Macworld

I was there yesterday and even got to sit in on a remote of the Keynote. Here is what I saw:

#1 - The Air is really great! Look at the Address on the Apple site - Jobs played this up quite well. He pulled pulled the new Air out of an interoffice envelope. The first ad on the thing also uses that as a visual device. When you see it up close it is even more impressive. The solid state memory is very expensive but I expect it will increase battery life by a lot. The engineering is classic Apple. The battery is sealed which I am sure will get some people chattering. It is not a problem but some people will comment. The screen is well done. I also liked the keyboard and the touch pad. Mine will not come until mid-February. To use this you will have to begin to think about laptops differently. In the last few months, with 12,000 photos on my hard disk, my performance has declined. I spoke to an Apple engineer yesterday and he suggested that I need to think about what I need now and then put all the rest of it in the "cloud" - that sounds right to me. Key software and key files - then all the rest in the cloud - available whenever I need it. The two ports on the box will take some getting used to but I think they will work well. I suspect the $29 ethernet adapter will probably be useful - although I have never used the USB modem I bought for my Macbook Pro. The next version of this laptop should be a bit cheaper as solid state memory comes down in price. Last summer I found a 4 gig flash for about $30 at Fred Meyer - a year before that a similar device was more than $100.
#2- The iPhone changes are superb. I downloaded the iPhone software last night. (Hint - do the iTunes download first or you get a funny response which eventually corrects itself. I am going to be using the smart maps features a lot. Yes, I did rearrange my home screen. I probably would have paid for the upgrade but the free upgrade does two things. First, I was hoping the 3-G network would be rolled out yesterday - and because of the changes offered yesterday, I am willing to wait. But second, the map and the rearrange changes (that allow user defined "desktops" or home screens) will tie users to the device.
#3 - Time Capsule - $500 for a wireless Terabyte is pretty good - with the software for wireless backup. I will buy one of those when they come out. The engineer had one other suggestion - even with backup in Time Capsule you want to back the important stuff on another external drive. Best Buy has networked Terabyte drives for a bit under $600. So the price of the Capsule is pretty good.
#4 - Movie Rentals - This looks like real competition for Netflix but I have one question. Jobs suggested that most people do not want to have a movie library - thus the rental model. But a good marketing idea would be to have a renter become an owner by paying an additional fee. For example - I rent the Simpson Movie and then decide I want it. So I click back into the site and pay an additional $7-8 bucks (remember this transaction is all electonic - The Long Tail is important here) and I get an email back which allows me to unlock the movie so that it will not self destruct. My suspicion is that it could be coded - if the studios want it to have some DRM features. 20th Century Fox announced something called digital copy - which allows DVD purchasers to get an iTunes copy of movies purchased on DVD and that is a good step in the right direction but the broader link between rental and purchase still needs to be explored. The Apple TV upgrade was a smart move. The software upgrade is likely to make the device more useful. As opposed to the iTouch, the upgrade here makes the device more functional. The iTouch changes are really fundamental enhancements.
#5 - The software upgrades are also good enhancements for programs including iTunes - many of the new functions integrate with the new rental features.

I am not an iTouch user so I do not have a comment on the changes there.

On the show - I am not sure I will be back next year. After the Keynote I went to West Moscone to get my badge and they had screwed up the registration process so there was a long line. I went back to a friend's office had lunch and then came back later in the afternoon. I was able to get through the hall in about an hour. The new version of Office is out and looks ok. There were a million booths with iPod cases.

For me there were three great new software packages -

#1 - Wiretap Studio by Ambrosia Software. It is a simple program to allow you to grab sounds from any source and edit it. My wife's grandfather was a musician in the 1920s and there are a couple of his recordings on the net but I could never figure out how to take the sound down. Now I can. Inexpensive and simple to use.
#2 - Moneyworks - We've had a problem in the Mac world with accounting software. In my office we currently use a legacy package which is clunky. Moneyworks is well priced (about $500 for the Gold package). They have a test version and compared to the other available packages this one can do the job.
#3 - Yuuguu - A lot of the projects I work on involve some kind of distance related collaboration - where one or more persons wants to see someone's desktop or a file. Adobe and a couple of other companies have this kind of software but each of them is a) expensive to use and b) Clunky. YuuGuu is a) Free and b) simple - it runs off ad revenue and a linkage to a conferencing calling service.