What Stood Out at MacWorld

I got a chance to go up to MacWorld for the day and enjoyed several hours of walking the floor, watching demos and listening to pitches and seeing slick Apple products. I was keeping my eye out for a simple leather flip case for my wife's iPhone and came tantalizingly close but didn't secure the exactly specified unit despite my best efforts.

Not everything was specific to Apple products but, obviously, the vast majority of things were. Which meant that I was a pretty happy little geek. There were some pretty neat booths but the overall feel of the show was muted compared to last year. Maybe that's because I went earlier in the week last year but things were less frenzied and the crowd was definitely smaller. Both of which were good things.

My favorite demo of the day was the last one I saw just before I headed off the show floor. It was at the Zagg booth, makers of a protection screen called invisibleShield. The guy pulled his iPhone out of his pocket and pulled his keys out of another pocket and proceeded to rake the keys across the back of the phone. No marks were made. He turned it over and proceeded to rake the keys across the screen. No marks were made. Very, very cool. The 50% off coupon certainly didn't hurt in the least. And yes, I am putting in an order for not one but two so that both my and my wife's iPhones will be protected without the extra bulk that my iGriffin clear case has.

I watched some neat photo magic at a couple of booths, Topaz Labs and a company showing off a product called Instant Photo Studio (I thought that was the company's name but was wrong). Both had some pretty slick software. Topaz Labs was taking basically worthless photos and magically pulling information out of them to create viewable and decent photos. I.e. if a picture was too dark then it could be lightened up so that features could be seen. Instant Photo Studio had, you guessed, a portable studio set up to take product photos on site with a white box, two lights and a nice stabilized mono-pod for the camera. But the software package was even cooler. It was able to quickly and simply extract a portion of an image out, even from a many colored background. And the "grab" process was simple, just draw a line on the part of the image you want and the software does its own magic lasso act.

The BusyCal booth was another interesting stop for me as I spent yesterday trying to export a Palm calendar into Entourage 2008 and had to do create my own little workaround to get it to work correctly. I didn't get a demo but I did get some literature and will likely get more info down the road.

LightSpeed's XSilva had an interesting set up and I stopped by to see what they were about. They are an integrated retail POS system including inventory control, accounting and some nice iPhone reporting integration as well as online store management for virtual shops. It might be just the thing to take the heavy lifting out of running my wife's shop. We'll have to see.

I did not win the slick data transfer cable at the Targus raffle but the gent at the Dermis booth was good enough to give me a set of nice ear buds.

I stopped in Los Gatos on the way home to get a bite to eat at the Pizza My Heart just up the street from the Apple Store. The pizza was abso-freakin'-lutely awesome and not just because I was really hungry. And the stop at the Apple Store is always good too. The accessories are expensive but, in speaking with an Apple salesman, I got recommended to check out Monoprice.com for some good deals on things.

It was a good day overall and I'm glad I was able to take the time to get up to San Francisco and take it all in. But my feet are tired from all the walking and its late now so I'm packing it in and calling it a night.

My Tech Ascension is Imminent!

Not to heaven (which I tend to believe is just a nice fairytale carrot) but into the realm of smartphones, convergence devices and reclaiming my Mr. Cool status.

You see, I added the final $20 to my secret savings yesterday and now have enough money squirreled away to afford an iPhone.

Yeah, baby. i-to-the-mutha-fookin'-phone!

I've been debating for the last several weeks about whether the Touch would work for me and I've concluded that it just doesn't. Its beautiful, skinny and sexy and all but lacks two important functions. One, the phone and two, the camera.

I am trying to cut down on the numerous devices I carry with me and the Touch wouldn't really allow me to leave anything at home. I'd still need my phone and my delicious new SD1100 IS (which is coming with me anywhere I go anyway so maybe this is a moot point).

And man do I need to replace my Razr, it is beat up, beat down and ready for the recycler.

So, after much internal debate, I'm going to stop by an Apple Store either this weekend or on my way back from the city on Monday and pick me up a new delicious gadget so I can stop drooling over everyone else's iPhone and drool all over my own!

Wavering

I've been diligently saving my pennies (in $20 bill form) so I can replace my aging and not especially cool or useful Razr with a slick, sexy, awesome iPhone. But I got a good look at an iPod Touch yesterday and its every bit as cool as the iPhone without the phone. I'm not sure if that's the dealbreaker for me but the upside is that I could buy the Touch today and will have to wait another few weeks to order my iPhone.

I'm sorely tempted, really, really sorely tempted but I think I'm going to stick to my guns and hold off for the iPhone (but I'm won't be holding off until the not-even-announced 3g iPhone comes out because that'll be like next year).

One thing I don't really like is the very limited memory on-board and the utter lack of an SD expansion card slot. Eight gigs of music and video isn't very much really and it would be smart and helpful to allow me to use the ever-growing size of removable memory to bolster the on-board memory. But I know that Apple would sell none of the larger versions of the iPhone if everyone could just buy an extra memory card. This is one of those instances where up-sell sales are more important to Apple than delivering the absolute best product they can. They don't want to strangle their bigger ticket sales.

I can understand that but I don't particularly have to like it. I hope they incorporate expansion slots in the future though, that just seems like a smart move. Maybe in the 3G version.

Apple Drops the Ball and Lets It Roll Away

Readers of this blog are already well aware of the nightmare I lived last week when my hard drive in my laptop died a quick and painful death.

During the process of recovering as much of my life from that hard drive, I had to recover my professional website by downloading the entire thing from my host provider. And I figured that was the hard part.

However, iWeb, the app it was designed and built in, does not contain an Open function or an Import function and I cannot figure out how to get the program to recognize the site it already made.

I'm upgrading the software now and will see if that makes a difference but I can't help but feel that Apple has really missed the mark here. Not only with trying to force users to subscribe to .Mac but also by making it incredibly annoying to try and recover a site after a crash or disk failure.

And I am still in the process of pulling together as much of a previous digital universe as I can. It takes a damned long time.

But it won't next time since I've implemented auto-back ups with iBackup.

Macrovision's DRM Response Gets Fisked (HARD!) by Daring Fireball

Daring Fireball: Translation of (selected portions of) Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso's Response to Steve Jobs's 'Thoughts on Music'

This is about the funniest fisking I've yet read (apologies to Ryan "Nick Coleman is a F*cking Retard" Rhodes).

I don't usually laugh out loud of stuff I read online but I laughed a couple of times reading this.

And I don't know about you but I can use all the laughter I can get.