Everyone has a Mac in SF

... not really, but close. It goes hand-in-hand with hipness. Contradictorily, though, the MacWorld expo is an extremely geeky place. I should know. I was there today.

No, I didn't get to see Steve Jobs' keynote speech. That happened two hours before I got there, and you gotta be 1337 to get in. For those who don't know what that means, you get the gist. What I did see was a convention center packed with people, booths, iPods, Powerbooks, and lots of black jackets (but everyone in SF has a black jacket so that's nothing amazing). By the way, this is what my boss and I did today in lieu of going to the office (thus far, my job is pretty swizzank).

So, the announcements that I caught wind of: (And a quick note: those of you who care about any of this will almost certainly have looked these up on some Apple fan site... the rest of you will give the following a hearty, "Neat," at the most.

1. A new iPod. It's incredibly small (both in size and storage capacity, but not in price!). It costs $99. Dude, look on eBay... you can get way more bang for your buck. There are arguments against me, but really, this thing isn't that neat in my opinion. I think Apple's just trying to bring the iPod to the "common man" or some shit in a really stripped-down form. The presenter kept emphasizing how exciting the "shuffle" function is. For god's sake, they're even centering their ad campaign around this (and the fact that iTunes will "auto-fill" your iPod for you with random songs from your library). Wow, it's random, just like life.


2. iWork - now, this is cool. It's 2 apps. One of them is Keynote 2, an upgrade to their presentation software (think: PowerPoint). It just looks really sweet, and makes it easy for anyone to create flashy presentations. But what's cooler is Pages. This is their new Word Processing software. Maybe, just maybe, this will help to phase out usage of Microsoft Word (which sucks). Anyway, Pages makes it really easy to make really nice looking documents. And it has this cool feature where you can drag an image around on the page and the text orients itself around it. So, like, you can type a page of text, then put a big image of an orange in the middle of the page, and the text margins will curve around the edges of the orange.


3. Right about at this point in the blog entry, I feel like a big stupid geek.


4. Tiger. The next version of OS X. It has these cool widgets that can look up flight info, weather info, calculate stuff, work as a dictionary or thesaurus, etc. And they zoom out of nowhere when they come on the screen. Whoosh! It also has this thing called Spotlight that finds files really fast. And Automator, which makes it easy for people to automate just about any task they do regularly on the computer.

There were more announcements, but now I'm bored of writing about them. I'm going to buy a digital camera as soon as I can decide which one to buy. Once I have that, I'll start posting pictures of all the weird stuff I see around the city every day. Even the process for taking out my garbage is weird: You go down 3 flights of windy, dark stairs that open up into a small outdoor area. Then you proceed to walk kind of under the building, then out into another open area (between 2 buildings) and there (to the right) you find an area with 6 or 8 trashcans. I have no idea how many people in how many buildings use this same area, or how many other routes can be taken to get to this hidden garbage cove. It's just weird.

The girl next to me in the coffeeshop is browsing Friendster.