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If you want to judge the intensity of a given conference or trade show -- in this case, Macworld -- there are several barometers you can look at.
Are the main vendors' booths madhouses? Well, Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) displays are still at least two bodies deep all around, but you can, in fact, move from one to the other without catching an elbow in the ribs.
Are there still lines in front of the free video games? Nope, I got to play "Guitar Hero III" for the Mac without waiting. I was horrible. They booed me offstage.
Do you have to fight for a seat in the press lounge? No, I was able to stake out a premium spot next to a power strip, uncontested.
Are national news crews still clogging up floor space for their video cameras and lights? Looks like they've hit the road as well.
By all the above criteria, the show is winding down. The mere curious have gone home; now all that's left are the hardcore Mac lovers and those with serious business to do.
There are, however, a few booths on the show floor with serious crowds remaining. Most of these are the winners of Wednesday's Best in Show awards, presented by the editors of IDG's Macworld magazine. The winning items ranged from organizational tools to make life easier to high-end monitors to video games. Here's a handful of standouts.
Server Leaps
Apple's adoption among businesses lags far behind the phenomenal leaps it's gained in general user market share over the past few years. By inches, though, it appears to be making some progress, and a decision on Apple's part regarding Leopard Server may nudge things along a little further.
Leopard Server was the first version of OS X that Apple decided to license for virtual server machines. The company still requires it to run on Apple hardware, but Parallels was the first to pounce on Leopard Server's potential in a virtualized world.
The beta version of Parallels Server is geared for small and medium-sized businesses and departments within enterprises. It allows the user to run Windows, Linux, Leopard Server and a stripped-down environment that Parallels refers to as "headless" and "bare metal" all on the same server.
The product is still in private beta, but it should move to a selective beta stage around February. Parallels is shooting for open availability around the end of March or the beginning of April, and it's aiming for an under-(US)$1,000 price level.
Speech Recognition for Mac
The Dragon speech recognition engine is widely recognized as being one of the most accurate available on the consumer market, but it's currently only licensed to Windows products. Anyone wanting or needing to use a speech recognition application on a Mac has three options: Virtualize Windows and flip OSes each time text input is required; use two computers; or settle for the generally less-accurate Mac speech recognition programs out there.
MacSpeech, however, expects to change that around mid-February, when it releases Dictate, the first Mac speech recognition application that's based on licensed Dragon technology from its proprietor, Nuance.
Dictate's Mac-like interface is designed to work with virtually any application and text field. A handful of nonstandard apps may resist input from Dictate, company rep Patrick Henebry told me, but in those cases, a built-in notepad will pop up to facilitate copying and pasting.
The program supports multiple voice profiles and requires about four minutes of voice input to train to an individual's particular way of speaking. Household use appears to be an easy setup; however, enterprises that wish to store voice profiles on company servers rather than the user's own desktop will need to contact MacSpeech for special instructions.
Accuracy for any voice recognition software depends a lot on the user's own way of speaking, but Henebry told me Dictate gets him right 99 percent of the time.
WiFi Photo Transfer
The Eye-Fi Card from Eye-Fi looks exactly like any other 2 GB SD (Secure Digital) card you'll find out there, but it's got a WiFi chip built in. It enables any digital camera with an SD slot to automatically upload all the photos it takes onto the user's computer via a WiFi network. Eye-Fi reps demoed it for me, and my mug was on their computer screen in under five seconds.
It can send photos a lot farther than to your computer, though. The system is configured using included software. Users have the option of setting the Eye-Fi card to automatically send photos not only to a PC or Mac, but also to photo-sharing and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. At Macworld, the company also announced that in a few weeks, it will push out a software update that automatically organizes the photos it receives in Apple's iPhoto software.
Setting up wireless access to a password-protected network cannot be done completely on the fly, though. To set up each network you want the card to be able to access, you have to log onto a computer and teach it the appropriate passwords. Venturing into a never-before-used wireless network with just the camera and no laptop won't let you upload (unless you can borrow a computer from a kind stranger for a minute).
Still, the Eye-Fi card looks like a convenient tool for easily clearing out a crowded SD card and automating the task of uploading to a Web site. The card is currently on sale in the U.S. via online vendors.
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