Things I want from Macworld
Now that Macworld Expo is officially over, I have come up with my own list of things I'd like to get. This is not a Best of Show kind of list, but things I'd actually spring money to buy.
I don't have an iPod, so that eliminates half of the stuff on the show floor. That was easy, wasn't it? But if I had an iPod, iSee is what I want. You slip your iPod into the back, and it becomes a full-fledge portable video player and recorder. It has a 3.6 inch screen in front, 4-hour battery life, and isn't any bulkier than other portable multimedia devices on the market.
Every year I'd dream about getting organized with my paperwork by turning it all into digital documents. Then I look at the growing piles of papers and the time it'd take to scan them one-by-one with a home scanner, and I go back dreaming. But Fujitsu's ScanSnap may finally change that. It looks like a compact printer but it's a scanner. You feed a bunch of papers from the top, press a button, then it automatically detects single- or double-sided, color or black-and-white, different size and skew sheets, and quickly scans them into PDFs. I saw it in action and it's fast. I have till January 31st to get $50 off by entering SSMacSF06 using the above link.
With all my paperwok scanned, I'll need another external drive to store them. The LaCie Brick looks like Lego blocks but it's a hard drive. You can stack them just like Legos, too. The colors are fun and they come in different sizes, both physical and storage wise. The Brick isn't up on the web yet, but I'm sure you'll find it on Lacie soon.
By contrast, if I want to get all serious with my storage needs, then it's the Maxtor OneTouch III, Turbo Edition for me. It's a 1-terabyte RAID- yes, that's 2 500-gigabyte drives in one - that'll hold all my documents for years to come.
I don't know the hardware requirements, but I'm all for watching and recording TV shows on my Powerbook, since I don't own a television set at home. And the EyeTV 2 software can make the process easy and fun. It looks like part of the iLife suite, and It's only $49 till March 31st.
Speaking of iLife, iLife '06 is on my list, too. I have no use for GarageBand, since I don't do podcasts. I don't make home movies, except for the few I take with my camera in video mode. iMovie is out. I've only done one DVD to show off, so iDVD is not for me, either. What's left in iLife '06 are iPhoto 6 and the new iWeb. I want those. iPhoto 6 supposedly has major speed improvement, which is badly needed. And I'm hungry for iWeb to update my .Mac homepage, though I know it will no long be located there after it's updated with iWeb. So I'll have 2 homepages on .Mac.
That's my list.
So why did I leave out the new MacBook Pro? Simple. I'll wait for a 12-inch or perhaps even smaller model. I already have a 17-inch that sits at home, so now I want one that's truly portable that I can carry with me on trips like this one. This in between 15-inch MacBook Pro isn't what I have in mind.