I won’t try to talk about the SteveNote — Nemo has done such a good job of that already. Here are my random impressions and thoughts, as I spent the entire afternoon roaming the floor of the exhibit hall.
1. They’ve compressed the whole show in on hall in Moscone South. In previous years there were two halls, North and South. It gives the whole show the feel of a mideastern bazaar, not that I’ve been to one of those, with a dense, milling mob of booths and people all jammed into a half-size space. It creates excitement, and also makes it very hard to judge whether attendance is up, down, or what.
2. iPod accessories are occupying at least three times as much space as last year.
3. Bags are big. Bags for laptops, for iPods, for iMacs, you name it. I think I visited half a dozen bag vendors. What’s going on here?
4. The focus on things that are directly connected to Apple products is tighter than before. This is no longer a handy bazaar for anything that people who like Macs might also like.
5. Tiger is burning bright. I went and looked over shoulders a lot and got my hands on it a little. Spotlight is awesome, though I will also have to write a whole article about it when Tiger is released. Dashboard now has a whole lot more widgets than it did back at WWDC 2004, and looks much more interesting. And the eye candy is just, I don’t know what to say, fabulous. I don’t put down eye candy — it makes you like your computer. This is something that no one else understands as well as Apple does..
6. iLife 5 looks good. I cross-examined an Apple booth-weasel about whether I could use IPhoto to make a fancy KenBurnsified slide show and export it as a QuickTime movie, which could then be imported to, oh, iMoveie or KeyNote. The answer is, yes, of course.
7. iWorks looks pretty good too. Of course, having written Why I Hate Word Processors a while ago, I am going to have to go into Pages in some depth when I can get my hands on it. But I subjected it to an important test that AppleWorks failed: control of widows and orphans. Widows and orphans, you ask? Well, these are just cases where the first line of a paragraph gets isolated at the bottom of a page, or the last line gets isolated at the top. A decent word processor has to prevent this, and Pages passes the test. I also asked the booth-weasel whether Pages could handle big documents. He said they test it regularly on War and Peace, which I thought was a pretty darned good answer.
8. I found Andy Hertzfeld at the O’Reilly booth, and chatted with him about his new book, Revolution in the Valley. This book grew out of his terrific web site, folklore.org, where he has induced the people who know the great stories about the creation of the Macintosh to preserve them for others to read. And though the book is out, the web site goes on. Andy is still exactly the same great, interesting guy he always was, and everybody should buy his book. I did, and O’Reilly gave me 20% off on it and another book, plus a T-shirt for buying two books. I like O’Reilly a lot.
9. Before the fact, I went on record as not believing in either the Headless Mac or the Flash iPod. Well, as my father used to say, that is why they put erasers on pencils.
10. The Mac Mini may or may not sell a lot of units. I’m not dumb enough to try to predict that. But at an absolute minimum, it will get a lot of people to go into Apple retail stores to see it, and that is nothing but good. I put my hand on top of it at the booth, and it was not warm. I asked if it had a fan, and answer was yes, but it’s very quiet. I also asked if it had the same footprint as a Cube, with the height squished down; the booth-weasel thought the Cube footprint was 8×8 inches, while the Mini is 6.5×6.5. Even so, you can surely argue that this is The Cube Done Right, at $499.
11. The iPod Shuffle is a pretty smart product. When ThinkSecret leaked the basic idea, they did not know about the smart part. Because the question is, if you want it to be really cheap and tiny, you probably can’t have a display at all, so how do you pick songs? And as we now know, the answer is, You don’t. Hell, there’s only one or two hundred songs on the thing, play them all. Either shuffled or not. I think it’s brilliant, and at the strikingly low prices of $99 for 512MB and $149 for 1GB, Apple will take over the flash-player market in short order — after all, the others are selling 256MB for $179, mostly.
12. Once again, there are basically no flight sim games for OS X. All I saw was X-Plane, which is nice, but come on, only one? I don’t mean science-fiction games with imaginary spacecraft, I mean flight simulators with real aircraft. What’s the problem?
13. I’m an old guy, and you know what, there are a LOT of old guys at MacWorld. Not that the younger demographics aren’t there, but you know, there must be a market out there for stuff like Medicare Minder and Social Security Maximizer and Heart Medicine Tracker and suchlike. Just a little clue for the developers.
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