From...

January 10, 2000
Web posted at: 10:59 a.m. EST (1559 GMT)

by Andy Ihnatko, Macworld Online

SAN FRANCISCO (IDG) -- Regardless of how long Expo actually lasts, I can usually rely on the second full day being the busiest. Lots of things have to happen just in general -- giving talks, doing a little TV and radio, trying to maintain a presence so that those hundreds of accidental bump-intos happen -- but two of the biggest bits of the pie-chart involve private meetings with software and hardware companies and simply making sure you've seen everything that's going on in every booth. Typically, there's one day in which I've no appointments that will take me away from Moscone, and that's the day I set aside for intense (and sometimes exhausting) legwork covering the show.

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And then there are the private little meetings. A lot of deals get struck here, but if you write about the industry (or even more interestingly, write reports that might lead your employer to invest millions of dollars of people's retirement funds in certain companies) here's where a product manager or lead programmer makes the case for their hardware or software.

It's actually pretty valuable time; as a writer, it's a chance to collapse months' worth of idle questions and potentially months' more of future phone tag into ten minutes to an hour in which you're speaking to, literally, everyone who can give you a direct and specific answer.

If it's a hardware company, I might get to play with a prototype fresh off the boat from their manufacturer, and there's nothing more odd than working with a familiar $900 gizmo which has absolutely no logos, product numbers, or even button and switch labels on them. You sort of feel like you're using a prop from an animated show or something.

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Some of this is done "under NDA" -- a signed non-disclosure agreement which says that I can use this information for background purposes but I can't quote anybody, hence the lack of specifics here; but the upshot of all of this is that obviously it's damned valuable to get the chance to speak so openly and directly with these companies, without having to work through the levels of bureaucracy.

But in between these meetings, I walk the line and look for cool stuff. The highlights:

During the kickoff on Tuesday, I suggested that Apple make a sort of wristwatch Palm Pilot; something with a lot of functionality, but most importantly something with a free API so that hundreds of new wristwatch apps could flood the shareware and commercial space.

Well, imagine my chagrin when I found Matsucom's booth, and their onHand watch, making its first appearance. Though not a perfect implementation of what I was picturing, it's damned close. It has all of the functionality of a Palm (though it uses a four-way "nipple"-type joystick instead of handwriting, and of course it doesn't use Palm software), serial and infrared beaming...and an open API. Eight pounds of cool in a five-pound bag. The Mac version of the software is still being written but will make its appearance in early spring.

With less flash but no less important is what's being done by fatbrain.com. Apple has always had great luck making its developer information available to the general public; you used to be able to go into any good bookstore and buy a complete set of Apple technical reference, but that's gone by the wayside lately; in public space, technical reference is represented by downloadable PDF docs, which are great in that they're free and immediate but dammit, a 500-page reference needs to be a book. Now, we've got the best of both worlds.

Fatbrain (operating with the blessings and involvement of the Apple Developer Connection) is a book-on-demand operation. If you order a copy of the AppleScript Language Guide, they'll print you a copy right then and there from the very latest version of that PDF, even if it just came out that morning. The result isn't a loosely-glued stack of laser-printed pages but a book that doesn't look at all out of place among the rest of your books.

StudioZee has come out with a doo-dad called the ZephIR. In a nutshell it's a pager-sized infrared emitter and detector that allows an ADB Mac to be used as a "learning" remote. It can control anything that can be controlled via infrared, and if it doesn't know the codes you need, you can teach it. The user software that controls the ZephIR was pre-release and this a little sketchy, but for me the big attraction is the fact that it's completely AppleScriptable. Damn, the things I can do with this...many of them purely evil, of course.

And of course that's just a few of the cooler things that are currently littering my hotel room.

The people you'll meet

Speaking of which, Steve Jobs made a sweep of the show floor. I talked with plenty of users who were thrilled to have a chance to shake the man's hand and were greeted warmly, and one person who, well, was a witness during an encounter between Jobs and a show exhibitor which was vivid enough in detail to make me think that anyone who wants to buy one of those licensed Apple wristwatches ought to do so sooner rather than later.

Calm before the storm

Tonight, the Ministry of Nightlife has posted an ambitious agenda. As with just about every Expo week, the first night is for talky networking and socializing, the second night is the Ironman Nightlife Decathlon of music and flashing lights and enormously loud music and 24-year-old people sprawled in the back of cabs muttering that they're not as old as they used to be. And tonight, the third night, tends to be a mixed bag.

I want to go to a book party where Michael Swaine will be celebrating the release of a new edition of his abso-fraggin-wonderful "Fire In The Valley," a book so good that I didn't waste time with weaseling a free copy and just bought the damned thing. My good pal Bob LeVitus is hosting a party for his new company, which is proving to be the ultimate high-tech startup in that they've got a party and t-shirts but no desire at this point to tell anyone what it is their company will be doing or producing.

Smashmouth will be performing at the Beatnik party, and I've sort of been hoping for a chance to see them live without the humiliation of being one of those Gen-X people desperately hanging out with the generation who stole the title "The Kids" away from them. And then there's the Mac the Knife party, which typically marks the official close of the Ministry of Nightlife for this particular Expo week.

I meant well, I really did, but was tired enough that I got out of the shower too late for Swaine, and when I got to LeVitus' party I found it pleasant enough that I couldn't motivate myself to swap another hour of mixing and mingling with a drink in my hand for listing to enormously loud music.

Chris and I made our way from that joint to the Knife party. The Knife -- invitations unattainable, don't even try to bluff your way in, I don't care who you are or who you say you're with -- presents the partygoer with a terribly catch-22. It doesn't really heat up until 11:30 or so. But if you wait until 11:30, the only place left to stand is on the heads of the dead and dying who lost consciousness hours earlier but are kept standing by the crush of the rest of the dead and dying, those who severely need immediate medical attention but who tragically will never be reached by the EMT's in time. I was born too late to attend a Who concert, but I've been to enough Knife parties that I think I've got the gist of it.

Nonetheless, it's usually worth it. But though I've been having a lot of fun here complaining about this cold, it has been taking a lot out of me and by 11:30 there's a consensus opinion from my body's various committees that they should make In Bed By Midnight part of their party platform. Though I retain executive veto power, I prefer to reserve it for more vital matters of state, so I boost myself into a cab and fall asleep quite against my will.