I usually have a privacy law seminar on Tuesdays, but by random chance it was cancelled today. So a friend and I drove up to San Francisco to take part in the madness. We arrived at about 10:15, and waited 45 minutes for the expo hall doors to open. Then we waited in this cattle feed registration queue for another half an hour. Thankfully the general attitude in the crowd was bemused acceptance, and the folks working the registration booths were fast and courteous.

Registration was a bit like a cattle feed

The MacBook Air is quite light and thin. Sure, it’s pricy. This MacBook isn’t for everyone. But I think Apple has realized that for many professionals who haul their laptops everywhere, weight is important. Apple is also continuing to push hard with wireless. If I travelled frequently for work, I’d keep a desktop at the office for archiving important files, and keep my working files on the MacBook Air. My guess is that before too long Apple or third-party vendors will start rolling out syncing software explicitly designed for this sort of scenario. More and more of our most important data is also being stored in the Internet cloud, and road warriors in particular are embracing online apps that make hard drive storage less important.

The MacBook Air also reinforces the value of the iMacs and Mac Pros. We have an iMac at home, which serves as our media hub. My wife and I both sync our iPods to it, and if I were to replace my 5.6 lb. PowerBook with a MacBook Air, I’d certainly use the iMac as the hub for all of my big data files, project archives, and so on. I’m not in a position to buy a MacBook Air, but I can imagine this setup would be attractive to many laptop-dependent professionals (and students who have hefty financial backing).

The MacBook Air really is thin and light

Panic, makers of Transmit (my favorite FTP client) and Coda (which flat-out rocks for hand-coding websites) was on hand. I was happy to meet Cabel Sasser at their booth. He was giving out special Panic M&Ms. Gotta love that.

Panic had the niftiest M&Ms I've ever seen

I’d figured the Axiotron Modbook was going to be another piece of vaporous hardware, sort of like the Phantom game system. Boy was I wrong. The Axiotron folks had a huge floor setup and several Modbooks with demo operators taking them through their paces. I have no experience with Tablet PCs, and not enough time with a Modbook to know what it would be like in real-world law school conditions, but the thought of a Mac tablet is intriguing. I’m looking forward to reading some in-depth reviews of the Modbook.

The Modbook was impressive-looking

I was happy to see the Drobo folks out in force. I can’t review the product, because I’ve never used it, and because friends of mine work at Data Robotics. But I will say that Drobo seemed to be getting a lot of positive attention.

The Drobo crew seemed to be having fun

I was also fortunate to chat with GTD guru Ethan Schoonover, who is now part of the team at The Omni Group. He was showing expo-goers how to make the most out of OmniFocus and soliciting feedback on the 1.0 version of the product. Ethan is the man behind Kinkless, the GTD hack that converted many Mac users (myself included) to a new way of keeping track of tasks.

Riccardo and Pippa Ettore of Ettore Software had a booth, and Riccardo led me through some of the nifty new features in TypeIt4Me version 4, which should be available for download within the next few days. One potentially very handy feature: Shortcut templates with variables. This makes it easy to create a form letter, for example. Create a shortcut for it in TypeIt4Me, and replace the variables with actual information when the shortcut is executed. this gives TypeIt4Me the ability to create flexible templates that work in any word processing environment. So you can create one template and invoke it in MS Word, NeoOffice, Pages, et. al.

Comments

View comments and add your own to this post (no registration required) in the Mac Law Students Forum.