Macworld 2008! - Still undersconstuction

What an awesome day we had today at Macworld 2008. Our morning started out very early as Larry decided to we should take the 6:57am Baby Bullet from Mountain View to San Francisco. Stepping out our front door the fog was really obvious and it was kinda spooky! We arrived to the train station and did our usual – one gets the train tickets and one gets the car ticket. The machine for the car would only take quarters so there was a number of people around the machines trying to make it work, eventually one of the men ran to his car and got some quarters for everyone. It was just in time as I pulled out my receipt the train started to pull into the station and I had to run across the tracks with only seconds to spare. As we went from station to station it was really difficult to decide where we were because of the fog, the train was blowing its whistle for the majority of the ride up but we got to San Francisco on time at 7:42.

After a short bus ride we were at the Moscone Center and all I can say it – The FUN began!!

Here are some shots of a chilly January morning in San Francisco:



First person we met was Mr. Tivo and of course we had to take some pictures:

We went to the express booth in Moscone South to get our badges which was really haste free. Here is Larry all decked out with his badge:

Next stop was Moscone West where we just went to look at the people all lined up to get into the Conference. The line went nearly all the way around the block:

Yep that is me in photo # 3 looking at the line!

Back again to Moscone South to wait for the exhibition to open up.  The Keynote speech was going on across the street everyone was trying to get online to find out what Steve was announcing. The Macworld internet access was just not working, I had my MacBook Pro with me and kept getting dropped every 4-5 minutes. People on their iPhone were getting the news quicker and the buzz of excitement around us was awesome! It is amazing the age difference of the Mac followers behind us was a 70 year old man who was announcing to all around him what was going on and in front of us was a much younger group of people.



The 70 year old Mac fan!



A group discussing the announcements.



Larry keeping track of the announcements on Macrumors.com on his iPhone




The line waiting for the doors to open, I was so glad we were just up front.

At 11am the doors were opened and we were lets loose to play in the Macworld like a group of kids at Disney!

First stop for us was the Adobe booth and we sat through a demo of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. I really enjoyed this demo as I am just trying to teach myself Photoshop Elements and doing a lot of work with photobooks in iPhoto as I did a number of them as gifts for friends for Christmas. In Lightroom the images live in one place like a catalog, they are like inventory in a database that knows about the location of the images. By importing photographs into Lightroom they are added to its database, the Lightroom database then keeps track of where the originals are stored and remembers whether they are on the local hard drive or not. I loved the offline feature as you can still see the images and manipulate them and show them to other people with the originals stored on a flash drive stored elsewhere.

One of my goals for 2008 is to buy myself a nice new camera and take some photography lessons and after this demo and a visit to the Nikon booth later in the day, I am more than determined to buy myself a new SLR camera very soon! :-)

Oh I nearly forgot to mention the other thing to remember about this demo is that they gave away three prizes of sofware and I was one of the winners:

And then on to the MacBook Air demo.........I am so in LOVE!! I am like Veruca in Willy Wonka's Chocolate factory " I want it NOW". It was love at first sight at the demo and when I touched it ,then played with it in real life I was just so much in awe I was speechless at how light, thin and portable it is. The most awesome feature for me is the trackpad, they have enhanced the technology from the iPhone and you can swipe, pinch and rotate and manipulate from the trackpad. As I love to work with photos I just imagined how much easier it would be to work with the the Air - my mind was boggled with all the possibilities! The three finger touch to go backwards and forwards through webpages is also awesome!

After the demo and even before I got to touch it, I pick up my six month old Macbook Pro (which I also love) and handed it to Larry ( who is still living in the '80's and has a PC) and said " Here is your gift for all possible presents for 2008 - your birthday, Valentines, Easter, our Anniversary, Christmas etc. You can keep this one, I am off to the Apple store to order myself a MacBook Air" Not sure I can wait two weeks or not sure I can really justify the price as I have a new laptop that is wonderful and a new car that I only got last month. A girl can dream!

The cool display of MacBook Air. 

Some other highlights of the booths or demos we visited:

I had a wonderful discussion with the folks at the Merlin booth. Merlin is advertised as the next generation of project management software for Mac OSX, developed by project manger for project managers. As a project manager for over 15 years I could have talked to them all day! My first question to them was why Merlin over MS Project and the response was that it was more intuitive, easier to use and less features than MS Project. The collaborative tools work in real time over a  network or the internet. It tracks files, risk, resources events and checklists to keep any project on track. I had great fun talking project management to the folks at this booth and when I mentioned that that I soon would be celebrating my 18th year in Project Management and could quote the date - He told me I must be a true Project Manager!! :-)

Larry asked “Is this the Polar Express? and he said “No It is the Bi-Polar Express”
He then added that “ His is not the Conductor but the Semi-Conductor”