Macworld Expo Floor

Highlights from the Conference

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Ryan J. Bonnell recaps some of the highlights from the floor of the Macworld Exhibition Hall and provides his insight into what the next year might bring for the Mac faithful.

Two year’s ago at Macworld 2004, Steve Jobs predicted in his keynote address that it would be the year of the laptop. Last year at Macworld 2005, Jobs’ predicted it would be the year of HD (High-Definition Video). For this year’s keynote address Job’s didn’t offer a prediction, but if he had prophesied one it would have been for the year of the iPod.

iPod Accessories Everywhere

At this year’s Macworld Conference, iPod accessories dominated the showroom floor, and there doesn’t appear to be any lack of momentum for that to change in future Macworlds. The iPod has experienced an incredible demand over the past year, and meanwhile iPod products and accessories are being created at an astounding rate.

While the industry pundits keep warning of declined growth in the iPod market, Apple keeps releasing striking numbers of improved growth—and their current stock price reflects this momentum.

If the saturation of the floor of the Macworld conference is any indicator of the future growth in the iPod accessory market, then 2006 will prove to be the best year yet.

“Big” Vendor Support

Macworld wasn’t just about the iPod, the excitement surrounding the OS X platform was alive in good spirits, as evident by the support and presence of Apple’s traditional big vendors: Adobe/Macromedia, Microsoft, Belkin, Quark, etc.

The “big boys” were out in full force showing off their latest and greatest products, but behind all of the flash demos, we couldn’t help but wonder how far along they were in making their flagship products universal binaries.

Many of the smaller (and newer) software developers have already released universal binaries for their applications, but what about the likes of Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and Microsoft Office? Sure, Apple’s own consumer applications are already universal binaries—and in March we’ll see the Pro apps get updated—, but in order for the Intel transition to really go smoothly, Apple needs the Adobe’s and Microsoft’s to update their apps to run on Intel.

Thankfully, Microsoft has renewed their commitment to Apple for another five years at minimum, but look for this year to mark big announcements about the availability of universal binaries.

Small Business Developers

While the larger vendors always seem to attract the bigger audiences, we couldn’t help but notice the excitement and innovation coming from the small to mid-sized software companies. Inspiration has always been evident from this faithful group, and this year was no disappointment.

The price for an exhibitor is still pretty steep, so not all of the Mac indie software developers could afford to showcase their creations, but we were marveled at the ones who did. The EyeTV 2 from El Gato was stunning, as was Marware’s ProjectX, and Endicia for Mac and let’s not forget about Zimbra’s AJAX-inspired collaboration suite (watch out Microsoft—Exchange has a new competitor in town.)

We missed seeing some of our own favorite applications on display, but talking to the developers of Transmit, (Cabel Sasser), QuickSilver, (Nicholas Jitkof), NetNewsWire, (Brent Simmons) and Endicia for Mac (Pat Castaldo) face-to-face made us remember why we fell in love with these applications in the first place.

Apple Design Awards

The expo wouldn’t been complete without Apple inviting their Design Award recipients to the expo, and this year’s winners were top notch.

Panic’s Transmit FTP client software took the award for best Mac OS X Tiger technology adoption, for its use of features like Automator, .Mac sync, Spotlight, Dashboard and more. Delicious Monster Software’s Delicious Library received the Best Mac OS X User Experience.

The Best Product New to Mac OS X award went to plasq’s ComicLife, an application that turns digital photos into comic book-like strips and panels.

Blizzard Entertainment walked off with the Best Mac OS X Entertainment Product award for its multi-player online role playing game World of Warcraft, which was released simultaneously for Mac OS X and Windows.

The Best Use of Open Source award went to OsiriX, a medical imaging product that lets radiologists, surgeons, clinicians and others examine images generated by MRI, CT and PET scanners.

The Best Mac OS X Scientific Computing Solution award went to DataTank from Visual Data Tools Inc., a mathematical modeling and graphics, data mining and programming utility.

If you haven’t checked out each of these applications, you really should take a look at them and you’ll see why they’re worthy of their awards.

Head-to-Head with Apple

In every Macworld event there are always at least one—if not more—stories that don’t receive a lot of media coverage, but turn out to be big stories to those parties involved. This Macworld was no exception, and we were shocked to learn about one such story— Karelia’s Sandvox.

In seeing the new product announcement of iWeb to the iLife suite, we couldn’t help but wonder what the developers of Sandvox must have felt considering that iWeb is invading on Sandvox’s turf. Yes, the products are different and some of the biggest limitations of iWeb can become strengths for Sandvox. However, just like the folks of Panic learned with Audion, it’s hard to compete with Apple when iLife (and consequently iWeb) is included on every new Mac. Of course, Karelia knows this story all to well itself, when Apple invaded their turf with Sherlock, the free replacement for Watson.

Thoughts & Reflections

From the keynote address, to the exhibition floor, to the social scenes and meeting the developer’s of your favorite applications in person, the Macworld Conference & Expo is a must attend event for any serious Macintosh user.

We were delighted to be a part of this year’s conference and look forward to what next year’s Macworld Conference & Expo has to offer.