Category: Life

A day at Macworld Expo 2010

I tried to make it to Macworld last year, but work got in the way; this year, I did a better job of defending my calendar (and having the expo include Friday didn’t hurt, either) and was able to make the trip.

IBM (mostly Lotus) was out in force — they were greeting attendees at the bottom of the escalator and promising “sweet tweets” at the booth. And they delivered, with a nice “candy bar” (which was completely depleted well before lunchtime). In addition to the calories, they had four pedestals set up, showing Lotus Sametime, Lotus Notes, and Lotus Symphony (all of which I happen to have on this very computer, imagine that!), as well as Lotus Connections (which lives on servers) and LotusLive (which lives in the cloud).

Microsoft had a big booth, too, but not much content — they were showing Office 2008 for the Mac but talking about Office 2011 (which will be ready late this year). I suspect that the show cycle didn’t match up with their development cycle as well as they’d hoped.

I suspected I’d be making a few impulse purchases at the show, and I was right — the first one was from 4iThumbs. It’s an iPhone screen protector with bumps, designed to help you learn the virtual keyboard; I played with one and decided it was worth gambling $15 (show price) to see if it can help me type more accurately on the phone. I haven’t yet actually installed it, but maybe I’ll get to it tonight.

Two years ago, I picked up an earbud Jack to keep my earbuds from tangling, but it wasn’t a good match for my FrankenBuds. So this year, when I saw the Budsock, I insisted on a tryout before parting with my $4 — the earbuds were barely small enough to fit, and it works. Recommended.

The last impulse purchase this year was a pair of RichardSolo 1800 external iPhone batteries (at two for $50, how could I resist?). I’ve already used one to get me through a long day of GPS mapping, and the other one’s on a truck to New Orleans. So far, so good — though I really don’t know why they added the LED flashlight and the laser pointer.

The only talk that I really wanted to see this year was at the OmniGroup booth — Merlin Mann gave a talk on “Advanced Secrets of the Omnifocus Ninja”. Since I’m using both the iPhone and Mac versions of OmniFocus to help manage my life and get things done, I thought it’d be an hour well-spent (or at least one which generated amusement), and I was right — Merlin’s demo has helped me get a handle on perspectives, one of the most useful features of OmniFocus. And Merlin’s schtick was funny, too. But I got my best tip before the presentation, talking to one of the real Omni people — use Yelp bookmarks to keep track of restaurants to try, rather than OmniFocus. A tool for everything, I guess.

Scanners were big — both Fujitsu and Neat had large booths (nearly adjacent), and there were a few other vendors. I had hoped to get a deal on a Fujitsu ScanSnap at the show, but they weren’t selling there; fortunately, Costco has them on sale this month, and one is wending its way to my door even as I type this.

Most of the iPhone app developers were in one area, packed four to a tiny table — it was crowded, to say the least. Microsoft was there with their Bing app, cheek-by-jowl with one-person outfits. I had an interesting conversation with the developer of Snoring U. Smule, the Ocarina people, were there with several amusing apps. And I spent some time catching up with John Wolpert of Cabulous, which would be a good tool to have if I ever needed a taxi in San Francisco. There were several GPS apps, and lots of picture-sharing tools, too.

Headphones were another popular category — Sennheiser and Shure both had huge booths; I was amused to see Shure was selling phono cartridges, even one for 78rpm records. And, of course, there were many vendors selling cases for MacBooks and iPhones — and iPads. I think I’ll wait until I have an iPad before I buy a case, though.

I wasn’t sure how well Macworld would do without Apple — but I think it came through just fine, and I hope to return next year.

Three days with the IBM Academy in [internal] Second Life

The IBM Academy of Technology used to have an Annual General Meeting where the 300 or so members, along with guests and senior IBM executives, would spend three-plus days in intense interaction, setting our agenda for the next year and taking advantage of chance meetings. Oh, and socializing. It was a highlight of my year.

That, of course, was before the economic meltdown.

Last year’s meeting was cancelled on fairly short notice; instead, we used teleconferences and Second Life to hold the meeting; it was an uneven experience (but having the meeting cancelled did make it easier for me to enjoy a very nice tour of New York, so I wasn’t completely unhappy about the substitution).

I’ve attended a couple of meetings using the behind-the-firewall version of Second Life this year, and, as I’ve written here and here, I found the experience less than thrilling.

This year, they made the unsurprising decision not to hold a physical Academy meeting, which meant that I could expect to spend a significant part of three days in the internal Second Life environment. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, but I didn’t see any alternative — especially after they got the code working with Snow Leopard, depriving me of what seemed like a great excuse not to participate.

I’m still not a big fan of the virtual environment (and am very happy that one of the nine mini-plenary sessions was held at Almaden so I could see some of my colleagues in person), but it was a far less unpleasant experience this year.

As before, I think that the very best feature of the environment is the spatial high-fidelity sound, which makes conversations, even in a group, much more realistic than a teleconference. In public areas, the sound tended to carry a bit too far — this was good when it let me eavesdrop (and choose to join) a group conversation with a very senior executive; it wasn’t as good when there were a lot of conversations in a small area, as happened during the closing social event.

The team who put the conference together did some innovative things, like setting up the poster sessions so that each poster was in a sound- (but not sight-) isolated room — you could easily have a discussion without being drowned out by conversations in the hall or at an adjacent poster, which is better than a real poster session, but you could see who was in a room as you walked by (one definite improvement this year was the integration with our LDAP directory, so everyone’s avatar was identified with their real name). And poster presenters were given better instructions, too — many came with one-sheet posters which you could actually read in the environment, rather than trying to show a series of slides which needed more screen room than was available.

I still found many aspects of the virtual space to be distracting or counter-productive — there was a lot of tedium involved in getting from place to place, and watching a slide show in-world is not an inspiring experience.

Another interesting choice was the way video messages from senior executives were played — you went to a theater, sat down, and watched as a video was played (at a low frame rate and resolution) on a screen at the front of the room. It reminded me of Apple’s first Mac commercial; I think the video would have been better served up without the trappings (and outside the virtual space, at higher quality).

One social hour went very well — the space was arranged so that I was able to position my camera overhead; I could see the names of everyone who was there, and when someone talked, the green-bar animation made it clear who it was (and the audio quality made dealing with accents much easier, too). And there was even room for a text chat on the screen, for additional comments (both public and private). It beat the hell out of a teleconference.

Using a big screen (relatively speaking — 20 inches, 1600×1200) instead of the laptop’s screen made a big difference; I didn’t have to squint to see things (and I was able to do other stuff on the laptop screen). Using a headset also helped, because then the sound was properly aligned with my vision — the first day, I used the external screen but the laptop’s speakers, and that was a problem. And having a new MacBook Pro with the fast graphics chip helped, too, though it did a number on battery life and made the machine run hot.

I still found no reason to spend any time or effort customizing my avatar, though if it had been completely generic, I might have wanted to do something to make it more recognizable at a distance, but I was fortunate enough to have been used as a test case for “realistic” avatars earlier in the year, so I was already wearing a distinctive aloha shirt. Nor did I see any reason to drink virtual drinks at the socials (though many people did — and some lucky folks were at home with real drinks available).

I’ve been using Lotus Notes for more than 15 years, and I’ve gotten fairly good at making it do what I want — but, with apologies to my Lotus friends, it’s not a tool that I really like. I expect that the same thing will be true about meeting in virtual spaces — it’s going to have to be part of my toolkit, and I’ll get better at using it, but I don’t expect to become a fan. And I look forward to the time when those who are enthusiasts stop trying to convert skeptics and settle for helping us become competent enough to get our work done.

Now, can I tell you about this wonderful Mac-only application I just started using?