MacWorld 2007

Computing

My first impressions of MacWorld 2007. This time I ‘watched’ it live on a combination of MacRumors.com and a group on iChat with loads of people on it chirping in from different sources and discussing what they saw, it was a laugh!

Apple TV Nah, not interested, unless it gets hacked to play more than the kind of codecs Apple distributes it’s stuff in. Will it play the range of video that VLC does, I doubt it ….. The box seems too tied to the whole iTunes Store thing …… don’t get me wrong, I like iTunes, it is running all day here, I just do not use it for video and I don’t see myself buying the kind of video Apple sells.

iPhone Gosh, quite astonishing to look at it working!! I love all of that gesture stuff. If I can afford it when it comes out, it will be very tempting ….. On the video side, I am going to have the same doubts as I do for the Apple TV, on the music side, 4 or 8 gig do not seem like a lot, as an Internet device it looks sublime, as a phone dazzling. The big question for me though is, will this be a closed device like the iPod, or an open device like a PC? If Open Source and Shareware developers can easily develop for it and a strong ecology develops, it would be a killer! I would immediately want a SIP Voip client on it !! Can you bring up a Terminal and run an SSH session? ;-) Without an open SDK, the (astonishing) fact it runs MacOSX is largely irrelevant (except that Core Animation looks devine). So I hope they do the right thing there ….. The deals with Google and Yahoo are interesting. I am glad they went for Google not Yahoo maps. It is a shame Google do no IMAP for email ….. OH and I LOVE those little pins dropping down to stick in the maps !! The instant messaging tool he was showing …… is that SMS or iChat? Would SMS not cost a lot if you used it like an IM Client?

Missing I thought MacWorld was supposed to be a developers conference, so I was surprised to see no sign of Leopard.