And so it all ends so quickly – Thank you MacWorld for another great week of geeking out! Let’s quickly go thru the sessions I saw thru and then talk about the cool Apps and App Developers I got to talk to this week. I got to attend three sessions. The first was by Chuck Joiner from the MacVoices Podcast – Mac, iPhone, and iPad: The Stuff you gotta Have! I am so glad it wasn’t on day one, or I would have spent too much money. Actually, not really, most of the things he recommended I am already using. The items that made the most sense, that I could pick up, are items that I don’t need. The best recommendation that I hadn’t found before is the Scosche 12Watt Car Adapter the show floor had this as a $5 off special for $20, but as a Amazon Prime member I can get it for $19 and have it at home when I actually need it. The best book recommendation was Erica Sadun and Steve Sande’s – Talking to Siri second Edition. I could use this one, to get a better / deeper understanding of Siri.
The second session was called – Music Togetherness: How technology is teaching the world how to sing together by Jeannie Yang – Chief Product and Design Officer Smule. Smule is a cool group of app developers who focus on music and social apps. If you’ve not picked up any of their apps, I highly recommend doing so just to get a taste of the way you can sign or play with people around the world. Jeannie spent the enter talk showing very compelling and cool examples of how people are leveraging social music to meet, form friendships and communities. I had to pick up their Sing app and when I got back to the hotel tonight, I sang Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting as a Duet with someone in England. Way cool.
The Final session I went to is the one I go to each year – Future Tech. Each you the kids from the Hawai’i Preparatory Academy come and show of the projects they are working on. Over the last few years they have showed off work with the Emotiv headset, earthquake sensors and other cool things. This year, they showed work on HDR Panoramas (this is an ongoing project the new part this year was work with Drones). Using music to assess memories, mood, and cognitive function of elderly individuals in nursing homes. Work they are doing to create a wireless Sleep Apnea sensor (with the idea of potentially waking the person before they have a full event). How to identify energy patterns in the noise of telemetry data from an entire building (using social and other data they can identify the signature of certain devices in the data). Creating a ton of project with Raspberry PIs. And the final project was using brain wave data from the Emotiv head set to create music. Very cool!
I then went back on the show floor and talked with the guys from Reallusion. They were showing off their FaceFilter software for Mac. If you work with a lot of portraits, this software makes it really easy to do touch ups, change make up, and overall manipulate faces. Amazing software, I am looking forward to getting a copy and playing with it soon. Maybe I will get an updated headshot from this.
I spoke with the guys over BusyMac they are about to release a new tool, BusyContacts. This looks like a compelling improvement over the default contacts app on the Mac. I am looking forwards to when this comes out. The integration with their BusyCal looks impressive, but thats to be expected.
The show floor is always a bit of a blur, I wish I could get an iBeacon report of all the booths I stopped at… Speakers, Scanners, and Software. I also picked up the EverDock I mentioned earlier this week.