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Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Notes from Macworld 2008

Live, from the Microsoft "Blogger's Lounge" at this year's Macworld Expo, some disjointed notes and observations:



  • I had absolutely no idea how many different companies were attempting to make a business out of carrying, storing, protecting, decorating, or otherwise interacting with your iPod. Seriously, it's insane. Ever third or fourth booth is occupied by someobdy with a new and improved carrying case.


  • Office 2008 is certainly shiny, and seems to have lots of good features. However, it's introducing a UI innovation not unlike its corresponding Windows version's "Ribbon", and the implementation is flawed. It has lots of flashy animations- when you change to a different "tab" of controls, the new controls sort of swoop in from the left. This is cute the first time, and then gets annoying. Fast. The spokespeople all seemed to agree that there is no way to disable the animations. Lame.


  • Office 2008 also introduces some basic bibliographic management features. Unfortunately, they only support three or four reference styles: Chicago, APA, and one or two others that I've forgotten about. There's no way to import or add new styles. Double lame. Apparently, you can edit existing ones, but then what are you supposed to do if you need Chicago style for something? I don't think EndNote has anything to worry about.


  • The people at OmniGroup's booth were friendly. Big congrats for winning the "Best of Show" award with OmniFocus!


  • The Nikon D3 is a seriously sexy camera. I took a picture at ISO 3200 that had about the same amount of noise as my D70 has at ISO 400. You can practically shoot in the dark with that thing.


  • The new Macbook Air is even shinier in person than in pictures. That doesn't change its constrained feature set or exorbitant prices, but it's still impressive. Also, I'm guessing that the target customer for that thing isn't worried about either of those things...




More notes as they come...

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