Excel poses for its close-up at Macworld

Microsoft has released the 11.5.7 update to its Office suite, aimed at the users of Office 2004. You should download this update to protect your Mac from being hacked by compromised Word, Excel or PowerPoint files. Even the Mac has security flaws, but more common are the hacker entry points through things like Office or Adobe’s Flash. (If you aren’t up to date on the Microsoft security releases, 11.5.7 won’t load up. You can check your status in the Updater Logs folder inside your Microsoft Office 2004 folder. Microsoft also has prior updates available for download, to catch you up.)

Microsoft was one of the few big-name vendors at this year’s Macworld Expo, but it didn’t have new software to roll out this month in conjunction with its show appearance. The Redmond Giant was talking up the forthcoming release of Microsoft Outlook for the Mac. (Talking only, since no demos were presented at the Microsoft booth.) Outlook will be a replacement for Entourage, which still has advocates within the Mac expert community. One advantage of Entourage, noted in a Macworld panel, is its smooth interface with Microsoft Exchange servers, operated at countless companies who handle their own e-mail. Outlook will be inside the Office 2011 suite, and it’s not yet clear if it will be sold standalone. Entourage never was. Read the rest of this entry »

Attendees waiting for the keynote to start covered a wide age range

A trade show is an odd thing, an entity that exists only in a brief span of time like a polliwog, a text message or an NBC talk show host’s gig. Afterward, it’s remembered best by those who were actually attending the conference, like last week’s Macworld Expo. But the Web is full of ace prognoses today about the health of the Apple world’s biggest trade show, many served up by people who want to justify their absence.

I’ve sat in that kind of chair, far away and commenting on a show I didn’t attend, doubting its health and relevance and value. Take those comments for what they’re worth. There was a lot of value in being at this year’s Macworld. In the days and weeks to come, this blog will tell stories from being there, ones you couldn’t report any other way about what’s new or what works for Apple computer users who employ their gear as a work tool.

People at the uber-sharp Macintouch.com site are weighing in on the experience, although a serious share of them didn’t experience the conference. Some who were there are saying they noticed a genuine upward age creep in attendees. It didn’t seem any different to me than in years past, except maybe there were not scores of 25-year-olds in an Apple booth. Nothing wrong with the youth of America, but a robust trade show is built of equal parts managers and explorers. 2010′s show had both in my iPhone’s viewfinder.

Unless there was a fountain of youth bubbling in the basement of the Moscone Center, making us geezers somehow look callow, there were plenty of attendees well under 40. The show itself may be elderly in hitting age 25, but many there were not a lot older than the expo’s own tenure. The picture above is a little clue of who was on hand at the first day’s Feature keynote.

If you want to forecast the lifespan of a trade show, you need all your instruments working to make a prediction. When people talk about this year’s MacWorld as “half as many booths” or “no massive vendor exhibits with savvy people inside,” they’re correct, but not accurate. Those raw numbers don’t matter any more than just measuring the wind speed and then trying to predict weather. You want to work with business measurements, because a trade show is a business opportunity. Read the rest of this entry »

More than anything else, more than news of IT asset tracking software or a tiny mic to power an iPhone’s recording of meetings, or the reports of the $6 spreadsheet-plus-word processor for iPhone or transcription software for the Mac, people wanted to know if Macworld was healthy after one day without Apple. It would appear the patient was too busy frolicking to stop and have his pulse checked.

In the vacuum of the month before the doors opened, nobody could tell how spry the old guy’s step was going to be yesterday. The conference organizers invited the right people, to be sure. They got an Emmy winner in David Pogue to kick off the opening day with a show so complete it even included a play about Steve Jobs, written as a parody of It’s a Wonderful Life. They got Levar Burton to play Steve Jobs, so the actor who created Geordi La Forge on Star Trek could swap adulation with Pogue. “I can’t believe I get to meet you,” they each said.

But it’s one thing to put on a good one-act and another to fill the seats. A few hundred yards away from the play, the bodies were thick in the center of a bustling Macworld 2010 Expo floor. “Steve Jobs isn’t here,” Pogue said to start his keynote. But the Apple faithful were, and probably will be even more by tomorrow, the first weekend day in decades for this conference.

You had to be patient, in the face of the Cool New Stuff all around, to squeeze through some aisles and into some sessions. Like Burton, though, people seemed to know that this meeting about the Mac has roots, deep enough to weather the chill Apple showed to the show.

Burton came into the public’s eye the year before the Mac was born, the Reading Rainbow host who’s now in his 50s and producing. Pogue is 46, and neither fellow looked anything but genuine in his child-like ardor for Apple’s solutions. Out on the expo floor there were plenty more less famous acolytes and experts to testify to a shinier future, with evidence of their creations on display.

Macworld is so much bigger than just the Mac these days, and what’s been sloughed off of this event isn’t being missed. For every absent Adobe booth there was an expanded Crash Plan exhibit, where the back up company showed a product range wide enough to be free for The People or priced to help corporations protect untold acres of data. Crash Plan was giving out $60 licenses to everybody who visited its booth. Adobe might have been here before, but I never walked away from their booth holding a free tool that could keep my creations alive.

If I ran a company and wanted to save money on my utilities, I would look into the asset management software from Absolute Software. Tucked away into the Enterprise Desktop Alliance booth, the company showed the sort of product you would expect for corporate servers, tracking the use of Macs on a network to show when they could be put to sleep to reduce power consumption. The software scales from a handful of Macs to thousands, in one office or across an organization’s continental network.

The products sold through Dr. Bott include Blue Microphone’s Mikey, emerging in a new model tuned up to grab meeting notes as well as close-up note dictation. It swivels toward the subject of your video you’re taking with the iPhone. It’s got a line-in port to use for phone recording and three “volume” settings on the gadget that plugs into an iPhone or iPod Touch, new gain settings to help you get the sound onto a file headed for your Mac. Once it’s there, the new Scribe software from MacSpeech will help push those spoken words into text. The software was so new to production release that they were burning DVDs at the back of the booth to tuck into boxes. But it was also being sold at about a 40 percent discount.

That sums up the draw of Macworld, for the faithful who’ve come here for years. Something new, unveiled in the sparkle of a sea of the excited, sold at a steep deal and explained in a way the Web can never match. It was enough of a valentine to why we love Apple’s products to bring a tear to this old guy’s eye. Of course, it helped that the moment was echoing It’s a Wonderful Life‘s finale, when “Steve Jobs” learns that there wouldn’t have been the Web, or Wired Magazine, or popular computers, or Pixar, if he hadn’t invented the Mac.

And it helped if you were old enough to know and love the movie as well as the long haul away from that darkest year of 1998, as Pogue’s play pointed out, when Apple lost $1.7 billion and the last non-Jobs CEO was leading the Mac over a cliff. If a Mac’s life could imitate art, the ardor of the audience and attendees here showed a lively pulse for the products of tomorrow, showed today.

Macworld Expo gets rolling this evening with a pair of media receptions, the start of The New Era that show organizers IDG are promising. Half of the world’s largest Mac and Apple show venues has been removed to the Moscone West hall, evidence enough that things will be new and changed here in San Francisco. The expo may spill into Moscone South, but the hall above that arena is not a conference venue.

This is my fifth Macworld but the first without an Apple mothership hovering in the expo’s molten core. We’re all waiting to see what the impact of the missing lead vendor will be on this 25-year tradition. Registration lines seemed light this afternoon, although the media desk had a steady stream of reporters and bloggers. It might just be a feeling, but the attitude at the press registration desk smacked of genuine gratitude for our attentions.

Read the rest of this entry »

Content is king of the communication over the Internet, be it on a traditional Web browser or in the screen of an iPhone or iPad. While it’s easy enough to just point Safari at your Web site or blog, if you communicate with customers and prospects using news, there’s a new tool that can let the less-technical business person create a mobile app.

It helps if your blog already has an RSS/CSS feed, apparently, something that most blog services include as a tick-box. Yapper promises a means to create that brand-specific app for smartphones and perhaps the iPad too.

We’ll have a look at the tool when it makes its debut at Macworld next week. Early feature sets in the teaser information tout:

APPER (Your APP maker) is an online self-service for bloggers, newspapers, pod casters and others to make their own native mobile apps in WYSIWYG fashion. Key features:

• No coding required use existing RSS/ CMS feeds
• Multiple mobile OS support: iPhone, Android and Blackberry
• Optimized for mobile user experience: Mobile optimized UI (mobile friendly entire article content with images and videos), Content caching (users can read offline), Fast (no straight RSS feed parsing), Location enabled
• Customization options: colors and branding
• Push notifications for breaking stories and events
• Monetization and analytics support

The 25 percent-off discount for Macworld Conference packages has been extended through midnight Pacific time Tuesday (Jan 5). The two-day extension includes the offer of a $10 Expo Pass, which can educate about business solutions as much as many training sessions.

But even one day of those sessions is only $79 through tomorrow night. Some reports show that more than 20,000 attendees are already registered for the first Macworld Expo that won’t have an Apple keynote or a booth. The conference begins in earnest Feb. 11 and features its first Saturday hours this year.

Register at the Expo Web site using the priority code MWHOLIDAY to get the discounts.

The organizers of the biggest Apple show of the year are discounting registrations by 25 percent through midnight, Nov. 29. Use code CREATE25 as you check out of the registration site.

This year the conference includes a first ever Mac Work track in the User’s Conference. The eight sessions in the track are designed to ease a user into employing a Mac in a business environment. The session lineup:

Thursday, February 11
10:30 AM – 11:45 AM Branding Your Small Business Better
1:00 PM – 2:15 PM Mac at Work
3:00 PM – 4:15 PM The Paperless ‘Mac’ Office

Friday, February 12
10:30 AM – 11:45 AM SOHO Survival Guide
1:00 PM – 2:15 PM Connecting with Your Customers Using Snow Leopard

Saturday, February 13
10:30 AM – 11:45 AM Social Media Demystified

The User’s Conference also includes tracks on the new Snow Leopard environment, Music, Creative Tools, Video and a lot more. A discounted registration is less than $150 using the above code.

Macworld Expo organizers have moved the 2010 conference and trade show back one month, into a more sensible February. It’s a welcome change for those of us who’ve been attending to learn, shop and network at the old early-January show dates.

The fate of the Feb. 9-13 conference, which Apple abandoned after this year, is not certain even though IDG World Expo has already said the event will happen no matter how much participation they get. The Expo organizers report that 90 exhibitors signed letters of intent to buy show floor space already. The cost per square foot has dropped, too. Best of all, free passes to explore the expo floor are available now.

As for attendees, the marketing has already begun many months earlier to get us to show up in those expo aisles. The word “conference” has been added to the event’s name, but every class and seminar is now packed into Moscone West; they once spread over two halls. But there’s decent learning on the expo floor, too. It’s worthwhile to make a trip to Macworld at least once if your business is built upon Macs and Apple products. It remains to be seen how much iPod commerce will fill the show aisles, rather than the higher-grade exhibition of business solutions in software and hardware. Read the rest of this entry »

Retrospect is so aged and unresponsive, after using it for more than 11 years here, that I’m moving away from it for our backups. In 2008 the EMC rep at Macworld said a new version would be out by the fall of ’08. EMC missed that date, not a good sign for its commitment to Mac. Really now: OS X is just another Unix under the covers.

Time Machine gets the vote here for the newer systems (those running Leopard). Yes, it takes a little trick to get a Time Machine drive ready to boot up in case of a crash, but it’s worth it. Mac OSX Hints has the process here. Well worth the time.

As for Retrospect: Yes, as a business we’ve used it, but it takes tinkering. I’ve probably spent the equivalent of 10 hard drives in rewritable CDs and then DVDs staying backed up. It might be worthwhile to have several hundred versions of the InBox from your e-mail program, but I’ve only looked at a handful of these snapshots over a decade. SuperDuper is far superior to keep a current version of your drives backed up. At $29, it’s too cheap to overlook.

Once a week I schedule a Retro backup onto the DVD plastic. I’m not sure why, but there’s all those years of habit.

Offsite storage is good. I use CrashPlan on the newest iMac and BackJack for our Tiger systems. Each is about $45 a year for storage over the Internet to a remote server. The latter is great at telling you what it’s doing, right down to an e-mail verification. It works the way Mozy did here during 2008, until EMC (them again!) spoiled its Mac interface.

Just this morning I read of another method for offsite backup: Find a Mac buddy who you can have coffee with once a week and swap backup hard drives with them. Do a Carbon Copy Clone of your drive before you go have your grande latte. That way you’re at worst only 7 days behind on a backup in case of a fire. Be serious about the relative value of an offsite backup in the aftermath of a fire. A billboard near my office reminds me that more than 4 out of every 5 businesses — small or large — cannot resume operations after a disaster.

An InfoWorld article echoes a lot of what we’ve heard across the MacWorld expo floor and at the conference. Apple’s departure doesn’t have much impact on the vendor itself, or its many partners who don’t need a massive Apple booth to validate innovative third party Mac solutions.

Trade shows do serve businesses that don’t enjoy Apple’s high profile, but if you’re a show-going vendor, sharing a thinly carpeted exhibit floor with Apple isn’t much of a selling point.

This show might appear in another month than the Consumer Electronics Show, suggests Tom Yager. But the IDG expos group has already called 2010 the start of a new era, with a January 4-10 date.