As Sent!

Its been a few days after a crazy Macworld: a period of frantic running from one booth to another meeting hall to a late night tweetup. I’m fully relaxed now, so let me share with you the loot I came out with from the event. I’m only going to list the stuff I actually paid for, not the shwag which I eventually left the most of in my hotel room.

First, the Apple products. The only hardware item that was announce was the 17” Macbook Pro:

I admit that I’m a 15” Macbook / MB Air user so this product isn’t for me, but a member of my family would want to replace an earlier 17” with this monster. There was a lot of talk about Apples controversial decision to integrate the battery into this computer and I can’t wait to test Apple claim of 8 hours per charge.

The only Apple announcement that has been released is iWork. I just installed it this evening, and I’m warming up to it.

I’m truly excited about iLife, and especially iPhoto: as an environmental field worker, I find the geotagging feature by itself worthy of the upgrade..

And now for some other, non-Apple, products:

Since I mentioned Geotagging, the requirement of which is a GPS ready camera. Currently I use the Nikon Coolpix P6000, which happens to be the only major camera release with an integrated GPS. But what about other cameras, both Point-and-shoot or DSLRs?

For awhile I used software from Houdah software, which released version 2.0 of HoudaGeo, a free upgrade to current users of the software. What the package does is simply to chronologically splice GPS tracks to digital pictures.

Going a step further, adding GPS functionality to a DSLR to allow for the automatic geocoding requires some like the Nikon GP-1 unit. This device was announced sometime ago, and even at the Nikon booth at Macworld the attendants were not aware of its immediate availability or price. Luckily, Samy’s Camera offered it on a special sale price of $189.00 (down from $240) in their own booth. They sold out of the item quickly, so my own device will be shipped sometime later this week.

For years I’ve been considering getting an IntelliScanner for home organization, so this time I decided to get the Mini version with loads of bar code strips:

The lady who processed my order was the developers mother, and she commented that he started the company some 11 years ago at the tender age of 13, and now he want to retire!

And finally, this little beauty:

Yes, thats an HP next to a PC notebook. The HP MediaSmart Server works with both Macs and PCs, works with Time Machine and it allows for future hard drive expansions. The only caveat: it won’t be available for the international market until sometime later this year. There are rumors Apple is working on a Time Capsule-on-steroids-with-bells-and-whistles, and with this baby out they should bring it out sooner rather than later.

Thank you aljawad!

(Photos courtesy of our forum member “aljawad”)