MacWorld Creative Pro has been going on for three days now, and even though the size of the expo has diminished from last year, there is still enough to see to fill a full week. Maybe that isn't the case for pure expo attendees, but with conferences in the mix the week for me is fully stuffed. Today's feature presentation centered around Peter Max. Max, one of America's more popular artists who has been the official artist of five super-bowls, five Grammy's, the World Cup USA, and several other events, attended last years keynote at the Javits Center and was attracted by the idea of having his own presentation. And so it was arranged.

Peter Max came on stage and talked about his rise into pop art, after first starting as a realist. "Whenever I came into a gallery the they would tell me 'If we need realism we get photography.'" said Max during the presentation. He also made the point of following your inspirational ideas, especially those that you write off as unreachable. His idea of refurbishing the statue of liberty, after painting it for years on canvas, finally took off after "small windows of opportunities" started opening up during an event at the White House of the Reagan years. Eventually Max managed to start the process of refurbishing the statue in 1988.

Even though the stories he told didn't tie in directly with Mac's, the presentation was still entertaining and insightful. The only time anything was mentioned about computers was in the beginning when the artist mentioned that he does not use computers to create his art, only for publishing or finishing touches.

In addition to the Feature presentation, Conference sessions continued all day. Shawn King's "Surviving on 2000 e-mails a day" was one of the more popular and personal sessions on the first conference level. Several audience members knew Shawn from his weekly Mac internet-radio show, Your Mac Life, and in return joked several times about, lets say personal problems. This included one audience member reminding Shawn about leaving his iPod on a plane.

The expo floor was relatively busy, at least in relation to the rest of this years MacWorld CreativePro. Many of the busy attractions were booths such as Tekserve who provide several crowd favorites, including a two headed iMac. I'll check back today and see how the thing works.

Several products worth noting are Harman Kardon's new speakers. I'll just quote here what I said in our daily blog: "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.)"

In addition, OKI Data is showing their C5100n/C5300n printer which supports Rendezvous detection, and ATI is putting it's Radeon 9800 Pro out there, running games on several Power Mac's surrounding their booth. This is another attraction in Hall 3E, especially with the kids since large gaming areas are at hand during this expo. Another interesting booth is that of the 'League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots'. The league is showing off, for one, their GuitarBot. The "GuitarBot, an electric stringed instrument, is compromised of four independently controllable stringed units which can pick and slide extremely rapidly." Check out www.lemurbots.org to see what it's all about.

That's it for today. Soon I will bring you the last edition of my "MacWorld Report" which will wrap up this first, and possibly last MacWorld CreativePro in New York.

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