MW2005--Hands-On Show Floor Report 1

Almost as much fun as the keynote address is walking the Macworld Expo show floor to see and chat about the new hardware, accessories and software available for the Mac. This is not to say that the conferences at Macworld are anything less than outstanding because they aren't, its just that we come to Macworld primarily to see and report on all the new things. If seminars and lectures are your thing, then by all means the conference sessions at Macworld are tops.

We received an overwhelming number of press releases and invitations to demos, more so than any other Macworld that we have attended. This shows that Macdom is alive and healthy but made us use triage to decide on whom to visit and report on. Unfortunately, due to other commitments we only had two days to see things this year rather than three or four.

To our surprise, the Macworld Expo show floor is pretty much confined to San Francisco's Moscone Conference Center's South building for 2005. In previous years, it filled up much of both the North and South buildings. It doen't seem like there are fewer vendors, over 230 are listed in the show guide. There are just much fewer mega and very large booths. The ubiquitous regular-size booths seem to have shrunk some and the stand-up booth area is terribly crowded together. There are no open areas to congregate and relax on the show floor this year.

The crowds have been good for the first two days, especially Tuesday when the keynote was given. The show floor is certainly very crowded but not as crowded as one might expect from the degree of floor space and aisle space compression. This could be a total misimpression on our part or maybe there's a huge increase in those attending conferences and special events. We'll have to wait and see what IDG says officially about attendance but even if smaller, in our view it is certainly a success for Apple Computer and its Mac fans.

Now on to what we saw and occasionally operated....

The John Lennon Educational Tour Bus was parked inside at the east end of the hall. Every so often a great band, starting with the Spin Doctors, would strike up live and could be heard over the din of people talking for almost half of the hall. We already reported on the Lennon Bus. Right next to it taking up much of the remaining space of aisles 300 and 400 was a large guitar accessories sales booth, a new item spawned by Apple's increasing focus on and success in the digital music world. In fact there were many more music item vendors than in the past which seemed to mostly consist of speaker and non-music digital audio manufacturers. We offer this as a general comment since we are not in anyway knowledgeable about the music business and didn't frequent any of the music booths this year.

There were also a few cars on the show floor. Mercedes Benz had two that were there ostensibly to show off their new iPod adapters but, hey, they are MBs. One of them was the terrific new black SLK350. We forgot to look for the iPod adapter when we finally got to the car. The MB person was saying something about it but we were not hearing them--sorry. More cars will join BMW this year in having built in iPod adapters. Clarion, the radio manufacturer, had a car to demo its product as did MacMice, the Mac accessory reseller.

Okay, let's get serious now....

Intuit gave us a hands-on demo of their new QuickBooks: Pro 2005 for Mac that came out just last November. We are a Quicken 2004 user for our business but were really impressed with QuickBooks as a real business software package. Intuit believes that the primary users of QuickBooks are small businesses in the 1-6 person range and that includes us.

QuickBooks appears to be very easy to set up and the invoicing function is terrific. It's data can be output in QuickBooks for Windows format so one can send it to an accountant that's not Mac literate. It also imports the Windows format. There is a new cost by job report that allows one to follow up on all reimbursable costs not yet billed to a given job or client. Also new is the ability to export a future check cutting reminder to iCal. One can backup to disk, a .Mac iDisk or to a Windows file. Intuit maintains a pro advisor network of accountants trained in QuickBooks with a locater on QuickBooks.com.

The only con that we saw with QuickBooks is that it can not interact online with your bank accounts. But, I was told that Intuit is working on that feature. Of course, Quicken does interact with banks and QuickBooks imports Quicken data so that may be an interim workaround to stay in the Intuit environment.

QuickBooks: Pro 2005 for Mac is $299, $199 upgrade.

Small Tree Communications provides high performance networking solutions like InfiniBand used in the now famous Virginia Tech cluster supercomputer constructed from 1,100 Power Mac G5 (now Xserve G5) computers. More exactly, Small Tree provides Mac OS X InfiniBand software with high performance and low latency in Infiniband hardware its president, Corky Seeber, told us. He also told us that what's new is that Small Tree has partnered with InfiniCom Systems to deliver the industry's first complete suite of InfiniBand products to the Mac market. Small Tree also announced the first ever multiport fiber optic ethernet adapters for the Mac as part of their strategy to bring the world's top performance to the Mac. We wish Small Tree well in their quest.

Adobe invited us to attend an NDA-covered presentation on potential future products. We are a heavy user of several Adobe products so we attended the very interesting 2-hour session. We got really hyped over what we saw and heard but, unfortunately, we can't say more than that at this time due to the NDA. Don't you just hate that as much as we do? Stay tuned...er, can we write that? Hmm, let's see....

Information Appliance Associates, a "neighbor" of Macs Only! since we moved to San Diego, showed us their PocketMac for Blackberry 3.0 software. It syncs data on your Mac running Mac OS X 10.3.x with most Blackberry devices via serial or USB, The data it syncs are contacts, calendar, tasks and notes from Entourage, Address Book, Now Contact, DayLite, iCal, Now-Up-To-Date and Stickies. Tim Goggin demoed it for us and PocketMac is easy to set up and use and quick to work. If you are a Mac user and have a Blackberry, you will want to look into PocketMac for only $29.95. There's a Macworld special of $10 off until January 17 using coupon code MW05.

SMART Technologies Inc. showed us several superb technologies for teaching and brainstorming ideas consisting of hardware and software. Michelle Maingat demoed them for us. The hardware is the SMART Board overlay for flat panel displays, the rear projection SMART Board and the Sympodium. The first enables a large flat panel display as a touch screen that controls your computer, allows writing in digital ink and saves work in a number of formats. Coupled with their SMART Ideas software, the SMART Board makes a great electronic brainstorming device. The rear projection SMART Board is also a touch screen that controls your Mac but it is designed for educators. It is kind of a digital chalkboard but much more with SMART's applications software. Finally, the Sympodium ID250 is an interactive pen display that controls your Mac. It can be hooked up to a projector to display the action and results on a large screen. This excellent technology does not come cheap. The Sympodium runs some $2,250, the flat-panel SMART Board is about $4,000 for a 50" overlay and the rear projection SMART Board runs to $12,000.

IOGear had several new devices on display. The cool 3.5" Tri-Select ION Drive allows anyone to set up three sets of backups (i.e. different sets of files) and has three buttons to start any of the three. The Tri-Select ION comes with FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 ports as a stand alone enclosure or with drives of 160GB to 500GB capacity. The 200GB model sells for a reasonable $239. IOGear also had two DVI KVM boxes, one with two DVI ports for two computers to share one monitor and one with four DVI ports for four computers. The DVI KVM boxes will come out shortly with the 2-port one selling for around $300.

That's it for our first report. Much remains and we will file our second report tomorrow. [Bill Fox]