Someone in my office sent a promo code for a free MacWorld Exhibit pass, so an officemate and I took advantage of it. This was my first MacWorld -- considering all the free passes that I didn't take advantage of and the relative close proximity from my home, I'm surprised I never went (being a Mac-head and all).

Appreciating the iPhone

The primary driver for me was to check out iPhone and a little bit of a sneak peak of of Leopard. The iPhone is to drool for and appears to be an amazing engineering achievement in industrial design, engineering and certain aspects of usablity. Based on what I saw in the demo, to call the interface a series of UI improvements is an understatement. To call it revolutionary, I'm not sure I would go that far, but it's definitely more than evolutionary in that someone actually thought the user interface on this device outl. There are aspects of the design that just seemed to make sense. There's definitely no reason why someone couldn't have done it sooner. I was more impressed that the thing was running a full version of MacOS X! I didn't see any processor specs though -- I'm going to suspect that going to an Intel architecture might have made the phone possible. The only thing I'm not too sure of with the design is a lack of tactile response because interaction is done almost completely using the screen. With no click or button forms, the experience is probably going to be fairly numb, although I'm sure aural response will be defaulted to on (one of the reasons I hated dialing on the screen on my old Treo). This might pose some interesting usability issues. I'm going to suspect that although the interface is cool (onscreen typing isn't new so I'm not going to call it revolutionary, and neither is auto recommendation since Windows Mobile/PC and most modern day phones have had this feature for years), people using their Blackberry or Treo phones as their primary diversion from reality will quickly give up on the iPhone if they're more interested in hours of thumbing fun.

That aside, for geek-chique and for status, this one's a winner. Apple's always been good at this.

For those who question the importance of tactile form and response (particilarly the Mac-heads), remember the original iMac mouse? The hockeypuck mouse sucked because it was impossible to really figure out which way was up and whether or not your finger is on the mouse button because there was no distinct shape to help orient and diffrentiate the mouse's body using it's form, and there really wasn't a way to figure out where the mouse button was. Apple fixed this after the first series of fruity Macs by adding an indentation on the button -- it didn't help (I bought the first USB Logitech mouse as soon as I could find one at Frys). Although I can hardly say the demo proved it -- texting and data entry accuracy rate during the demo seemed to allude to this. I'm wondering how much more difficult this phone will be used when used in real world situations -- like actually moving around versus standing behind a podium.

Apple TV was cool as well -- although it's definitely going to need beefing up if people are going to really adopt this en-masse. It has a 40 Gigabyte harddisk that I thought was a bit anemic given the price of storage these days and the growing size of iTunes users' video/audio library. Because of the relatively low resolution of iTunes movies, the lack of resolution was very apparent with the plasma flatpanels Apple used. Also missing is DVR functionality -- it's another box to add to your home theater. AppleTV can be connected to a PC/Mac running iTunes via a wired or wireless network (definitely going to need at least a 802.11G wireless network) and sychronized to download music, photos and video. It also allows you to connect up to connect with up to 5 computers on the network and connect to a guest for access to those iTunes libraries. One thing that wasn't clear was whether or not more that one AppleTV could be connected to a computer to stream or sychronize content. I guess we'll see.

The preview of Leopard demonstrated a lot of the stuff that Apple's Leopard website already explained, but in person so nothing too surprising.

One product I saw that looked really great was MS Office 8 for the Mac. I was glad to see a new Office as a Universal Binary (I'm finding Office 2004 somewhat sluggish on my MacBook Pro). More impressive yet is functionality that allows someone to contextually understand formatting changes to a document -- much like what Office 2007 for Windows appears to function. Funds permitting, I want to pick this upgrade up. Usability Gurus Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool had alluded to this in previous workshops I've attended.

There's only one item I want on my wishlist -- Creative had Cambridge Soundworks Radio 705. It's a Tivoli knockoff (kind of, but not really since Henry Kloss started CS). It comes in silver, white and black -- they had a test unit in pink. I suggested adding retro blue, retro green, retro cream, and retro mother-of-pearl with an old-school acoustic cloth speaker cover. Yeah, baby....

War Protest After MacWorld

At the close of the day, we walked in out of Moscone and straight into an anti-war march... I'll post photos when I download them.

For some reason, my family started talking about eyelash bugs and whether they exist. Although the scientific aspects of microscopic critters living and breeding on human eyelashes is interesting, we found a site full of cute critters as part of our social sharing of my laptop. We found Holly Hostess on http://www.parasitepals.com. We all want Blinky Eyelash Mite.

I'm going and am really excited for this event -- I've played around with the betas of all of each of the Expression products. They're not too bad.  I'm need to start toying around with the tools a bit more.  I wonder how much of a dent these tools will have to existing packages like DreamWeaver, Flash and the like. They might be a good alternative to the higher priced tools for small businesses/SOHO market, or even to small web design businesses. They appear to be well priced and appear well positioned. Adoption and application stability will be interesting.

I also thought it was interesting that iView was rebranded as Expression Media -- as user of iView in the MacOS 9 days, it's a terrific media browser. On the iView-Multimedia site, it appears as if Expression Media will be released in a Mac Universal Binary! Yay!

Tried to install Joomla the other night from my MacBook Pro -- Cyberduck (FTP client) doesn't seem to like my hosting service (Windows server) as I'm getting dropped all the time. It's a fairly large upload at over 11MB. Right now, it's the heavyweight when compared to Drupal (2.1 MB) and Umbraco CMS (7.6 MB). I'll try again later in the week from my Windows notebook.


In other news -- Steve J's iPhone announcement -- Wow! (both in looks and mystery pricing) Now that the cat's out of the bag, I wonder about design changes for a phone integrated into the Zune -- it's already got the widescreen and the media player (yeah, I know Windows Mobile cell phones already have Window Media Player). I also wonder what this means for a new generation of streamlined UI's Windows Mobile devices.

What I found really interesting is that the iPhone's OS is MacOS X -- does this mean a pending re-design of iPods using widescreen displays and a real MacOS X operating system?