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10) It’s held in San Francisco
9) Get free stuff
8) Meet Mac celebrities
7) Compare products from multiple vendors
6) Meet developers of your fave apps
5) Receive first-hand experience of products’ attributes
4) The Apple consultants booth
3) See/touch/taste latest Apple products
2) MacWorld Live! with David Pogue
1) Learn new skills at free workshops

10) It’s held in San Francisco. San Francisco is a thriving, bustling, happening city. I stayed in a hotel in Union Square, just a 10-minute walk to the Moscone Center where MacWorld is held. Union Square is in the heart of downtown SF. Catch a cable car on Powell St. to Fisherman’s Wharf. Take BART to the airport in 30 minutes. Numerous restaurants in the area serve every cuisine imaginable. One night, fellow traveler, Brad, and I dined at Lefty O’Doul’s cafeteria-style restaurant. The next night, we upped the ante to Les Joulins’ fine French dining with live jazz. And shopping! Macy’s, H&M, Virgin Music and so much more.

9) Get free stuff. The expo is chock full of vendors wanting to sell you their products. Many of them give away treats to promote their services or products. From the folks at Parallels Desktop, I received a 128MB flash drive with a demo copy of their software on the drive. Free copies of the current issues of MacWorld magazine and MacLife, formerly known as Mac Addict. From Mac Tank, a coupon for a slice and a drink at SF haunt, Blondie’s Pizza. From Quark, a fine baseball cap. MacUpdate passed out CDs containing software with hundreds of the CDs containing registered copies of said software. Nifty promotion.

8) Meet Mac celebrities. Some of these people would probably balk at being called celebrities, but they are well-known in the Mac world. Some are authors, magazine columnists, Apple engineers, or just someone whose name you recognize from the reply to your support email. Columnists and editors whom I met in the User Group Lounge included Christopher Breen, Chuck Joiner, Jason Snell, Bob LeVitus, Adam Engst and Tonya Engst.

7) Compare products from many vendors. I took the opportunity at MacWorld to get some close up views and handling of various laptop bags. There are many styles to choose from: briefcase, shoulder bag, and backpack styles are just three that I focused upon. And wouldn’t it be cool if I found a bag that could easily go from backpack to briefcase style? I tried on bags – how did they feel? could they be easily adjusted? and most importantly, did they adequately protect ‘my precious’? I didn’t make a purchase at Macworld, but it was fun getting my hands on the goods for an accurate assessment.

6) Meet developers of your fave apps. A few weeks before MacWorld 2007, I purchased a bundle of software for $50 promoting independent Mac developers. The Mac Heist bundle included a dozen apps, most of which I had never heard of. The promoter, Phill Ryu, donated a portion of each sale to charity. This successful campaign sold 16,821 units, raised $200,000.00 for charities, and increased visibility of some previously little-known gems.
One such application is Disco, a disc burning utility. I began using it because its interface is so simple! By comparison, Apple’s free Disk Utility is confusing and not very intuitive. Strolling through the developer’s pavilion at MacWorld, I noticed the Disco icon on one of the tables. There I met Jasper Hauser and Austin Sarner, creators of Disco. They were promoting their other product, ZapApper. I introduced myself and got all my questions answered about Disco and ZapApper. Austin hails from the Boston area and Jasper from Amsterdam.

5) Receive first-hand experience of a product’s attributes. There I was at MacWorld, taking pictures, when the smart media card on my Olympus digital camera became corrupted. I had almost a dozen pictures that I thought were lost. Then I went to the friendly folks at the PhotoRecovery booth. Ray Hasinger was able to recover all 11 images from my card and put them on my thumb drive for later downloading to my laptop. He was very helpful, suggesting that my AA rechargeable batteries were running out of juice in the midst of writing to the image storage card, thus corrupting it. I changed to a fresh set of non-rechargeable AAs and the images appeared back on my previously corrupted card! Thanks, guys!

4) The Apple Consultants Network. Stand in line for a short wait to speak to an Apple Consultant - free! Brad was assigned to one of the 5 professionals on hand to help him with his queries. Brad’s consultant gave him valuable advice about maintenance for his laptop.

3) See/touch/tase the latest Apple products. It should come as no surprise that Apple has the largest booth. The Apple display area is in the center of the south hall and take up a good one-third of the floor space. Two main stages were encircled by 30″ cinema displays running the latest Apple software, staffed by black-shirted Apple employees. Demos and presentations of Apple goodies ran continually on the stages. I watched a presentation on Leopard, OS 10.5, due out this Spring. I got excited by the many cool features like Spaces, Time Machine, and easy-to-build Widgets.
The iPhone was there in all its glory. One single iPhone floated above a tall pedestal under protective glass. There was always a crowd standing around it, drooling and taking photographs of this rare animal.

2) MacWorld Live! with David Pogue. Wednesday morning, 9am, I went to Room 134, not knowing what to expect. What a fun hour! David is an upbeat entertainer. He bounded onstage and, much like Leno or Letterman, launched into his 12-minute monologue. Very entertaining. He had three guests: Phill Ryu (yes. the fellow who dreamed up MacHeist); JF Doucette, musical director of Cirque du Soleil’s “O”; and a fellow from Space Adventures. They are all Mac-loving geeky guests who brought their laptops with them to demonstrate some cool Mac thing. At the end of the show David, who plays piano, and JF, who plays bass guitar, sang a couple of songs. Not just any songs. How about “I’ve Got You Tube” sung to the tune of “I’ve Got You, Babe.”

1) Learn new skills at free workshops. My last hour at MacWorld was one serendipity after another. I stopped in at the Digital Photography area, intending to listen to a presentation entitled, “Telling Your Story: from Photos to Slideshow.” All 25 iMacs had people sitting at their stations, so I found a seat on the floor at the front of the open classroom. Just as the class was to begin, the 12-year-old girl seated next to her grandfather lost interest and left her seat. The grandfather offered me her seat. And so I got a front row seat for the class and use of an iMac. Then the teacher came on stage and explained that he would show us how to use the slideshow program, Fotomagico. Here was yet another program I owned through the MacHeist bundle, but had not yet had a chance to play with it. What a great surprise! Serendipidity #2. I learned how to create a slideshow using images from my iPhoto library or any of its albums, and music from iTunes. An added bonus was learning some tricks to make my slideshows rival a Ken Burns TV special.

It was a fitting end to a fab MacWorld and just one of the reasons I’ll be going back next January.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 12:54 pm and is filed under geeky, macworld, out and about. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.