Macworld SF 2005

I missed not being able to watch the Keynote live this year, but it always was a bit of a hit and miss affair as far as bandwidth goes. I often found that the video and audio dropped out just before Steve-o announced something insanely cool. Streaming or no streaming, there seems to be some juicy stuff coming out (mostly leaked beforehand, but it's still nice to see the reality). I think the product I'm most excited by is the iMac mini

I missed not being able to watch the Keynote live this year, but it always was a bit of a hit and miss affair as far as bandwidth goes. I often found that the video and audio dropped out just before Steve-o announced something insanely cool. Streaming or no streaming, there seems to be some juicy stuff coming out (mostly leaked beforehand, but it's still nice to see the reality). I think the product I'm most excited by is the iMac mini — that wee thing is adorable. It looks like someone has stepped on a Cube and squished it in a cartoon accident kind of way. The specs look pretty good for the price, and since I might be in the market for a replacement for my ageing iMacDV, I'm certainly interested.

The iPod shuffle is a bit more of a puzzle. It looks nice in a fairly bland way, but I'm just not convinced that even 1 GB of space is enough. If there's one thing I've learned from owning an iPod (a 10GB 2nd generation model), it's that having a big reservoir of music is an enormous plus. I hardly ever sync up my iPod, and I listen to it everyday, but I never feel like I'm hearing the same old thing again. But people will no doubt snap them up like hot buttered toasted teacakes. Actually, Apple seems to be a bit worried about potential food/MP3 player confusion; there's a footnote to the caption "Smaller than a pack of gum and much more fun" which reads "Do not eat iPod shuffle". The headphone cord will get stuck between your teeth.

I use Keynote quite a lot¹, and the changes included in Keynote 2 within the new iWork bundle look good (and somewhat overdue). I don't think I can really form an opinion on the word processor, Pages, until I try it out. The shots make it look like a 'home' product, rather than something you could use for academic writing, but that might be just the way they've presented it. I've always liked the idea of being able to integrate all kinds of frames on a page (text, image, graphs etc.) without worrying about what kind of document you happen to be writing in — it was a good thing in AppleWorks, and other office suites like KOffice also have it. I'll probably give it a go.