MW2005--Hands-On Show Floor Report 2

Today, we continue our report with the second in a three-part series on the new things we saw and tried at Macworld Expo 2005 in San Francisco.

In yesterday's report we provided our impressions on the size and attendance of Macworld 2005 and, wouldn't you know it, IDG subsequently issued a press release on the topic. While the final, audited attendance numbers will not be out for about two months, IDG expects attendance to be higher than the 32,409 that attended Macworld SF 2004. They also noted that the number of vendors renting space was up from 260 to 280 and that they rented more square footage in total than last year despite being housed in just the South Hall this year.

We should have noted that this year's reporter last attended Macworld SF 2003 so the impressions posted yesterday were relative to 2003 and earlier, not 2004. Brian Nakamoto, who has also attended previous Macworld SF shows, reported for us on Macworld SF 2004. He noted that Macworld SF 2004 was a smaller show than previous ones. Still, we sure appreciated the shorter walk to visit all of the show floor vendors as did many attendees surveyed by IDG. The vendors also liked the increased traffic brought by situating all exhibits in the South Hall. Macworld 2005 is an excellent, exciting show regardless of its size relative to prior years.

Now on to the show floor for our second and penultimate report....

LANDesk demoed its Management Suite 8 for us. Management Suite 8 appears to be an IT Department's dream-come-true software for checking on, updating and controlling client computers on a company network. The server core of Management Suite 8 runs only on Microsoft Windows Server 2000 and 2003 but it works with Mac clients as well as Windows, Unix and Linux clients. An application is installed on each client, including Macs, and it maintains its own inventory of software on the client computer, not relying on System Profiler or any other system component for security reasons. The server side can ask for a report at any given time, install updates centrally and keep selected software from running on any client computer...and more. LANDesk has 8-9 years experince on the Mac, largely in the LDAP server area, according to the company representative. If there is a significant customer move to Unix or Mac OS X Server, LANDesk plans to develop the server core to run on those platforms but for now it remains a Windows 200/2003 product. The company also makes Security Suite 8 and Patch Manager 8.

NewSoft demoed its new Presto! BizCard Reader 5 and software and its new Presto! PhotoDisc software. BizCard Reader 5 is a $129 USB business card reader and database manager. It draws its power from the USB port so no AC/DC wallwort is needed. We placed a business card in the reader and it zipped through quickly. BizCard Reader produced an image of the card and entered the data from it into a database. With one click, the data was also added to the Mac OS X Address Book. It can also easily sync with PDAs, Entourage, Now Contact and FileMaker Pro. Bizcard Reader has gone through 5 version cycles on Windows and is now coming to the Mac. The final product should be out in late February. We were quite impressed with the Presto! Bizcard Reader 5 and look forward to its availability for the Mac.

PhotoDisc is very much like iPhoto and iDVD and but it works with internal and external DVD burners. With PhotoDisc you can make slide shows from images and video clips, add music from iTunes, text or record narration and then burn them as DVDs, SV CDs and VCDs. It has templates, transitions and does MPEG2 as well. PhotoDisc supports a broad range of standard media formats including: CD-R/RW, DVD-/+R, DVD-/+RW, and the new double layer DVD+R format. Presto! PhotoDisc worked very simply and intuitively. It will cost $49.95 and be out for the Mac in late January to early February.

Micromat demoed its new DiskStudio, an extremely simple utility application for non-destructively creating additional partitions on a hard drive. It does this by formatting the unused space on a hard drive without disturbing the existing data. DiskStudio can also delete partitions previously created by it, erase and reformat existing partitions in a number of standard formats and completely erase and repartition an entire hard disk. The uses among many are to install a new copy of Mac OS X, but keep the original copy intact, install a completely different operating system, such as Mac OS 9, on a new partition, create a partition to hold special projects, such as audio or video files, create a partition to hold scratch space for programs such as Adobe Photoshop, etc. DiskStudio will cost $50 (show pre-order special of $35) and will be available in February.

Sonnet Technology had all of its new CPU upgrades available at show special prices. We were especially interested in the new Encore ST 1.7GHz G4 CPU upgrade for the G4 Cube. They had them in stock for $460.83 at the show. The kit includes a quiet fan and requires a firmware upgrade using Mac OS 9.2 because it uses the Freescale (formerly Motorola) 7447A G4 CPU.

We will have a lot more in the final report tomorrow. [Bill Fox]