I got back from San Francisco on Monday afternoon after Macworld last week. The weather was a bit of a shock! I saw lots of flooded fields and rivers on the approach into Heathrow. The weather in San Francisco was very good. It was sunny for the whole time myself and 2 others were there. Apparently this is unusual for January. The sun shines on the Mac users! When I got back to Belfast it was blowing a gale and there was horizontal rain. Cold. These things are relative though. I came out of the hotel in San Francisco one day last week and saw a girl on her way to work with wooly gloves and scarf on. For me it was a warm morning, for the natives it was cold. Transplant one of them to Belfast last Monday and they’d probably have died on the spot!
On the subject of travel, well flying, I have to say that British Airways are excellent. I’ve always had excellent service from them and they are my carrier of choice.
Macworld itself felt a bit flat to me. There were some good points. The Microsoft Day at the Office session to launch Office 2008 for Macintosh was good. Attendees had to pay $199 to attend this session. It was worth it. There was some very useful info from people who knew the software. They also gave everyone a copy of the Special Media Edition of the suite. A $499 value. Nice. Other highlights for me from a product point of view were: TheSkyX and Seeker from Software Bisque, Casper from Jamf Software, and Filemaker Pro 9. The new virtualisation solutions from Parallels and VMware that allow Mac OS X Server to be run in a virtual machine looked good as well.
There were several very good talks, as well as several indifferent ones. On the good side there was the talk by Merlin Mann. Very entertaining and very useful as well. Leo Laporte and Alex Lindsey gave a good talk on podcasting and video podcasting. No slides in this one, just a conversation with the audience. Andy Ihnatko gave a good talk about how to use iTunes and iPods better. The Expo show floor was a typical trade show. I had a good talk and made some contacts with Jamf Software about Casper that’ll be useful for work.
I wouldn’t rush back to Macworld. I’d rather spend the money on attending Apple WWDC. This is a better conference for my needs. Entries in the Moscone Centre schedule for June list a corporate event from 8th to 13th June. That’ll probably be WWDC 2008. I’ll hopefully be at that.
This entry was composed using MacJournal 5 which has just been released and I’m testing to see if I can adopt it as my journal and blogging software. If you are reading this then it works!
UPDATE: MacJournal isn’t going to replace Ecto for blog editing.