Ah Macworld… It’s one of at least two days per year the entire Macintosh community can gather around the proverbial fire in eager anticipation of something cool.

So, what’d we get?

Paramount Pictures on iTunes
Okay, this could be cool. I’m not a movie purchaser for the most part (although I do own a couple of classics on DVD, like This Is Spinal Tap and Stop Making Sense), and I’m not sure how this behavior might change in the future (see below). Something I did notice during all of the iTunes hubbub yesterday was poster art for The Hunt for Red October and Patriot Games, two very good Tom Clancy books (two of his first actually) and two pretty good movies. In my hunt last night to see the trailers for them however, I couldn’t find them on iTunes. I’m hopeful they’ll come along and they just haven’t been encoded, tagged and stored yet, but I was underwhelmed with point 1. Additionally, from a UI/IA point of view, iTunes should allow users to browse by Movie Studio or Record Company. If Apple’s going to make these claims that they’ve got XYZ company’s albums up there, let me go look at what that means. I don’t know what bands are signed to what label and which studios put out which pictures, and I’d wager a guess that most users are as unsavvy as I here.

Apple TV
This is a cool concept, and something Mac users have been trying to jury rig for some time, I’m sure with some degree of success. I’ve never attempted a hacked version of it. The closest I’ve come is my original-vintage Tivo (series I) with an after-market network card and a 1.5-foot piece of cat-5 dangling out of the back of it with a gender bender. And I’ve still been too much of a wuss to take the drive out and install services on it so I can interact with it on the network. I really just didn’t feel like having to deal with the phone line, so I put it on the network. And this isn’t even working properly since I moved so I’ve downgraded even further to the toy that cable companies term “DVR”. For those of you considering making this move to remove one box from your lineup, don’t do it.

But I digress. My biggest qualm with Apple TV is its lack of support for 20th Century TVs. I plan on getting an HDTV, but at this point in time that’s not in the cards. When I have the full-size family room that’s NOT the living room or kitchen or home office, etc., I’ll probably upgrade the TV (and the Tivo). At that point, I might consider it, but I’d still really need to become a movie/tv-show purchaser before that happens. Additionally, it’s only got a 40GB hard drive. I guess that’s probably enough, but I guess I was looking for something a little more substantial.

iPhone
WOW. WOW. Huh?

Let me explain. The iPhone is cool. Really cool. It’s the culmination of many rumors of many different products from the last few years. The Mac Tablet, the wide-screen video iPod, the iPhone, the speculation from the patent drawings featuring this weird UI that used finger gestures. In fact, according to Time Magazine, the iPhone was spawned from Apple’s research into developing a tablet form-factor Mac.

The sale of the whole thing during the keynote was just sick. I’d never seen Steve Jobs that excited about something in any of the Macworld or WWDC keyonotes I’ve seen. But something left me a little uneasy.

iPhone provides full sync capability using iTunes. This eliminates most Office users who need to use Entourage for mail & calendaring instead of (the preferred, IMO) Mail & iCal. Granted, all of this would just use the SyncServices library, so there COULD be a way to sync that content between Entourage and iPhone, but I’m not putting any money on M$ or Apple developing that.

The iPhone apps (and their icons) look strangely like Apple’s Dashboard Widgets. Apple certainly would’ve considered this similarity and done something about it if they didn’t intend the end-user to notice it. With a small version of OS X, Safari and Mail, it seems like the WebKit engine is built in as well, which makes most of these apps (ie, Google Maps) much easier to engineer than they could’ve been under a different OS. So, what of the iPhone APIs or SDK?

The “Notes” app. This is available on the home screen of the phone, but was not demoed. I’m curious as to what this syncs with on the Apple side. I’m afraid it’s going to be Stickies, but maybe it’ll be Pages. That could be okay, although it’d be nice to set the sync prefs for some of these apps. Imagine being able to sync it your notes with TextMate or OmniOutliner, or something like that?! That said, what do the Windows users get to do with that app?

An exclusive agreement with Cingular. This isn’t that bad, IMO, as it enables Apple to create a product that’s meant for the network. And Cingular can tailor the network to suit with the product. We’ve already seen this in the demo of Visual VoiceMail (where you can click on the voicemail you want to listen to vs. having to listen to all of them inline). This will also force Cingular’s competition to re-think the way they deal with phone manufacturers. You want our phone? You sell OUR PHONE, not what you want our phone to be (ie, a vehicle to sell your additional network feature that was once in our phone but we had to remove for you).

Bluetooth, WiFi, Edge. Can I use it as a bluetooth modem for my laptop? I KNOW Apple’s going to say “but you don’t NEED a modem anymore– you’ve got a breakthrough Internet communicating device in your hand!”. Hogwash. Until I can run TextMate on it, I need a modem of some sort for those numerous occasions when I’m not near a suitable network connection and need to be!

But, enough bitching. Widescreen video iPod just may make me a movie & TV purchaser from iTunes, and that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? And it’s so damn cool looking :-P