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No Apple?!?!

For the last year, there’s been a lot of hand wringing and speculation about the health and future of Macworld. The 2010 event would be its 26th year, but for the first time, Apple would not be attending. Macworld has been the cornerstone event for the Macintosh, and now Apple, -centric business ecosystem. Up until this year, it’s the only event where Apple, vendors, and consumers could meet, congregate, exchange ideas, share news, announce new products, all face-to-face. For anyone doing business involving the Mac and Apple products, be it software, hardware, or accessories, this was the show to attend.

With Apple’s announcement last year that it would no longer be attending, the community was shaken, and many felt that this spelled the end of future Macworld. The arguments were with the rise of internet, trade shows were no longer needed, and with a rough economy this past year, the expense of a trade show outweighed the benefits for most businesses. Apple certainly didn’t need to save the money, but for its own reasons, wanted to insulate itself from the cycle of having to do a big product announcement at the Keynote of each Macworld. (That didn’t seem to stop Apple from announcing the iPad separately just a few weeks before, something I see as having been a nod towards supporting Macworld.)

But despite all that, IDG, the company that puts on Macworld, decided to go ahead full steam. The biggest question was whether the vendors would come. Most vendors sat on the fence, waiting to see if anyone else was going to come or not. In the end, there were a lot fewer vendors than in years past, missing some of the large names such as Adobe, Quark, Epson, and Canon. But the vendors that did commit, including some large names such as Microsoft and HP, were there, along with the scores of medium and small players in the Apple econosphere. IDG worked tirelessly to secure vendors, publicize the event, reduce the costs to both vendors and attendees, changed the date from the previously awkward early January time slot to a much more welcome mid-February slot.

…No Problem!

All of IDG’s changes to Macworld 2010 made a huge difference, saving Macworld from death, but leaving it in what state of health? That’s what we all wanted to see. My fear was that the show floor would be a ghost town, with wide open spaces, dotted with anxious vendors peering out from their “we shouldn’t have spent the money on this” booths.

I arrived at the show on Thursday morning, to attend the keynote address, delivered this year by New York Times Technology columnist David Pogue. In Macworlds past, this was the slot where Steve Jobs himself would come down from the mountain and reveal Apple’s latested creation. Its where the iPod was revealed, the iPhone, the iMac, etc. Obviously, lacking that kind of content, Pogue had a tall bill to fill, but as opposed to trying to out-Steve Steve, he did it in his own folksy way, putting on a keynote filled with his own light Mac humor, some music, a skit, and some guests, including Apple enthusiast and acclaimed actor Levar Burton. Despite a potentially hokey event, it went down well, set the tone, and Macworld 2010 was off to a good start.

The show floor was packed. Right from the start, absolutely packed, in a good way. The floor area was about 40% the size of last year’s, and small enough to fit in only one of the two massive halves of the Mosocne Center. Paul Kent, IDG World Expo vice president and general manager, who produced the show, told me that attendance was about 30,000, down from 90,000 in the previous year. And although size is what everyone was worried about, it didn’t seem to put a dent on excitement on the floor. Vendors who were there were mobbed, the Mobile Applications Showcase area was jammed, and the scheduled events were solidly attended. Some photos on clixtr.com.

Stuff I Saw and New Things

Aly and AJ of Marketcircle w/Douglas (middle) at Macworld

Marketcircle, the company that makes both Daylite and Billings, hadn’t committed to attending until just two weeks before, and they’re glad they did. By attending, they were able to submit Billings Touch, their new iPhone app version of their invoicing application Billings, for consideration for a Macworld Best of Show award. And they won it. Congratulations!

at the CrashPlan booth

CrashPlan, the makers of the excellent cross platform backup solution for home and business, CrashPlan and CrashPlan Pro, were there with a large booth. I got a chance to talk to their people about their latest products, and get some demos of some of the finer points of their software. I am really impressed with their stuff, and will be recommending this, where appropriate, to clients in the coming year.

Microsoft let leak a few more details about their upcoming Office 2011 suite of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and for the first time Outlook — NOT Entourage, for Mac. I’m not a big fan of Entourage, due to its myriad of technical issues, nor Outlook on Windows. But the good news is that Outlook 2011 will allow the import of Windows Outlook generated .pst files. This is going to make switching users out of Outlook Windows into Mail.app on the Mac that much easier.

talking to the Neat people

The receipt and business card scanner industry was seeing a lot of activity, with long time player Fujitsu showing their latest ScanSnap scanners, and scanner and software makers Neat were showing off the new NeatWorks for Mac 3.0 . This is great software that, combined with either their mini portable scanner, or their slightly larger desktop model, will scan, and then OCR receipts, cataloging them in an exportable database come tax time. It also does the same for business cards, scanning them and allowing for import into Address Book and other common formats. I wish the sync was a few steps shorter, but that’s what I love about Macworld — I was able to talk to the developers directly, explain my concerns and give them direct feedback. Finally, new players to the Mac receipt & biz card scanner market were BulletScan, who also were showing higher capacity document scanners in the $1000 – $2000 range — perfect for smaller law offices who need to digitize lots of case files.

demo at the Pulse Smartpen booth

Finally, I bought a gadget. I usually let myself try out one gadget per Macworld. This year, I’d been intrigued by the LiveScribe Pulse Smartpen for a while. It’s one of those things that might be a useless toy, and might be a game changer. I’ve always been bad at taking notes, mostly because I’m good at remembering things. But I can’t remember it all, and occasionally wish I’d taken better notes, mostly at client meetings. I’m hesitant to take physical notes, because of the chore of re-typing them into my Mac, and I’m not fast enough (and accurate) of a typist to type while in a meeting. Not being a touch typist, but a hunt-and-pecker, it is distracting to be typing on a computer while talking to a client.

Enter the Pulse Smartpen. It is a combo audio recorder and pen-stroke recorder. When taking notes on their supplied special paper (just like any notebook or notepad, but coevered in nearly invisible micro dots), the pen records your pen strokes, as well as the audio. When you dock the pen in its USB cradle, your note taking sessions are copied into the Mac. The page(s) of your notes are perfectly reproduced on the software’s screen, and you can then select any word or image to playback the audio that was happening at the the time you wrote those words. The words are also searchable, as they OCR your handwriting. And my handwriting is awful, yet the software was able to find almost every word I wrote. That in itself is amazing. It’s much harder to describe than it is to watch the videos on their site. Suffice to say, it works fantastically well — no lag, no slowdowns — its pretty amazing to see in action. With the 10% off show floor special, and Marni Melrose’s demo of how to use it to get notes and diagrams into Daylite, I was sold.

Conclusions

John Gruber presents at Macworld 2010

I enjoyed Macworld 2010, and despite its smaller size, I felt it demonstrated a fundamental truth about Macworld — It’s not about Apple. It’s about the businesses that work with Apple products. All those people need a place to congregate and exchange ideas, and look each other in the eye. I can’t stress that enough, that having face-to-face contact with consultants and developers and engineers is irreplaceable, no matter how much info might be on a product website, or how quickly an engineer replies to your email. It’s also a time for the tech press and pundits to assess the state of the Apple universe, and define their thoughts and musings on the direction of things. Evidence of this was in the many excellent presentations, not the least of which was the talk by John Gruber of daringfireball.net .

I think it will keep going, and I think it will grow… slightly. Nothing can replace Apple’s presence on the show, but I think it will give the rest of the community plenty of space to expand into the new format. Without having to work to Apple’s schedule and needs, the show organizers have more flexibility, and hopefully will use that to improve the show.

You can view my short slideshow of photos from the show here.

With the iPad, Apple seems to have figured out the right combo. More like a grown up iPhone than a scaled down MacBook, its interface is very similar to the iPhone’s, but with changes that take advantage of the size and more powerful capabilities. I’m not going to do a full review here, but I will return to link to reviews and comments by people who’ve had a chance to test and look at the device first hand. In the meantime, learn about it on Apple’s site.