New product announcements at the July 2002 Macworld Expo in New York City were overshadowed by a big, furry X. Literally. The poster for Apple's latest OS was the tallest single object in the exhibit hall. Of course, if you wanted to read about Jaguar, you'd have gone to www.apple.com/macosx.
In the absence of major players such as Adobe and Macromedia, who declined to show at this summer's Expo, innovative products from smaller vendors seemed to stand a little taller and do a little showing off, reveling in the attention of Macintosh fans who had more time to linger in each booth.
Here's a virtual tour of some of the interesting things I found as I explored the Javits Expo floor in search of delights yet discovered.
This device (roughly the same size and shape as an early Zip drive) and its accompanying software give you TiVo-like capabilities on your Mac--without the monthly fee.
For a one-time price of about $200, you can hook up your TV (broadcast or cable), DirecTV, camcorder, VCR or DVD player, and EyeTV (www.elgato.com) digitizes the video and sends it to your Mac. There, with the help of the onscreen remote, you can do instant replay, pause, skip commercials, and all that TiVo stuff. (At 650MB, EyeTV can hold an hour of video.) If you're the multitasking type, you can receive live TV in one window and watch a recorded program in another.
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Perhaps the best part of EyeTV happens later, when you save the video on your Mac. You can create a library of your favorite video, burn it onto a VideoCD (playable on most DVD players), or export it in QuickTime format. So, although the EyeTV unit itself is portable, all you really need to carry on the road are CDs to view your favorite programs on the PowerBook.
Meanwhile, your EyeTV can stay hooked up to your Mac at home, recording your selections while you're away. El Gato has partnered with Titan TV, which looks up the schedule of whatever broadcast or cable service that you're signed up with. To set EyeTV to record a program, just click it on the schedule, up to 14 days in advance. As an alternative to TiVo, EyeTV gives you the ability to save video and burn it onto CDs. The drawback (or benefit, depending on how you look at it) is that your Mac becomes your TV set.
Both Canon and Nikon were drawing lots of attention from show attendees, many of whom wanted to know the best digital camera to buy so they could get started with iPhoto. I polled Derrick Story, coauthor of iPhoto: The Missing Manual, and he recommended the Canon S200.
This little 2-megapixel wonder fits in your shirt pocket and weighs in at a svelte 6.4 ounces. Yet it has many advanced features such as long shutter mode, custom white balance, QuickTime movie recording, spot meter, adjustable ISO ratings, and sequence shooting. Or you can set it on "Auto" and just click away.
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The S200 uses Compact Flash memory cards and retails at the Apple Store for $349, but was seen for as little as $314. If you want a beautiful camera for on the go, this is Derrick's top recommendation.
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Related Reading iPhoto: The Missing Manual |
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If you find yourself juggling lots of different memory cards, then the SmartDisk Universal Reader might be your next "must-have" item. Since it's a mass storage device, it doesn't require any drivers for Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, Windows XP, 2000, or ME. But it can read four different types of memory cards including Compact Flash and SmartMedia. You connect it to your Mac via a USB cable.
The Universal Media Reader normally sells for $49, but the show special was a very reasonable $39.
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Also newly shipping is Creo's Six Degrees, as in "six degrees of separation." This program is able to create and remember the relationships between the documents you work with and the contacts and messages in your email program.
For instance, if you create a document and email it to someone, Six Degrees remembers both the document and the recipient's name and considers them part of the same project. If someone else emails you another document with a lot of the same keywords as the first one, that document and that person also show up in the legend window.
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Six Degrees continually monitors new documents you create and new emails you receive, so that you can watch the legend change in real time. Compared to launching Sherlock or scrolling through your email list, Six Degrees may be the quickest way out of those "I know who sent it to me, I just don't remember where I saved the attachment" moments. Six Degrees can't show you paths or let you rename documents in its legend window, but part of the beauty of the program is that it only displays documents as links or aliases. It can detect just about any kind of document on your Mac (any that you'd want to open, anyway); you still do your work in the original application.
With the advent of the Jaguar Address Book, Six Degrees's contact features may seem superfluous, but if you're the type of person who hates burrowing through files or dealing with elaborate folder organization, Six Degrees may be $99 well spent.
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What would a computer show be without accessories? The coolest accessory, though not technically new, is Contour Designs's Shuttle Pro. The Shuttle Pro looks like a wide, flat mouse, and feels more comfortable than most standard mice. If you do any video or audio editing at all, even splicing home movies in iMovie, you need this device. Its rubberized central wheel is the only humane way to operate a scrubber bar. Outside of that, the Shuttle Pro shines in its titanium-like finish and its fully customizable buttons (four below the shuttle wheel and nine above, all in easy finger distance).
After all, when you're using an audio or video program, you're probably going to spend more time with the mouse than the keyboard. If you put some thought into customizing these buttons, you may be able to avoid shuffling your hands to the keyboard entirely. (How do you remember what all those 13 buttons do? The top 9 have removable labels. The Shuttle Pro also has a Dock icon that you can click to see and change your customized settings.)
Imagine getting just the most useful features of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, for one-tenth the price of Microsoft Office. Then throw in 20MB of free backup space on the Web (even Apple doesn't give you that for free anymore). Want to stretch your imagination further? Then just suppose that this program works in Mac OS (both Classic and X) in Windows, and in Linux Red Hat. Just buy one Thinkfree Office CD and you can install the program on as many computers as you like, as many times as you like. (Take that, Microsoft!)
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And if you're on the road and forget the CD ("say, you're at your friend's house," says Thinkfree's Sungmin Ro), your single $49.95 license grants you the right to download this Office suite as many times as you like. This company not only thinks different, it does different.
Thinkfree Office works on all three platforms because it's written entirely in Java. Its toolbars are neat and clear--more like AppleWorks' than Microsoft's, although Thinkfree Office cannot deal with AppleWorks documents. Thinkfree decided to pick its battles, to do fewer things but do them all well. So its Office can open any file created in any version of Microsoft's from any platform, but its presentation program can't insert QuickTime movies, as PowerPoint can. ("That's something kids like to play around with, but movies aren't used very much in a corporate environment," Ro argues.)
Documents opened in Thinkfree Office don't look exactly the same as the original, and you do miss a few bells and whistles (its list of spreadsheet functions is slightly less endless than the one in Excel). But for one-tenth the price (not to mention one-tenth the disk space), you can do just about anything in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint you'd need to do on a given day. In fact, if you're Microsoft-free and all you need is something to open all those .doc, .xls, and .ppt files people insist on emailing you, it's not a bad deal at all.
Many kinds of workers (editors, artists, lawyers, and consultants among them), bill by the hour. While accurate recording of those hours is of utmost importance, many of us aren't very good about "writing it down," and cheat ourselves out of hundreds of dollars. If you're an employer of people who bill by the hour, on the other hand, your biggest concern is getting what you pay for. Is everyone working on the most urgent project, or is one person turning his or her attention to a lower priority job? Did you make enough money on your biggest account, or do you feel that you're spending more than half your time on something that brings in less than half of your money.
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Gluon Job Tracker, by automatically monitoring how much activity takes place in the applications on Mac and Windows computers on a network, as well as tracking non-computer items such as phone calls, takes the guesswork out of work.
Once you tell Job Tracker what applications you're using and what kinds of jobs and rates you're working with, all you have to do is choose the job from a pop-up menu and get to work. The difference between using Job Tracker and programs that show how long a program has been open is that Job Tracker is sensitive to activity. Once a set amount of time since your last keystroke has elapsed (30 seconds, or 5 minutes, for example), Job Tracker turns off the clock. Unless you switch to working on a different job, you're off the hook as far as recordkeeping goes. Whenever you're working, Job Tracker is timing you.
As a boss, Job Tracker gives you an increased feeling of serenity. You don't have to wonder who's working on what project in what application--you can see each worker's activity in a compact list. So if a big deadline is looming, you can see who's "working" in Internet Explorer instead of Excel and ring them up with a gentle reminder.
Which begs the question, what programs can Job Tracker track? Just about anything ... Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Word, Excel. If Job Tracker doesn't recognize it, marketing vice president Seth Elgart assures you that Gluon will write you a plug-in for it.
Nan Barber is the coauthor of Office 2001: The Missing Manual as well as the Missing Manual series copy editor, having edited the Missing Manual titles on Mac OS 9, AppleWorks 6, iMovie, Windows Millennium, Dreamweaver 4, and Mac OS X.
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Copyright © 2007 O'Reilly Media, Inc.
