Macworld SF 2006
We are back from Macworld. It was great fun, we got to meet lots of cool people doing cool things. We did a short interview with CocoaRadio, met the AppZapper guys, and Phil Ryu from Widget Machine (thanks for the party passes Phil!), among others.
We got to see a glimpse of how the rock stars of this industry such as Plasq, Panic, Delicious Monster, and Rogue Amoeba handle themselves at an event such as this.
As a developer who is affected by the announcements at the show, it was nice to get a chance to have a chat with the guys at Karelia Software at the macsb dinner hosted by Niall Kennedy. They have an excellent web page creation software that just came out called Sandvox. It is far superior to the new iWeb in iLife ‘06. It should give the RapidWeaver folks at Realmac Software a healthy dose of competition.
The Stevenote was very interesting. I’m a little annoyed that the Intel iMacs are shipping the same day instead of say in two weeks or a month to give us time to prepare. The most exciting news for us was GarageBand. It looks like the most awesome podcasting software ever. It had lots of features that we dreamed of implemending in Podcast Maker, but just knew was going to be really hard or next to impossible.
The Intel laptop news is a very welcome change. The new name makes me wonder if the iBooks are going to be renamed to MacBooks because why else would they change the PowerBook to MacBook Pro? Apple is famous for being minimal in everything that they do and that “Pro” to me is painfully ugly. And the PowerMac? I suppose it will be renamed Mac Pro. Repeat with me 10 times! Mac Pro, Mac Pro… I feel a bit better now.
I totally dig the new commercial they put out by the way. That smile on the woman’s face after she does whatever she’s doing with the silicon wafer is priceless. I’m guessing that it’s done by the folks at Chiat Day and I think they deserve a round of applause.
One thing that I wish I had seen more of at the expo are small developers. There are just so many gems for the Mac that I wish there were a space to showcase them. It costs far too much resources to do it at the Macworld Expo. With this frame of mind, it was very sickening to see the usual tradeshow spam companies totally unrelated to the Mac selling massage services and such at Macworld. Somebody should take this idea and run with it. Perhaps an online expo? Is there such a thing? Or at least do it in a cheap place like Ontario, California like the Portable Media and Podcast Expo.
Main Feed
January 13th, 2006 at 9:32 pm
Yes Garageband 3 does look great but I do not want to publish to .Mac. How well does it work, generating RSS feeds, to ftp sites? Where does that leave Podcast maker?
January 13th, 2006 at 10:11 pm
:)
I’ll post on this topic soon. Promise.
January 14th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
For my podast, I am sure I will continue to use Podcast maker for all of my uploading, rss generation, etc.
GB3 will definitely help me tighten up the production quality. I hear there is a way to publish without using Dot Mac, but haven’t had a chance to mess with it yet. I am curious if Apple will only make it able to export AACs or if I will still have to go into iTunes to convert to MP3.
For now, I don’t do any enhanced podcasts, but I may in the future, so I would probably add the artwork, links and such in GB.. but if Podcast maker does it better.. I will definitely stick with it.
My copy should be here next week, and I will be able to tinker around with it.
The support for Podcast Maker has been very good, and I am going to stick with them. They will provide more updates, useful personal support, and provide a more open format than GB3 & Apple will provide.
January 16th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
An update on the commercial’s originality. It looks like the commercial is not so fresh as I once thought. They had issues with the Eminem commercial and now this…
Apple Goes Postal