups easy and effortless. The best “swag” presentation award has to go to MacBak They provided a shirt, business card and stickers in a nice static bag. They claim to be the backup service for graphic artists. They work with extremely large files sizes and claim to actively monitor their “logs” and will contact you if something didn’t backup right. That’s amazing customer service. I don’t think the average Mac user needs that level of protection, but graphic professionals that work with large files and have constant deadlines could sure use something like that. They’ll definitely be included in an upcoming LAUG meeting.

Another program at the show for backups was Crashplan. Their program allows you to backup your computer to any other computer. The salesperson gave the scenario of backing up your home computer to work, or you and a buddy backing up each others computers. He told me that his program is the “perfect balance”. He said that this program provides offsite backups without monthly fees. Also, with this program, you don’t have to wait for the disks to be shipped to you during a disaster. If you backed up to work, you go to work and then do a restore. VERY intriguing idea. I was given a test copy of their program, so I’ll report back to you how well it worked. I have high hopes for it.

Of course, like every year, there were the ubiquitous iPod cases and accessories. Talking with vendors this year, they were more focused on style than function of these cases. I won’t mention names, but one vendor actually said to me “our protection products don’t cause cancer” Whatever! I didn’t spend much time at the accessory booths. You’ve seen one iPod case, you’ve seen them all. I did see some unique ones though, such as these earbud holders and of course the iToilet. One company made a portable boombox like device for the iPod that seemed to work pretty well, however I’m not an audiophile.

Quite a few companies were making bluetooth wireless headphones such as etynomic and Logitech. All sounded good to me, but what do I know! Let’s also not forget competing products that let you look like Geordi Leforge while watching your iPod. Neither the one from Ezgear or Myvo worked very well for me. If I wore my glasses, they didn’t fit correctly and if I took the glasses off, I couldn’t see the screen. Cool theory that missed it ALL in implementation, at least for me.

Besides protecting your iPod, companies were interested in protecting your laptop as well. protector causes your Mac to heat up a bit more. Speck is the only one that sells their products at the Apple store and thus has their blessing. The rep claims it causes the Mac to run “slightly hotter”. They promise to send me a demo. Their cases were made from plastic, but there were ones made of vinyl, leather, and about every product under the sun. The theory is not everyone wants a bulky bag to protect their Mac and want to sacrifice a bit of protection for convenience and ease of use.

Don’t worry though, there were plenty of traditional style bags from such companies as Targus. Everyone claimed however to have the “best” case. Since I’m in the market for a new case I listened closely. The laptop case market generally divides between the messenger bag style and the backpack style, though there are some that do both. STM sells their bags at the Apple store, so they have Apple’s unofficial endorsement. Crumpler wants my business because they are cool and hip. They had the most comfortable booth, with comfortable bean bag chairs and some of the most innovative marketing materials such as a “catalogue” that doubled as postcards. The most promising contender however is the BPB Bags. Not only is it a good bag,but their slogan is “what’s on yo bumm” Gotta love a company like that. How will I eventually decide between these great bags. The one that sends me a free sample of course. :-) Hey, some companies recognize the value of “buzz” and want to see cool people like me using their products. I’m just kidding about the free bag…maybe.

Other products that sparked my interest were two companies: Flying Chao and Pzizz that write software that generate MP3s you can listen to to help you sleep. Could work..or could be a total waste. We shall see I’ll definitely write an article on these programs for the Topeka Cap Journal (did you catch my article yesterday?) and let a therapist help me evaluate it. Remember yesterday I mentioned a word processor optimized for foreign language? Well there was another one there this year called Mellel. They gave me an eval copy and a T-shirt and claims there program “never crashes.” We shall see. I definitely see an upcoming LAUG meeting to include alternative word processors and have a showdown between such programs as Mellel, Nisus writer, BBedit, etc.

Smile on my Mac made me smile because they are very interested in working with User Groups. They showed me their product “Browseback” and my first reaction was “too bad you can’t password protect the history.” A engineer overheard and said “That’s an amazing idea..give this guy a free copy.” So in the next version, look for me in the credits!

Final category of things are programs that I have no immediate interest in, but would like to evaluate for the future. Most of these were smaller booths in the Apple Developers area. The person working the booth was not just the programmer, but the marketing director and the CEO–in other words a small business. Finally there were as PDF conversion programs by Recosoft that will convert a PDF to editable format for Office, Appleworks, and even Adobe Indesign. Good theory, but how well it works will really be the question.

Oh and speaking of Adobe products I asked when the funeral for Freehand was and was given the official response of “No Comment”. Next version of Freehand “No Comment.” Will Freehand be designed for Intel Macs “No Comment.” Of course, as I was chatting some guy saw my media badge and started complaining about Freehand. I was polite and then eventually picked up my phone and pretended. to take a call. Arrrgh.

Notice no mention of the Apple booth. I did stop by and see the iPhone. Notice the rather large man protecting it. Large booths like Apple, Quark, and Filemaker don’t really have much to show unique to Macworld. They basically hire people to walk you through slide presentations that can easily be downloaded via the website. What’s the point of going to their booth? They don’t have programmers or product developers there, opting for talking heads that put an attractive face and voice to a press release. Incidentally, that’s why you’ll NEVER see me at the Keynote Presentation. Why wait inline for 4-6 hours to hear something live that you can download a few hours later? Sure, there is the excitement factor, and Brian tells me it’s just like a Chiefs game. I almost never attend live sporting events, opting for the comfort of home or a bar. I’ll pretty much always choose practical over coolness which is why I’m not the least bit excited about the iPhone.

At 3:59 PST, I returned to the Netopia booth to eat dinner with the crew. The show closes at 4:00pm with a round off applause to the exhibitors. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. I finished the show with exactly 1 minute to spare. Perfect timing. Of course, I had to skip lunch on Friday in order to do it. Totally exhausting, but I learned so much and I’m happy I was able to share it with you all.