Brian Nakamoto's Macworld Expo Report--Day 2 [Wednesday]

I specifically talked to Aladdin, Asante and Connectix about their new products.

Aladdin released Transporter yesterday which allows you to create drop boxes that run automated tasks on whatever you drop on them. My take is that they're like a collection of glorified AppleScript applets. Power users probably won't benefit but novice users might.

Asante has a cool alternative to Apple's Airport Base Station in the pipeworks. For what will debut at approximately $250 to $300, you will soon be able to get an 802.11 wireless router from Asante that supports up to 253 clients. (Forgot to ask about range but it has two antennae so I imagine that it's equal to or better than Apple's Base Station.)

At Connectix, Virtual Game Station is still going strong although relegated to a very tiny corner of their booth without any signage. They are mainly promoting the latest version of VirtualPC that is enhanced for Velocity Engine. It can also dynamically increase virtual disk space and supports the ability to run multiple environments at the same time ala vmachines. Connectix is also working on a Mac OS X version of VPC although I couldn't confirm if this is true for VGS. Connectix's other new product that interests me is DoubleTalk which looks to be a strong competitor to Dave. (If you're not familiar, DoubleTalk and Dave let Mac clients communicate with Windows networks and printers.) DoubleTalk is great because they're using native TCP/IP, it allows you to access Windows workgroups through the Chooser and print via LaserWriter. I'll probably use this combined with the new Outlook:mac client to get on our LAN at work.