MacWorld '07

In other news, I happened to have a free Exhibit Hall Floor Pass to MacWorld this year that I got through an editor's group to which I subscribe. I'd never been inside the Moscone Center at all, actually, so I thought it'd be a good opportunity to check it out.



Apparently the talk of the town is Apple's unveiling of the new iPhone, which they had on a very nice revolving display as you can see here.



It's very thin and you're definitely paying for style, as is true of all Apple products - but hey if you're into that sort of thing (as many are), go ahead and buy it when they come out in July. You can see good ole Steve giving the lowdown here (you'll need Quicktime to watch the Webcast).

But the second product they unveiled is Apple TV. Look carefully!



It's not the pretty Sony HDTV that you saw, right? You're smarter than that, aren't you? It's the little white box that sits at its side - Apple's iTV interface, which can link your computer up to your HDTV for... what you'd expect a computer connected to an HDTV would do. You can watch HD Webcasts, you can interface with your computer through your TV with a little Apple remote device, and so forth.

The last thing Apple's pushing here: yes, you know it. They've been talking about Leopard... It still uses our friendly Dashboard interface that was unveiled in Tiger, however now you can make your own widgets! Specifically though, you can take a webpage and create a widget that acts as a shortcut to that piece of the page - examples given were reading a comic online, or watching a stock ticker or an eBay auction just by glancing at your dashboard. There were also some new features in backup via a system called TimeWarp (which frankly just looked like it was for show - practically speaking you still need the dedicated space to backup and I'm biased, so I want to see that backup being done). Unless you're running your own array or you've got that spare hard drive just lying around, you're gonna need something to do it. But if you do happen to have that spare hard drive, and you like deleting things and then digging through the past to find them again, TimeWarp might be for you. However, the new iChat features are impressive - you can essentially make a presentation through iChat now, complete with custom backgrounds, or even yourself in a tiny little box, or you can take over and directly interface with remote computers!

Other impressive items were to be found, the one I liked most was Canon's new HD Camcorders that follow up the very popular GL and XL models - prosumer is closer and closer to pro now, with these cameras costing around $9k retail! Incredible, something like this would've been over $20k probably last year...

And there are of course the new software updates to Adobe (CS 2.3 apparently), and FileMaker Pro, and iLife.

Now don't you wish you had no job and no life so you could bum around at random tradeshows?