Walking the Macworld 2007 Expo Show Floor--Part I

Where to start. During Macworld the media is literally deluged with emails and brochures about new and improved products for Apple's products, all beckoning one to their respective booths. Picking out a few to highlight here is always a difficult job.

We rarely make appointments and choose to walk the floor, usually starting at the high booth numbers in South Moscone and working our way down to the passageway under Howard Street leading to North Moscone. The exceptions are usually press conferences, some requiring an Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), discussing really new things. This year we went to two, the Axiotron/OWC press conference on their ModBook (reported on yesterday) and an NDA-covered (secret) presentation from Adobe. If one stops and talks with people at even a fraction of the booths, it takes a couple of days to cover the show floor completely.

First, Apple's booth

The first place we headed after filing yesterday's article on Steve Jobs' keynote address was to Apple's huge central booth to get our hands on the new stuff. Because the doors to the Expo show floor had opened, lot's of people beat us to it and the crowd was thick.

Apple TV units were on display in a large bank across the front section and one could actually touch one and play with it's video, image and music playing capabilities to a large flat-panel TV screen. Despite the crowd, it was easy to get to up close and personal with the Apple TV. The crowd's main interest was the iPhone.

Apple's TV is just as it appears, a Mac mini form factor that is a little larger in area and about half as high. It looks every bit as good as a Mac mini and would look great wherever one keeps a large screen TV. It worked well with the Apple Remote as one might expect. There's really not much more to it.

Those who download or rip movies to their computers will love it, as will those who want to show slides or DVDs they make on their large screen TV. Of course, we can already stream music with our AirPort Express or hook up our MacBook Pro via DVI to show video and images but its more of a hassle than having a dedicated box that we can stream to wirelessly from a distance or another room.

iPhone, there was exactly one on a circular black pedestal encased in clear plastic just over average eye height on each side of Apple's booth area. Each also came with two security guards who kept people at least a foot away from the pedestal as if it were the Hope diamond. Perhaps, it is possible to topple the pedestal if pushed and the security was there to prevent that. There was also a continuous live large screen demo going on. Both attracted the huge crowd. We had to wait until Wednesday morning to get close enough to have a real look.

The iPhone is gorgeous. It looks even better in person than it does on a large screen or on Apple's Web site. The circumference is polished silver and the back is a brushed silver with a lower black section that is not a removable battery. Unfortunately, there is no easily-changed battery according to an Apple employee--it has an iPod-like lithium polymer battery full encased. The iPhone looks about the size and thickness of our video iPod but with a full-length screen. It's interface is terrific and even though we couldn't get our hands on it, the iPhone is starting to grow on us already, probably becoming a definite crave by June. But more on the iPhone later.

Then, taking care of business

We wrote that we'd talk to Garmin about their slip in Mac support timing and to Intuit about Quicken for the Mac at banks. We did both next:

Garmin has some great new products and we can't find boo while driving unless we have a navigator of some sorts, human or machine. So we used a Street Pilot III for several years and still use an eTrex Vista on occasion. Neither compare at all to Garmin's new Nuvi personal travel assistants, GPS navigators, the 360 and 660. We're still trying to decide whether or not to spend an extra $300 or so for the very nice 4.3" screen of the 660--we're leaning toward saving the difference for an iPhone.

In the mean time, we spoke with a couple of different Garmin booth people at a couple of different times. They've been well-schooled because both told us exactly the same thing. There is Mac compatibility with their fitness products already (well, mostly), by the end of Q1 2007 one will be able to update the firmware of any recent Garmin product on a Mac and there should be virtually compete Mac compatibility across the Garmin lines by the end of the year. The problem, of course, is that is pretty much what they said last year. Why? Well, both booth people professed to not know the details but said the problem turned out to be harder than they thought. We didn't have a stack of bibles handy but both Garmin booth people said it would definitely happen this year, i.e. we could count on it.

Our eye in on the Nuvi 360, some $400+ street price, but we think we'll wait for the firmware update compatibility to happen as a sign that things will go well, although it is likely that we can do everything we need to do today via Parallel's Desktop for Mac running Windows XP. If Apple's iPhone just had a GPS like some cell phones already have, we'd pass on the Nuvi altogether.

Intuit's booth was mostly staffed by demo people, i.e. they really know the products but not the reasons behind the company's policies. What we eked out of several people was to the effect that competition on price was tough for the Windows software and it couldn't subsidize the Mac software, hence the dual bank license for Quicken for Windows and Quicken for Mac. They said the difference is something like 3000 financial institutions license the Windows version and some 2000 of them license the Mac version too, about 2/3rds, so its not like 10:1, they claimed, as many people seem to say and our mail ran after we posted on the issue last week. Their solution, of course, was for Mac users to demand their banks support Quicken for the Mac. I mentioned multiple currencies on Quicken for Mac and they said they'd take that under advisement.

By the way, QuickBooks 2007 for Mac is now a Universal application, running natively on Intel-based and PowerPC-based Macs. Quicken 2007 for Mac is not.

Now we're off and walking

Micromat announced a new product called Protogo so we stopped and saw it. Protogo basically installs a trimmed but bootable Mac OS X and TechTool Pro 4.x on a device of your choice like an older FireWire iPod or a very large flash drive since the installation takes 2GB of space. The advantage of a FireWire device is that it can boot PowerPC-based Macs as well as Intel-based Macs. You can also add other maintenance software of your choice to the device. It worked like a charm.

The advantage of Protogo over TechTool Pro 4.x is that it boots a Mac much faster than off a CD and could be easier to carry around than a CD. Micromat also has a ready-built solution with TechTool 4.x and Disk Studio installed called Protege which is a flash-RAM sized FireWire device. Micromat's products are available for a special show price.

Glance.Net has a great product in Glance, a one-button method for showing your screen to another Mac or set of Macs or PCs or a mixture of both. The possibilities are endless and range from giving proprietary presentations to teaching lessons to working interactively with a client on an image or manuscript or layout or...whatever is on your screen. Glance has been around for six years on Windows and a Mac has always been able to be the client but now a Mac can be the host or the entity showing its screen to others.

One sets up Glance on the host Mac with a domain name of choice for your Mac and password and by providing them to the clients who use their Web browser--any Web browser--to view your screen when you launch Glance by clicking its icon. This works great. It is so simple that it's hard to believe. I can't imagine an easier way of actively collaborating among Macs.

Glance is sold by subscription using Glance.net's servers starting at $499 per year for allowing up to 15 clients to connect per session.

SeeFile.com's SeeFile v3.0 is a totally different way of collaborating than Glance. SeeFile makes folders of images available to clients for their review and approval. The image's in the folders are updated when the original is updated. The interface itself can be changed from a collection of folders to a lightbox of images. It works with all RAW image formats that Mac OS X 10.4.8 supports. SeeFile uploads a thumbnail and preview image for each original. The preview can be easily watermarked as an option. A client can mark up an image and leave notes attached to the marks explaining what changes are desired. The client interface can also be branded with any logo.

SeeFile is more complicated for the end user than Glance because one has to setup a MySQL server to run SeeFile on top of. But from what we saw, this is an excellent image collaboration tool. SeeFile also has a different business model. It's a one-time purchase rather than a subscription and it starts at $399 for 4 clients and the administrator.

H&R Block was handing out free copies of their 2006 Federal Premium version of TaxCut, a $19.95 value.

Marketcircle, known for Daylite, has a billing application called Billings 2. It is designed for someone who bills numerous clients hourly for the time put into their projects. However, the interface is easily modified for periodic billing or university grant effort reporting.

The invoices that Billings 2 produces are simply terrific. There are a variety of invoice templates that may be customized completely.

Billings 2 is very easy to use. We set up projects in a way that mimics our business and prepared terrific invoices the Mac way. We just did it without reading anything and it just worked.

Billings 2 costs just $59 but Marketcircle is running an on-site show special of $45 for a limited number of copies. If you bill hourly by project, you can't go wrong with this application in our opinion.

That's it for today. Look for our wrap up tomorrow. [Bill Fox]