I am happy to say that I indulged myself with nine and a half hours of the MacWorld experience. I arrived at the Macworld Creative Pro Conference and Expo at 8:30AM on Wednesday and didn't leave until 6:00PM. I saw and experienced everything the Macworld Expo floor had to offer, I even went to the Keynote. The Expo has been changing every year, but this year it was completely different. Here I present my Expo reflections.

First I attended the Keynote address. Of course the first thing I noticed was how easy it was to get into the Keynote. There was one reason and one reason only for this, no Steve. Instead we had vice president of hardware marketing Greg Joswiak who was actually very good. He reminded me of Steve with his mannerisms and I suppose that's why he was chosen to do the Keynote. However, he was not Steve, he did not wear a black turtleneck and jeans. Joswiak, or Joz as he is known, kicked things off by announcing Soundtrack. Soundtrack is an audio composer that looked very nice from the demo he gave. It allows sound editing without having to use Final Cut Pro, but it also helps you compose music with its library of instruments and effects. Soundtrack is available for purchase now on Apple's website and will ship in august for $300.

Joz then told us about some of the new features in Mac OS X Panther and in the new G5. I had already watched the WWDC Keynote, but Joz actually brought up some things that Steve skipped over. He again showed a demo of thew new Preview rendering PDF's blindingly fast, but also announced that there are now several new options when creating PDF's through the print menu. PDF's are becoming more and more popular and Apple wants to keep up with this. He brought up Expose, which I'm sure you've heard all about already. It shows all open windows basically as thumbnails and is activated by a hot corner or hot key. It can also hide all windows. Joz did, however, unveil something in Panther that Steve didn't talk about at all at WWDC. Panther will include SMB printing, meaning that Macs can now print to shared printers that are connected to a PC. Apple is also bringing back the printer icon, either in the dock or on the desktop, to allow for drag and drop printing. The other software advancement in Panther is Pixlet, which Apple hypes as allowing amazingly high quality movies to play. But I am more excited about its potential to be a decent video codec for Quicktime. The Mac can use as many good video codecs as it can get seeing as how the Mac DivX is so bad, and Pixlet provides spectacular quality. Maybe there is a possibility that Pixlet can be used for some things that weren't planned.

On the hardware side the new G5 had the spotlight. Joz showed off some of the same benchmarks that Steve did at WWDC, showing the G5's blazing speed. However, what impressed me was what Joz said about the new system design of the G5. The dual processors finally mean something because they each have individual busses each running at 1GB . Also the new Apple System Controller can designate tasks to the two processors which means that they will be very effective. Apple also showed that the hard drives in the new G5's will be Serial ATA and will have individual buses. You'd be surprised how much a fast hard dive can speed things up, and these are very fast. The other nice feature of the G5 architecture is that it can take up to 8GB of DDR RAM. However fast a hard drive is, RAM is a lot faster and having a lot of RAM means your applications will rarely have to access the much slower hard drives. Your computer can just dump all the data for a document into the RAM and avoid the hard drive all together for as long as possible. Especially when it comes to working with big documents, this thing can really scream.

The Keynote experience was pretty amazing though. The laughing among the crowd when the Mac blows away the PC in tests is pretty great. Joz mocked the PC a bit too. But although all this G5 stuff excites me more than anybody, I was thinking about important new developments that won't be in the general publics eye, but are still very important. These include standardization such as SMB printing, and fast PDF reading. Also, I'm very glad to hear that IBM is making the new G5 chip because that means that Apple is finally making the initiative to get away from Motorola. Motorola's chips are too expensive to produce, hence the low price of the new G5. They are also too slow with implementation of their research. The G4 took forever to create and longer to push up beyond 1Ghz. IBM is the future and it wouldn't surprise me to see Apple putting G5's in every Mac as fast as they can in an effort to distance themselves from Motorola.

The Expo itself was a little disappointing. It had been getting smaller every year due to the great expense of the Javits center in New York. This year with no Steve, Macworld almost died, but a new sponsor and a new emphasis saved it. The new Creative Pro aspect of it stopped a lot of companies who usually come. Freeverse software was the only game developer present and ATI was the only other booth showing games. Canon seemed dissatisfied with the small size of the Expo and even Apple had a smaller booth than usual. Companies who've seen the smaller size of the Expo won't come next year and Macworld NY will fizzle away. If Apple doesn't step in next year, put some money into this and bring Steve back, Macworld NY will be gone in two years. Coming up are some exclusive interviews that I got on the Expo floor so stay tuned.