Spent the day at MacWorld Expo, just did the exhibit halls. Got a kick out of AppleSkinz — they make plastic G4 case overlays like tribal tatoos, American flags, licking flames, etc. Would be an okay idea, but most of the designs look like they come straight out of the Harley scene. The appearance of the people behind the booth would tend to verify that gross, and very unfair generalization. They’ll do custom ones out of EPS files too.
Saw the new iMacs – in person pretty much what you would expect after seeing the pix and videos. Still feel torn about that design. They’re extremely functional – gotta hand it to Apple on this one – they actually put function over form for once. I’m sure a lot of people love the design, but it reminds me too much of the furniture we all had in the early 70s, all that molded white plastic curved stuff out of Kubrick.
Hunted down and found a good deal on a combo USB/FireWire external drive enclosure. $99. Going to format it FAT32 for PnP compatibility b/w macs and win machines, carting MP3s around, backups, etc.
Went to see David Pogue (“OSX: The Missing Manual”) speak. He was pretty good and I learned a few tricks, but he seemed like an Apple schill, too obviously skirting problems in OS X and talking only about the good stuff. The clincher was during the Q&A. I axed him about his personal OSX wish list for future releases. He claimed he couldn’t think of a single thing he wanted to see improved. Riiiiiigggghhhhttttt.
Stopped at the Omni Group booth and thanked them for OmniWeb’s great cookie viewer, which was invaluable debugging php cookie problems the other day. Got a demo of Graffle – great app, but can’t think of a personal need for it. Bought a boxed copy of OmniWeb at educational show discount.
Bumped into an old work mate from the Adamation crew. Made me feel kind of nostalgiac, but not really.