MacWorld CreativePro Expo in New York ended today. For once I managed to spend most of my time on the expo floor, finding several new interesting products in the process. Currently internet access is sporatic, so please stay tuned over the next couple of days for those and other news, including our final edition of the "MacWorld Report". Additionally check back for extended MacWorld coverage with picture galleries, video clips and interviews from the Expo.

Thanks for 'hanging out' with us this week. We enjoyed it.
- posted by Fabian @ 4:57 PM

 
Harman Multimedia has several new speakers shown at their booth. The most popular model is the 5.1 surround sound JBL Encounter. It's large subwoofer, which draws 200 watts by itself, looks like a space ship modeled after the Coneheads. All pieces of the system "float" above blue lights which are emitting from the bottom of the speakers. The system has 450 watts of over-all power and sounds like it could blow your head off. The retail price of the 5.1 version of the encounter will be $399.95 when it comes out later this year in november. The 2.1 version which has the same subwoofer, is also impressive, and will be a hundred dollars cheaper. Harman also showed off their new Invader speaker set that features 4.1 surround sound in a little smaller space. (at least as far as the subwoofer is concerned.)

The Tekserve booth was also one of the bigger attractions of the expo, featuring their "Two headed iMac", a burned out Macintosh SE, and several other 'monstrosities'. I'll check by them again tomorrow and learn more about the two headed iMac. I'm sure you'll be interested.

Today I also attended Peter Max's feature presentation which I will talk more about in my next "MacWorld Report". Peter Max told several stories, including how he got the ball rolling on renovating the Statue of Liberty.

Be sure to check in tomorrow for more coverage from MacWorld CreativePro Expo. - posted by Fabian @ 3:33 PM

 
I just came back from my first two conference sessions. First I attended Photoshop: Uncanny realism with Bert Monroy. Bert, who is one of the biggest names in photoshop teaching and artistry, showed off several techniques in creating several of his well know photoshop "paintings" that are as photorealistic as any thing I have seen. Topics ranged from creating wood textures, to neon lights.

Next I checked out David Pogue's "Making iMovies with David Pogue" (very unique name for a session I must say). David Pogue, who always makes any topic he is speaking on interesting through his comedy and approach, based the whole hour on creating a short Apple commercial that centered around a speaker who talked about TCP/IP in a very monotone voice. Soon mostly every one was asleep, except one girl who seemed to be happily listening to the presentation. In the end the speaker came down to the girl and told her how much he appreciated her listening to the whole speech. She just took her iPod ear phones out and asked "Excuse me did you say something?". "iPod. The power to tune others out."
- posted by Fabian @ 1:12 PM

 
The Feature presentation with Greg Joswiak is over. Here are a couple of points that he covered. Joswiak started off the presentation telling the audience that his name was a mix of two famous names in the company. I'll let you figure out who they are. The first major topic discussed was MacOS 10.3 Panther. Greg gave several demos covering Expose, the PDF viewer (scrolling through 978 pages very quickly), Font preview, and printing capabilities. New printing features will include, for one, support for virtual postscript printing. Allowing users to utilize printers that don't natively support postscript. Additionally drag and drop printing is going to be back in panther, and under the print to PDF menu in the Print window users can now select from additional PDF plug-ins.

Apple Script was also discussed. Greg showed off an Apple Script that converted several large image files into smaller JPG's and created a website that included the images. This was possible due to new Image Events build into Apple Script. Image Events allow users to crop, rotate, scale etc. images inside any Script. Basically all the Pro features of Panther were covered. Greg went on to show of Expo with the standard demo, and then went on to Pixlet. A, now standard, Finding Nemo trailer was shown using the Pixlet codec, the video looks smooth and artifact clean. "HD/2 24-fps runs smoothly on a G4
PowerBook".

Soundtrack was also shown off by creating a small sound track for a video clip. It was then announced that Soundtrack will be available as a separate application from Final Cut Pro for $299.

Greg went on about MacOS X server which now features a method that lets users have one password for everything from logging in to OS X in addition to other services on the network.

The rest of the presentation covered the PowerMac G5. "We needed to make a giant leap." said Greg Joswiak. The G5 showed of specifications mentioning that the G5 which has over 215 in-flight instructions. The AGP 8x ProGraphics, 1GHz system bus, and cooling system were all shown off.
It was noted that according to Apple the G5 was 42% faster in converting 75 RAW images into tiff compared to Xeon, or a P4 when run un-optimized for the G5. Sounds good for a start.

Of course any decent keynote or "special presentation" couldn't be without a showdown between the newest PowerMac vs. PC. This was accomplished by playing music in Cubase on both a Xeon and the G5. The Xeon stuttered. The G5 didn't. "We love to run stuff faster." In addition, Greg demonstrated streaming video coming from an Xserve RAID box. The video was streamed to a G5 and composting was done to insert a video clip of people dancing in front of a solid color screen, into the middle of london. All in real time. Not bad.

- posted by Fabian @ 10:34 AM

 
Welcome to our daily report blog for MacWorld CreativePro Conference & Expo. In the next week you will hopefully find daily updates from happenings on the show floor and conferences on this page. I will post as many news worthy items as possible.. hopefully the ones you want to hear about. So go ahead and send me an e-mail to fabian@coolmacintosh.com about what topics interest you.

In addition, every morning starting the 16th, we will provide a daily report encompassing whatever was news worthy the previous day. For those who would rather not read long reports or even short news bytes, we will also provide pictures and hopefully short video clips. As they say pictures say a million words, but videos... say, I'm guessing, 30 million words per second. For all this and more be sure to check out our front page daily at CoolMacintosh.com starting July 15th.
- posted by Fabian @ 1:25 PM