Day two of Macworld Expo SF 2003 has come and gone, and Applelinks' Gary Coyne was once again all over the show floor. Below are more of his thoughts on Apple's offerings, as well as those from many other vendors.
Yesterday I mentioned that Apple had placed banners and plackards all over the place on all the great things they just announced. One of the things I had forgotten to mention is that in the press room at the Moscone Center there are 8 blue iMacs set up for the press (who don't have their own laptops to sign into the Airport Network) to use. I'm one of the people waiting for a spot on the iMacs. On Monday, the default browser was Microsoft Internet Explorer. As of Tuesday, it was Apple's new Safari. What was funny was that I sat down at the computer, started working away and then it slowly dawned on me that the interface was different. Talk about concentration!!
On the machine I'm currently using, Explorer had been completely removed, but this is not true on all the machines here. Curious.
Safari, if you hadn't heard, is Apple's new free Browser. As Jobs said in his Keynote, they haven't gone to every web site there is yet, so if you find a page that doesn't load right, click on the "bug" icon in the upper right and send it in. While Safari is a fast browser, it is rather buggy, so the engineers at Apple will be busy for some time yet. If you look at "About Safari" in the Safari menu, you will see that this is build 48 of the beta version. There occasionally is truth in advertising.
To get your free copy of Safari, go to apple.com.
From what I've heard, this show is being attended beyond expectations. They are talking about numbers up to 90,000 people. Remember that Comdex gets about 100,000-120,000 people. For our measly little 3.5 to 4 percent of the computer population, dang we have a loud voice.
By today, I've had a chance to complete my wandering thoughout all the exhibits space. I still want to go back and investigate a few more in detail, but let me catch you up to date on some more issues.
I've had a chance to talk to Symantec and, sadly, they do not have Norton Utilities' CD yet ready to boot in OS X. It will soon, but they will not even talk about when that will be. As mentioned yesterday, Drive 10 from MicroMat is ready now, and DiskWarrior will be ready in several weeks or so. Also from MicroMat is TechTool 4 that will also be able to boot in OS X. It is several months from release, but will offer generally the same capabilities as TechTool 3--but with a good interface and will run in OS X.
The repair disk issue is very important to Apple and all the people going out and buying the new 17 and 12 inch laptops. They only boot in OS X, and a repair program that doesn't boot in same is not going to help anyone. Beyond Drive 10, the only option this moment that someone might have is to partition their hard drives and have systems on both so they can run Norton's on one to repair the other (Norton is an OS X native program, but the CD cannot boot in OS X).
Other parts of the big news yesterday at the Keynote was the creation of iLife--the marrage of iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. These programs now all interact and one can use parts of the other from within each. Very cool--this is sort of a "multimedia Appleworks." I was talking to the PeachPit Press people and they have a new book by Jim Heid coming out called "iLife," and if you go to PeachPit's website and enter the code "EW-T2AH-DHCF" (without the quotes) you can get 30% off the price of $29.99 and free shipping (domestic only). This book comes wiht a 90 minute DVD Video disk.
Although the attendance is very high, the number of exhibitors is down. Hey,
it's the economy and all that, right?
One of my "measurement sticks" on the economy is the freebies that are handed out at trade shows. You know, beyond the pens and pins, there are the plastic brains and balls that light up when you toss them. Some of you might remember the wonderful unbrellas that WordPerfect used to give out at the MacWorld shows.
This year, I've seen almost ziltch. At most, a T-shirt or so, mostly if you bought something. I've not seen a frisbee, a ball, or anything that I could give my kids when I get back. The reality is that they are not going to miss these things and I am grateful I don't have to lug them home, but the important thing is that they were not here in the first place. I, for one, am glad the exhibitors are here and exhibiting. First things first!!
Not here was Quark. They have yet to release an OS X version of their software and Jobs indirectly pointed this out at the Keynote. Adobe has taken advantage of this with their slogan for the show "Right Here, Right Now" for InDesign (which is very OS X native).
Well, let me give you some idea of what the San Francisco show is like. It takes place in the Moscone center. In the beginning, there was only the south section and because it was too big for one hall, people were bused to other parts of the city. Once the north hall was completed, it was a nice tight package. Well, now there is still too much for one hall but not really enough to properly fill out the north hall. And, as such, the north hall is where most of the small companies are located. So, in some ways this is where the interesting stuff is and it's also where the "it's so esoteric that I really don't care" stuff is. This is also the section that they gave a big hunk of the floor to a bunch of game developers to show off their stuff. I wish Kirk was here to better report on this as I walked on by. I'm not a gaming person, and rather than do a very poor job on reporting what was there, I shall ignore it all together. Sorry.
[Editor's Note: I wish I was there too, quite frankly, but you can get great gaming coverage of the show from our friends over at IMG.
Yeah, I know that feeling. Try covering the show while also working a booth, Gary! With the show still in swing, we're sure to have more announcements from vendors and news from the show floor, so come on back.
