Today I recovered from my travel day and got an early start. I met up with some podcasting friends before the show started and was one of the first through the doors when it opened. I spent the whole day going through the south hall and talking to lots of the small and a few of the big developers.

I’m writing this late so I’m going to just touch on some of the high points.

1Password

The 1Password folds are continuing to refine their application. They now have a working beta on the iPhone that auto fills the forms. This is a blessing for a phone that lacks cut and paste. I think it is some sort of dark magic.

MacSpeech

They licensed the dragon engine and built an OS X (intel only) engine around it. It looks really good. They are talking about a February release and this is one application that could really help me out.

Eye-Fi

Imagine this. You take a picture on your point and shoot with this special SD card. You then walk into your house and your camera sees your iPhoto and downloads the pictures over your wifi network while you are still unloading the car. You had to see it to believe it. Recognize the face in the picture?

Tune Ranger

It syncs all of your iPod libraries including ratings and play counts. This one looks very useful.

BusySync 2.0

Sync’s all of your family (or business) calendars over bonjour and to Google calendar. It looks really slick and includes features like automatic back up. Maybe this will solve a cause of marital disharmony in the Sparks house.

Office 2008

The Microsoft update looks good. Maybe that is what happens when you wait 4 years to update the product. Or maybe it is actually good. I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

I watched the word presentation that looked interesting and the powerpoint presentation that really looks about 10 years behind Keynote.

iPod accessories

There are a LOT of iPhone accessory vendors. After awhile they all started to look the same to me except for the one below. That one is certainly unique.

There were more, but its late. One observation I can make is how fun it is to watch these small independent developers amaze me ingenious applications. One guy had a web application that could read HyperCard stacks!

In the evening I went to the Cirque du Mac party and got to spend time with some of my favorite Mac friends including Don McAllister from Screencastsonline, Adam from MacCast, Victor from the typical MacUser, Jonathan from MacTipsDaily, John and Dave from MacGeekGab and I made several new friends. The band sounded fantastic.

Now its off to bed and tomorrow I am hitting the West Hall.