by Jason Whong
MacWorld San Francisco is arguably the most exciting MacWorld show on the North American continent. While I've never been to Mexico City, I've heard that the show there is dominated by programs popular for the publishing market. And while all MacWorld attendance pales in comparison with the Tokyo event, I still think that Mac World San Fran is the most relevant to Mac users in the English-speaking world.
Ambrosia didn't have a booth in San Francisco, and part of that was because trade shows are extremely expensive. We felt it would be best to attend the show once to assess the viability of an Ambrosia booth in San Francisco in 2001. While the jury is still out, there were still plenty of exciting things going on.
I'm sure most of you have read on-line accounts of Mac OS X's snazzy interface, and while reviews are mixed right now, I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of it. I'm a critical thinker, and I don't just hop on every Apple bandwagon, but this new interface looks like it takes Apple to the next level, and that is very diggable.
What's even cooler is that underneath the yummy interface is a robust operating system that is (as far as I can tell) crashproof. The Mac will be more stable than it was even in the 68K years with Mac OS 7.1, and that will be a great selling point. Once Mac OS X gets released, Apple will finally be ready to pounce on corporate computing.
I'm not quite sure what Mac OS X means for gaming; perhaps it is cool that the screen is a PDF; perhaps this will make games slower. Maybe newer Mac Games will ship on boot discs with a minimal darwin OS on them; maybe the G4 kicks so much processing butt that this won't be necessary.
I don't know.
Anyway, the Games area was a total hoot. The National Macintosh Game Championship was especially entertaining, as was the general atmosphere in the Games Area. Of course, I have never been to an E3, so I don't know exactly how it compares. But still, everybody was friendly. After all, many of these people see each other only once every six months.
New this year was Bungie's BTV webcast, an interesting video stream from the gaming area. It takes cajones to try something new, and Bungie deserves a round of applause. Buy their games.
The Mac games Area itself was somewhat sparse, with only 4 publishers having booths larger than 10x10 (the smallest size allowable) - MacSoft, Bungie, Aspyr, and Graphic Simulations. Rounding out the mix was Blizzard, Freeverse, and Monkey Byte with their own 10x10 booths, as well as Suncom Technologies, who put forth a great effort, but were ultimately shafted by IDG Expos - placed in a dead aisle on the side of the show floor, without even a healthy corner to sustain them.
Ambrosia went with a 1x1 (yes, that's one foot by one foot) booth this year, which is quite unconventional. To do this, I hung our awards from MacHome magazine around my neck, and paraded around the expo floor. Andrew was there with me, and people were excited to meet him. In fact, he's so muscular that he could have been called a 2x1 booth. In any case, I wandered throughout the entire show, sometimes with Andrew, and sometimes on my own. My time in the game area was quite exciting.
Much to my chagrin, perhaps the most active section of the Game area was stocked with non-game companies like Industrial Light and Magic, who were handing out only posters, as far as I could tell. I think the game area would have been much more cohesive if the game companies' booths were in the higher-traffic areas.
Overall, I think that almost everyone walked away from the show excited about the Mac, and about all the cool products showcased in San Francisco. It almost made me forget that the Mac is still a minority platform.
Perhaps the most exciting thing was what I saw on the way out of the Expo: robed figures handing out vouchers for free programming classes at CodeWarriorU.com. All we need is a few thousand more aspiring programmers, and the Mac shareware scene will really start to take off!
To close, I leave you with a pic of Ambrosia's 1x1 booth, graciously provided by John F. Braun of the Mac Observer, which was one site that had excellent coverage of the show. I was especially impressed that they ran so many pictures, which you can look at here as well.
