Macworld 2009 Day 3 "The Community"

Macworld 2009, Day 3, January 8

Well I decided that today was going to be my last day at Macworld because I've already seen all the booths and there aren't really any sessions or anything going tomorrow, so I'm just going to fly back early which will be nice. So this being my last day at Macworld I decided to make the most of it. O, dangit. I completely forgot to mention in my post yesterday that I went to the feature presentation by David Pogue. So I guess I'll mention that now. This feature presentation was great, David Pogue is a tech writer for the New York Times and he was really entertaining. It was setup kinda like a talk show, he had a couple guests on stage including Matt Harding from the video "where the heck is Matt?", these guys from "You Suck at Photoshop" (they were pretty funny) and the creator of the Ocarina application for the iPhone ( and this was probably the coolest of them all). The guy who developed this application is the music professor at some big university (I can't remember right now, lol) and he has a laptop orchestra there. He gave us a small demo of how it works, and they use the accelerometer inside the Macbook Pro to create sound. In the demo he would hit the screen or touch anywhere on the laptop and it would make some sort of noise. It was so cool, I'll be uploading a video to facebook. So that was yesterday's feature presentation.

I kicked off today by attending a feature presentation by Leo Laporte. He talked about mass media and how media is changing with the internet, and now anyone can produce content and distribute it to the world. It was a really interesting talk. Plus it is always great to hear Leo talk, he is so smart and knows so much about media and the tech industry and always has good things to say. I then went from there and bought myself a tshirt from the Macworld store, it says "I'm a Mac" on the front and then "Macworld" on the back. I was pretty happy about it. I then waited for the expo hall to open.

I went back to the South hall because I had not finished looking at all the booths and such. I also had decided that I was going to buy an Invisible Shield for my iPod Touch. This is a really cool product because they use the same material that the military uses on their helicopter propellors to keep them from being damaged. I also decided to buy some skins for ipod touch as well as one for the back of my laptop. These are really cool first of all cause they have some sweet kick-butt artwork to choose from and because they are reusable, the company is called Gelaskins and I would highly recommend them.

Another cool thing about Macworld is that almost every company is doing some type of raffle or giveaway, so I signed for almost every giveaway possible, but unfortunately did not win anything. But what they do is, they use your badge to get all your information, because there is a barcode on my badge and every booth has a scanner so to enter into the giveaway they just scan my badge, but then they also have my email and all that stuff, but o well. Hopefully I won't get too much spam.

I didn't get to meet any famous people today, but it was still a great day. I got to sit in on a couple live podcasts which is always fun. I was going to go home a bit earlier than I had in the past 2 days, but it was 5:30pm meaning it was rush hour, so I knew I was gonna be sitting in traffic forever. But there was also a meetup at Jillian's at 7 that I wanted to go to, so I just went to McDonald's and got some food and by the time I was done it was time to go to the meetup. O, but wait, I forgot, I did get to meet Andy Ihnatko (a tech writer for the Chicago Sun Times) in McDonald's which was kinda funny. I was just sitting there talking to my dad and I glanced over and I saw Andy Ihnatko standing in line. So I waited till he was walking out and I turned around in my seat and introduced myself and told him I was a big fan of his writing, and that was about it because he had his hands full, but it was still pretty cool. So nevermind, I did get to meet someone famous today. LOL.

Then I went to the meetup and it turned out to be a great night. I ended up talking to this older woman for a bit. She was just asking me what I do on my Mac and I told her I did videography. She has been a school teacher, but she said her real passion is art. It was a really good conversation and so after that conversation was over I wanted to talk to some more people. I met two other guys who ran this news site in Santa Barbara, California, it is called SBLife http://www.sblife.com. We talked about podcasting and videography because they do a bit of that for their site, it was also a really good conversation. Buy by far the best conversation of the night was with the developers of the iPhone applications "Pull my finger" and "Stickie Notes." Their company is called Air-o-matic. It was just really interesting to talk to them about the development process and what the environment is like to develop for the iPhone. Let me just say that after talking to these guys I've realized that developing for the iPhone can be a gold mine. It's crazy how much money you can make from just simple application. I also met the developers of the iPhone app "MIMvista". This is an application that reads MRI's and CTscans of the body brain. It is an amazing application.

I ended staying at the meetup about 2 hours longer than I had planned. This meetup is an excellent example of the Mac community. You can start a relationship with anyone just because we have the simple commonality of the Macintosh. It made Macworld worth it all, and it made me happy and proud to be a Mac user.

Again, it all comes back to the community. This is probably the biggest thing that I took away from Macworld, how important the community of Macintosh is. Without the community the Mac would not be what it is today. And so that is how I will conclude this journal of my Macworld experience. If you a Mac user and have not yet been immersed in the Mac community, I would strongly encourage you to begin doing that, just by simply meeting another Mac user and talk about what you do on your Mac. If you are not a Mac user, I would say that this is one of the strongest arguments for switching to the Mac. Not only is the experience of working on a Mac unbeatable, but the community surround it is incomparable.

For pics and videos of my Macworld experience check out my facebook profile

Macworld 2010 here I come!