I know this post is a bit overdue, but I’ve been slammed with a lot of homework and haven’t had a chance to get this up earlier. Sorry, boys and girls!
Well, except for a few dissappointments, Macworld was awesome! Again. I got to stay there longer this year than I did last year, because I went with a number of friends and a teacher from my school on a fully supervised, official, legal, field trip. So, instead of me going up on the train after school and getting only about an hour to trek around the expo, I got to be driven up to Macworld, and we got there at about 11:45, giving me about 5 and a half hours to roam around before going to the event at the Apple Store.
So we got there, and of course, all the garages were full. The only way we were allowed to park was if we used valet parking, so Ms. Bandong decided to do just that. We proceeded into Moscone North so that we could get ourselves all registered and checked in, and then proceeded downstairs to the exhibit hall.
The exhibit hall this year was actually divided among both Moscone North and South this year. In past years (or, at least, last year), pretty much everything at Macworld was in Moscone South, with registration being in the lobby at Moscone North. The exhibit hall was in this big room underground in the south hall.
But not this year, this year, the exhibit hall overflowed into the underground of Moscone North, which is where the Internet Cafe, Taste of the Conference, John Lennon Bus, and some of the other smaller booths were housed. There’s a nice underground tunnel which went under the street and connected the two exhibit halls, complete with tables and wireless internet.
So we spent a few minutes walking as a group around in the Moscone North exhibit hall. A lot of the other guys were quick to spot the gaming section, where folks can try out all the latest games. They even had a section setup with 5th gen iPods pre-loaded with all the iTunes games to try out. (However, I had a hard time figuring how to play Sudoku on the iPod.)
But, we didn’t stay there long, and decided to trek over to the South exhibit hall, which has the Apple booth and all the huge companies. The Apple booth had two stages this year–the left theater for Leopard and Apple TV, and the right theater exclusively showcasing the iPhone. Of course, as you’ve heard about from other places, they had all the other people crowding around the two glass cases with the rotating iPhone on demo mode, swarming around it with their camera phones and whatnots. I have to say, it was kinda silly, and it really did accurately depict the frame of this comic.
The tables at the Apple booth were disappointing this year, compared to last year. Of course, last year, Apple had a HUGE slew of new stuff, including iLife ‘06, iWork ‘06, the iMac Core Duo, the MacBook Pro Core Duo, even the iPod radio remote! So all of Apple’s tables were lined with new stuff, and everyone was crowded around in lines to see them.
Not this year. The only thing new on ONE of the tables was the Apple TV, and people weren’t exactly crowding to see that. You couldn’t even hold the Apple Remote if you wanted to! And the other tables had nothing cool. Just iLife and iWork again, Aperture, Final Cut, the iPods, etc. Everyone’s already seen that, so those tables were quite bare, compared to last year.
The rest of the exhibit hall was pretty good. There was Canon’s PIXMA Photo Gallery, Griffin’s three-story booth, Microsoft’s always-colorful Mac BU booth, along with the regulars Adobe, HP, Belkin, Google, etc. I stopped by all of those.
I was really excited to visit the booth of The Omni Group, makers of the excellent OmniWeb browser (what I’m using right now to type this, actually). It just so happens that just a week before Macworld, I had decided to try out the demo of OmniWeb because I was getting tired of Safari, as usual. I was actually planning to purchase OmniWeb (only $15 now) by the end of the week, but I found out that they were selling all of their software at an Expo-only discount price! So I made off with the boxed version of OmniWeb for only $10–and I didn’t even have to ask my parents for a credit card! Sweet deal. 
But beyond the software, my FAVORITE product from The Omni Group is their blog, The Omni Mouth. They have really hilarious posts on there (especially the posts made by Linda, one of their marketing weasels). So you can imagine my excitement when I actually got to meet Linda, and talk with her about those hilarious posts of hers! She’s really cool.
I found it strange that the Microsoft Blogger Lounge was supposed to be for bloggers to post about Macworld, but even though I tried to do just that, they wouldn’t let me in! They said I had to go to the Internet Cafe, and apparently so did many others. I don’t know how the people who WERE in the Blogger Lounge got in, because I sure couldn’t. Oh well, typical Microsoft.
I picked up a number of handouts, including ads, etc. However, some of the more interesting stuff: I picked up a classy pen and a cute orange bouncy ball from the Parallels booth, a rubik’s cube from LANDesk, and this really cool pen from Belkin, where if you twist the top, you reveal a hidden Post-It dispenser! Built right into the pen! Really cool. VMware gave out a CD with something on it–I still need to find out what’s on it. I also purchased the official Macworld 2007 T-Shirt (which actually turned out to be a long sleeve, perfect considering how cold it is nowadays!).
I don’t know if you heard about the MacUpdate Software Giveaway, however I actually managed to sneak away with three promo CDs from the MacUpdate booth. And…
They were all losers. Oh well, I still did I good deed: I improved everyone else’s odds of winning. 
However, I did purchase a cool dark blue MacUpdate T-shirt (which I still need to get around to wearing).
Now, I need to tell about the story of what happened with my technology. As you may know, I came to Macworld Expo armed with a digital camera and a video camcorder to record footage for a video episode of PreviewCast. For whatever ultra-stupid reason, I thought that I could find some way to videotape stuff from the expo, but it’s hard because all that I really taped was me walking, and a bit of the Apple Booth presentations (which, by the way, were identical to the Steve Jobs Keynote presentations). I should have just stuck with recording the stuff from the Mac Podcasters Meetup. It didn’t help that I only have a one-hour battery on that camcorder and forgot to bring my other miniDV tapes–so I only had one miniDV tape handy.
Plus, the digital camera likes to suck juice out of AA batteries, and so without warning, the camera that day started telling me that the batteries were low, so I had to use the camcorder to take still pictures, which is actually where I got the majority of the still pictures that I salvaged. So I used the camera to take pictures onto my 64 MB SD card, and then towards 3 PM (when everyone else went back to school and I stayed behind at the expo), I swapped that card and the 512 MB SD card (which had a few pictures, but not as many) with my digital camera. I then stuck both into my Nikon bag (which they were handing out at the expo), and proceeded downstairs to the exhibit hall, and went to the Canon booth. For whatever reason, I took the camera (in its grey case) out of the Nikon bag, but I think I just dropped it right back in, or else I carried it in my hand. My next destination was across to the North hall to utilize the internet cafe to look something up on Google Maps. For some reason, I seem to remember putting something down next the the iMac when I started my lookup, but when I was done, there was nothing next to the computer, so I assumed that I hadn’t put anything down. As I left, I dug in my bag for my camera, and it was gone. Nowhere to be found.
I spent the next hour and a half walking back and forth between the Canon booth, the Internet Cafe, and the show lost and found. I must have looked through each half a dozen times, but never found a trace. I thought I had left it somewhere, but my mom later told me she believes that someone swiped it. Of course, that got me down, particularly because it was my brother’s camera, not my camera.
Thanks to me swapping SD cards, I saved most of the still pictures (only lost about 10 or so that were on the 512 MB SD card). So, shortly after 5 PM, I left the expo and ran by a local Radio Shack (what I was Google Mapping) to pick up another SD card and some AA batteries for my digital camera so I’d have something to use at the Mac Podcasters Meetup at the Apple Store.
I got to the Apple Store a few minutes after 5:30, and the second floor was already packed to standing room only. I found a corner and tried to fight my way to open up the packages of AA batteries and the SD card, and got them in my camera, and found a space on the left side where I could drop all my stuff. Of course, I’d been standing all day, and my legs were quitting on me by then, and I was still stressed from the camcorder, but I tried to put that aside.
I shook hands and said hi to Adam Christianson whom I interviewed on PreviewCast. I also recognized Alex Lindsay and Scott Bourne who were helping with setup, and I got to meet Merlin Mann, plus a few other people, who I told about PreviewCast. Then, the attention rose when Leo Laporte strode on in and came over to the left side of the theater (where I was). After saying hi to a few people, I introduced myself (and mentioned that I was “webmacster87″), and he remembered me immediately from the net@nite episode I appeared on. He’s promised me that he’ll come on PreviewCast sometime. We were actually hoping to do a video interview after the event, but the event ran long (I had to leave at 7:20) and of course, my camcorder was now MIA. However, I got a great picture with him (after being unable to convince him to be serious), and Merlin Mann actually took the picture with my camera! Then, I gave him the gift that I had brought for him (I know, I’ve got celebrity fever too), which was a Staples Easy Button. He said he loved it, and told me that on Call for Help, he actually hacked one of them to make it say something really, um, funny. According to him, they’re actually really easy to hack. I told him that he ought to do the Easy Button for a Turn the Table Tuesday on the Daily Giz Wiz, and he agreed that that was a good idea.
So, the actual event was pretty much a roundtable discussion with everyone on the guest list about podcasting, and the importance of it, how it’s evolved, etc. It was an informative discussion, but I’ve heard a lot of it before, and it was running late. I had to be getting home, so I left at 7:20, hopped a BART train, and came home.
So that was my day at Macworld. But I’m not done with my exciting trips. Today I’m going on the San Mateo/San Francisco Freedom Train (which departs in about 2 hours), and I’m planning to take ye olde digital camera (and hopefully not lose it!).
Oh, and of course, as I mentioned, I’ve got pics from Macworld and the Mac Podcasters Meetup posted on Flickr, so you can relive the experience! And, if you want some video from Macworld, may I recommend some of MacBreak’s offerings?
Leo Laporte and myself, signing out. Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!
–Douglas Bell
