I attended MacWorld today in San Francisco. I have read stories how MacWorld has evolved into its own Mac worshiper entity that differed from the interests of Apple the corporation. Many of the hardcore Mac users believe that Apple has forgotten who made them popular, but you wouldn't see this on the faces on the people that were attending the show.
This year was a little lower key than previous years from my understanding. Apple decided that they were not going to attend this year so it was left up to hardware and software companies to fill the void. On top of that, the economy has forced many companies to cut back spending on shows like that so the swag was down to a bare minimum. The overall expo area was only about 70% of capacity with some interesting products. I have attached a couple of pictures of products that caught my eye. One company that I thought was cool right off the bat was GameSalad. They make video game creation software for the mac that allows you to basically cut and paste games. During the demo, a number of adults, and a few children assembled a pinball game following the instructions of the host. Its a very versatile program that allows you to import your own artwork. Check it out here: http://gamesalad.com/ iRecord Pro was a very cool device that allows you to take input from any media source such as audio, video or both and record it to your Iphone in MP4 format. During the demo they took the output of a dvd player and connected it to the device then sent it on the fly to his Iphone. The quality of the dvd was as good as the original. http://www.irecord.com/ Another cool company was a company called Canson and their product Papershow. Papershow takes the concept of pen and paper and makes it into a digital interface complete with menus and icons. So all the benefits of a tablet pc or Ipad without the cost. Check out their video: http://www.papershow.com/us/index.asp Located immediately to their left was SMART Technologies. This was company had one of the coolest products for kids that I had seen in a while. It took the finger GUI idea and trimmed it down to make it kid friendly. There was an interactive touch screen table about knee high that allows kids to interact and play on. I believe that it would be very easy to turn it into a learning product as well. There is also a whiteboard version of the product that allows you to use a whiteboard as an interface. I have attached pictures of both the white board in use as well as the kid product. Very cool stuff. Overall lots of very cool stuff. The guys I felt sorry for were the Iphone App guys. They were all given one side of a 3x3 table. It was just enough room for a small sign, your Iphone, and a few 4x6 postcards, so most of them were competition literally head to head trying to drum up interest in their products. I'd like to go back when the economy is better to really see how wonderful the event can be. -- Celebrating 10 years of bringing diversity to perversity! Mahogany at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mahogany_pleasures_of_darkness/
