MacWorld

I drove (Tom's car is a truck, so its gas mileage sucks). Have I talked before about how lovely the drive up I-280 to San Francisco is? Rolling hills, the hills to the west, often with good views of clouds rolling off the ocean over the hills and heading into the sky to become clouds, it's great. If you drive north around sunset the sky is often lit up bright red from the sunset.

Parking was tight around the Convention Center where MacWorld was held, but we got lucky and pulled up to the Fifth & Mission Street Garage just as they were opening up new spaces. In fact, we got free valet parking. Handy!

As Apple employees, we basically could get into the two large exhibit rooms for free, but not into the presentations and seminars, so we just went for the exhibits.

Okay, so picture two really large rooms filled with booths, with hundreds of Macintoshes on display running various software. It's pretty amazing! I probably would have been even more impressed if I hadn't been working at Apple for ten months and weren't used to seeing Macs everywhere.

What did we see? Well, we checked out the gaming area first, and I was surprised (albeit only a little) to see that there was only one game out for the Mac that I didn't know about (not a big surprise since the Apple Store on campus has nearly all of them): Unreal Tournament, which is basically very similar to Quake, but with slightly different weapons. It actually looks like it might be a viable alternative to Quake providing a few different options: The Rocket Launcher which could fire multiple rockets at once was pretty cool. Still, by the time we get tired of Quake no doubt a better game than either of these will be out.

I had a look at Descent 3, another first person shooter which involves flying aircraft zipping around in a gravity-less environment. I wasn't so impressed with the controls and found shooting at other robotic things less satisfying than killing humanoid creatures.

There were also various peripherals for games, especially including a special chair with large sound speakers built into it to give you the whole volume-and-vibration experience of the game. Wacky!

We got to see the spiffy Apple Cinema Display flat panel, which looked slightly smaller than I'd expected, but is cool enough that I would consider buying one with my next Mac depending on the price. I do hope that flat panel manufacturing techniques improve over the next decade so the prices come down; they're ridiculously expensive right now.

We stopped by the little WebObjects display area and talked with the two guys manning the booth. They asked us which group in Apple we worked for, and I pointed to their sign and said, "This one!" We chatted for a little while about what our next release will be like; they're looking forward to it. I think they are training guys, and the trainers always are pretty pumped up about the stuff we produce, which is cool.

There was a big Handspring booth - really very big, really. I've heard rumors that Apple and Handspring are considering some sort of joint partnership, so I wonder if Handspring is specifically targeting the Mac user? That would be pretty cool. We saw a demo of some of the 3D software that was (Tom says) used to create the effects on Babylon 5. And we saw a cool example of a graphics card and monitor which could be used to display computer images in "real" 3D with the assist of fancy 3D glasses. It was quite cool, a new dimension (so to speak) in game realism. I have no idea if it will take off.

So, basically there were many things to see. We wandered around trying to find lunch, and were largely foiled by the best-looking places being jammed with (as Tom called them) iGeeks. We finally went into the Metreon and ate at the noodle place that Lucy and Sei took me when we went to the Cartoon Art Museum last month. Tom pronounced their food "awesome".

We finally pooped out around 3 pm and headed back to Apple. A worthwhile day. I also picked up my own copy of Quake 3 Arena at the Apple Store in the morning.

You might have heard about Steve Jobs' keynote address at MacWorld on Wednesday, where Apple unveiled its Internet strategy. To my thinking, the main elements of this strategy involve a tighter partnership with Earthlink - the ISP Apple's been using for people with iMacs to get automatic dialup Internet access - including investing $200 million in the company, and providing free e-mail and network disk space to people running Mac OS 9. OS 9 also allows the user to treat that network space as if it were any other disk, rather than having to FTP files around. This all seems pretty useful and might persuade a few more people to buy Macs.

Apple's also providing an "anti-filter" as part of OS 9 called KidSafe, which is a database of sites certified as safe for kids, and which is tied into the Mac's user management system so that people logged into a kid's account can only view Web sites which are in the database. Personally I'm ambivalent about filter software given the charged political atmosphere surrounding restricting access to the Web, but this will probably be attractive to people who are in favor of systems to provide such restrictions. I wonder how effective KidSafe will really be.

Apple's also providing a few other services which seem to have less utility. iCards is an electronic greeting card system. Tom pointed out to me that this is basically free advertising, so I guess it makes some sense. It's geared towards providing nice artwork and photography for the cards you send, as well as rendering them in e-mail directly rather than providing a link to a page. And then there's iReviews, which is a site of Web page reviews by category, reviewed presumably by some group of Apple employees somewhere, with the ability of users to also provide commentary. It's not clear to me how useful this will be, either to users or to Apple.

You can find most or all of this stuff on Apple's Web site, though you may not be able to access much of it if you don't have a Mac running OS 9.

Steve also unveiled Mac OS X, Apple's next operating system which is a major revision based on the NeXT OS, meaning it's a UNIX variant which will look like a Mac. He displayed the "new UI" (as we call it around the company), which has a candy-colored look mirroring the bright colors of the iMacs. I hardly think the color scheme is revolutionary, but it's a nice little change, and I think is a little brighter and friendlier than the rather drab "Platinum" look at Mac OS sports now (and which Windows also has, in an even less friendly-looking form).

It also provides some new doo-dads in the system such as a "Dock" (the word for which was spoken quietly so that someone turned to me at first as we watched the keynote and said, "Did he say 'duck'?") at the bottom of the Mac screen where documents can be minimized. Yes, it's similar to the Windows taskbar, only with a graphical representation of the documents which allows them to be distinguished - overcoming a major flaw in the Windows version. It's also got some spiffy special effects, although we all wonder how hefty a computer you'll need to have for all of this to work smoothly, since effects are very computation-intensive.

Still, OS X won't be released for months (well, not that I know of, but I rarely have inside information about OS X so I'm not a good source) so there's plenty of time to refine and improve the system and its performance. I've been saying for a while that as long as OS X has a UI that people like and performance that people can live with (or, better yet, actually like), then everything else will follow in time.

Subrata and I went to play ultimate tonight. My quadricep seems completely healed and I played a pretty good game. It's pretty much a game of inches for me as I build up my skills again (not to mention my endurance). The biggest frustration for me is that I'm one of the tallest people on our team, which means I spend a lot of time covering opposing tall players, who tend to be taller than me, and in better shape, so while I can keep up with them for a while, if they take off down the field too often, I just can't keep going for too long. Aargh.