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Tags: mac, macworld2007, vacation

Macworld Vacation: Session Summary

Friday, January 12, 2007 at 10:48 pm

Although the content of my previous blog entries would indicate otherwise, Macworld wasn’t all play. Tuesday and Wednesday were devoted to User Conference classes. Here’s a quick summary of all the classes I attended.

The New New Media

This session was headed by Jon Alper, director of technology at WGBH Interactive. WGBH is one of the top PBS affiliates in the country, and PBS handles the web like none other.

The discussion centered around WGBH takes shows like Frontline and transfers content to the web. It also delved into the impact of the social networking sites like myspace and YouTube — more specifically, whether content providers should choose to work with them.

Personally, I was glad to see a room full of people having the same doubts I did. YouTube and myspace may look like enticing options, but there are many disadvantages as well.

All in all, this was my top session of Macworld.

Photoshop Realism

Bert Monroy led a session on how he creates his masterpieces. Although I’m not a huge fan of his style (I’m more of a photorealist), it’s awesome to watch a master at work. Have you ever seen a document with over 15,000 layers?

TikiBar TV

Embarrassingly enough, I hadn’t ever seen TikiBar until this session. The two creators (minus LaLa, sigh) gave a very interesting talk on how they became accidental pioneers in the world of podcasting.

The talk itself was entertaining and informative, and I picked up a new phrase: “bag of ass.” Initial usage: “This was our old video camera, which was a bag of ass.”

The Mac in Your Living Room

I have been hacking away at media centers for years, and so this was a “must-attend” session for me. It was a nice breakdown of all the video standards and techniques for playing Mac video on a television.

Podcasting 101

This session was led by two Apple employees: one was the classic Steve Clone, who covered using Garageband to record a podcast. Steve Clones are usually pretty annoying, as they try to mimic Steve Jobs’ sales techniques every 5 seconds.

The other guy was fantastic… he’s the guy who decides what podcasts make it into the iTunes Podcast Directory. Much more informative — I have many links to try in the coming weeks.

Summary

All in all, these sessions were a lot more informative than I thought they would be. I’m definitely going to have to look at these next year.