Mac World with Dad

They say that this could be the last MacWorld.. it could be.

I picked up Dad when I went to MacWorld on Thursday. I dropped off lesson plans and took some of my comp time. I headed over the hill and picked him up at 10:40. We sailed into the city with the traffic not slowing us down.

We were there by noon. I parked the expedition on the top floor of the parking garage about two blocks from Moscone Hall. After locating our bar coded, emailed free passes, we headed into the exhibit hall.

MacWorld occupied both sides of Mascone.They did not house half of the convention in the West Wing like they had the year before. We dopped down on the elevators and it looked like we were in the vertical software section. It was the side that didn't have Apple. There were a couple of cool cars to look over, including an Acura race car from formula one.

We prowled around a little and decided to head to the other side through the underground tunnel. The other side had the Apple booth. It was pretty big, but not as big as in previous years. They had big posters of ILife 09. We watched a demo of IWork and Pages on the big thetre stage. I told dad that we really needed to look at the new IPhoto to see the changes. We buttonholed one of the presenters and he did an update for us on IPhoto with the new face detection software... very cool considering the number of digital cameras out here and a need to organize our assests. He also ran over the latest innovations on IMovie. Since Dad and I have spent a few hours invested in the old IMovie, were were interested in the latest version. What was cool was the ability to seemlessly stitch two versions of the kid jumping into a single segment.

We stepped outside the area, and got a sandwich each and a water and a soda and gathered up our energy to go back inside and find the area where we could buttonhole another presenter and show us some of what he knew about a photo program called Aperature. Dad has been studying it through the online service called Lynda.com. We a support person from St. Louis who provides the 99 dollar yearly service on all Mac software products. He was able to show us alot about Aperature. Most of which dad knew already.

I bought dad an overlay for his keyboard so that when he is doing Aperature, he will have all the key strokes available to him right on top of the keys.

I found this guy selling some interesting non photoshop software on the floor. It looked like it had great promise for doing photoshop portrait work. Dad bought it.

We were off and out of the center by 4:30. I was home in Merced by 8'oclock and change.

It was quite a day.

No big vendors were at MacWorld. No Adobe. The photo companies had very small booths, and so did the print vendors, HP and Epson.

There really wasn't much new to report. The usual pooled sellers were not there. The book salesmen were there but with much smaller displays.

There were many booths that had names hung on the sign, but no both materializing. The economy may have taken them out after they had paid for their book.

The whole show was much more vertical.. software that fits a niche. It was still worthwhile in the sense we were able to get up close and personal service.

Love
Pat