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NOTES FROM MACWORLD EXPO

My initial summary impression at Macworld Expo 2005 is: Why on God's green earth would anyone anywhere ever ever use Windows if they had a choice? Price? Not any more. There are no rational arguments left to endure Windows machines. Here's my report, live from Mac World Expo (the Press Overrun ballroom where we don't get to breathe the rarified air of Steve Jobs and Al Gore, inventor of the internet but we do get to enjoy second-hand basking):

First, Apple CEO Steve Jobs looks fantastic, recovered nicely from the illness made him look so drawn and thin last year. He's got some muscle on him and a lot of energy. Of course, Jobs shows up wearing the same jeans and black mock turtleneck from sometime in 1994. All a relief to know that the guy responsible for so much revolutionary thinking is likely to be around a while. Yes, I'm a fan of the guy. No, I would never want to work for him.

Second, the guy knows how to work a room. Most of us are literally sitting on the edges of our seats with each new announcement. It takes a few hours to come to your senses after the magic of the event.

Third, the new products Jobs introduces are very very cool from a shareholder, environmental and consumer standpoint. The new hardware is versatile and small, geared to reduce the amount of useful but obsolete stuff that finds its way into landfills. More on that later. New software and upgrades are dazzling time-savers.

Here's the new stuff:

SOFTWARE

The upcoming new release of the Mac OSX, TIGER features SPOTLIGHT which will find anything on your HD like lightning. It replaces the Find command. The results window is beautifully organized and intuitive. MAIL is integrated into Spotlight, as is absolutely everything else. This advanced finder is built into the Operating System rather than working as a separate app so it's almost as fast as your brain. Okay, my brain.

QUICKTIME 7, a video and audio player found on every Macintosh, is one of several PC-friendly products that Apple provides. It has a new scaleable codec, from cell phone screen sized to HD. It scales without a skip, though I'm guessing my G3 wouldn't show it so elegantly as did their G5. 97% of the Quicktime downloads are by Windows users, and they're about to get another terrific mpg 4 viewer.

DASHBOARD replaces OSX Panther's Expose, once again really elegant user interface - a place for widgets to live. There is a widget toolbar that appears to replace Sherlock. You can pop bits of it in small transparent windows, and widget tools are being developed for all kinds of specialized uses. Stock prices, dictionary, thesaurus, maps, conversions, world clocks and so on, can be brought in to view and diminished easily. They flip and rotate like multi-sided solid items. The graphics are wonderful - not as "lickable" as the turquoise gel motif of a few years ago but just fabulous. And if you're a long-time Mac user, it's a long long way from the old Apple Menu Desk Accessories.

HD - Jobs is pushing the whole High Definition technology this year. Between video editing programs iMovie and FCP Express, and the aforementioned Quicktime 7, every Mac media process now takes advantage of editing in the HD 264 standard. The difference is dazzling to view. The NTSC television format we're used to viewing in North America is a 4:5 ratio 720x480 pixels. High Definition is a longer 16:9 ratio cinema-like rectangle of 1920 x 1080. The early High Definition televisions I saw were so gorgeous and lifelike you could fall right into them. The CEO of Sony introduced a new Prosumer HD camera which lists at $3500.

iCHAT - Based on broadband connections, the new iChat can serve up 10 simultaneous audio chatters, or four motion picture window (including your own self) video iChatters. iChat still works nicely with text for as many participants as you can stand, and those lower tech friends can be part of the fun at their own level. The demo showed good resolution and the audio overlapped, none of that one speaker blotting out the other. Mac.com and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) accounts are both served by AOL, the accounts are free, and if you have friends on the other side of the world like I do, insist they get themselves mac.com or AIM accounts. (Yahoo Messenger works, but it's clumsy and graphically dorky and harkens back to the old days of javachat.) You'll be more inclined to stay in touch and it's free. The accounts are free, and use is free. (Mac.com will give you a free trial and in the years I've had the free trial account, I've never been billed for it or encouraged to use the other services. AOL tells you right up front that their AIM account is free.)

iPHOTO is all improved. Notably it now has editing capabilities which for my own uses would keep me from resorting to fixing pictures in Photoshop about 80% of the time. When I produce Get Lost Magazine's web pages, I mostly fix color and contrast, and crop and straighten crooked pictures. Editing can occur from within the app windows and even within the picture book setup pages. Jobs got oos and ahhhs with the simple act of straightening a picture in a few clicks, which sounds like a simple function but one which until now has required a bit more doing. I've always found the red-eye and wrinkle removing functions in iPhoto to beat the hell out of Photoshop. The algorithms in iPhoto's red-eye correction are better than my efforts to paint black dots over red dots in Photoshop which look, not surprisingly, like black dots over lighter black dots, no matter how carefully I match the existing black dots.

The iPhoto custom hardcopy and bound books available through mail order now offer more choices, including smaller pocket albums. They're a better bargain, more pages per book for the same price, and the small pocket book is only $3.99. iPhoto not only stores and organizes and views still photographs but video. Sorting in iPhoto can be done by keyword and there's a calendar view I find particularly useful. It now supports the RAW format for high end digital photography. Slide shows have more transitions and Ken Burns effects, though I find 95% of the transitions hopelessly distracting and cheesy. Lots of people love them. Professional editors usually don't, but they can be fun. (As a former professional video editor, I think transitions can be limited to cross fades, but the other stuff is fun if the content is iffy.)

iDVD has new menu interface designs, no notable improvements that they announced.

Apple is going after Microsoft Office with the new iWORK apps. They replace AppleWorks and are integrated seamlessly with all the other apps. The demo is impressive, and for the first time I'm considering abandoning Word which until now has been the industry standard, and aggravatingly more difficult with every new version.

HARDWARE

The big unveilings were for the Mac Mini and the new iPod Shuffle.

The MAC MINI is small. Steve Jobs brought one out on the stage, holding it in front of him as a kid would hold a prize-winning guinea pig. The new device is about that small. A little CPU, it's BYODKM, Bring your own Display, Keyboard and Mouse. Here's the thing: ANY Display, Keyboard or Mouse, even your PC leftovers. The little G4 box is $500 and targets the PC holdouts who don't want to spring a grand for an iBook.

Here's the think I love most about the Mac Mini: It actually promotes responsible consumerism. Far be it from me to get all squishy and lofty and earth friendly when talking about fun stuff like computing, but I think anything that allows a person to re-use perfectly good monitors, keyboards and mice instead of pitching because it doesn't work with the new stuff, is a very very good thing. And if it's cheap and comes with devastatingly great software, all the better.

I commiserate with the price point holdouts who do without some Mac stuff. Even though I love my iTunes , buy music from the iTunes store, and play it on my iBook, I've never owned an iPod which starts at $250. Today Apple trotted out something to fill the cheap $125 Flash player market - the iPod Shuffle. It's tiny, hangs on a lanyard, simple, and it can double as a USB drive. The end cap pops off and it fits into the USB port to load with music. Music can be played in playlist order, or it can be played in shuffle mode, which is the most popular way iPod users enjoy their music. It has a 12 hour rechargable battery (saving about $100 a year in AAA batteries the competition consumes). Storage can be allocated for data and music, so that when the Auto Fill function loads music onto the Shuffle, your data is safe in its own area.

Accessories include an armband, WP case, dock, and a battery powered 20 hour extender, mostly running about $29 each.

The other guy's flash music players average $150, hold 60 songs. The iPod Shuffle has a 512 MB 120 song model for $99, and a gigabyte 240 song version for $149.

So, for my own computing evolution, the questions are these:

• Will iPhoto replace Photoshop? For 80% of my editing needs, it very well may.
• Will iWork replace Microsoft Word? God, I hope so. It will read and save Word format files so I can play nicely with the Windows world, and will easily do the things I need to do and can't figure out in Word. Their templates are numerous and very beautiful, a graphical quantum leap from the dorky clip art stuff in Office.
• Will the low-end iPod Shuffle replace my current habit of humming to myself on my commute, or only listening to my 300 plus iTunes on my laptop? Very likely and soon.

Save the world, save the whales, save your sanity. Get yourself a mac.