SAN FRANCISCO -- The Apple booth at the center of the expo floor here at Macworld could be likened to a supernova -- a bright star, overheated with all that excitement for the new pivot-arm iMac, whose gravity draws in Macheads from all corners of the show.
Even two days after Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the new machine, devotees are still clamoring over the hundred or so iMacs that are on display here. If you want to get a grope and feel of one, go with shoulder pads and a face mask.
But compared with Apple's galaxy, the rest of Macworld is a barren, lifeless world, devoid of almost any exciting applications or peripherals to make the new Apple hardware fun. There are precious few gadgets here, not even the PDAs that occupied acres of space at last year's show. The software offerings are even skimpier -- there are plenty of professional-grade graphics apps, and a few vendors hawking some consumer-type stuff, but most of it you've seen before.
Macworld 2002 is, as ever, a show for pros. The high end is heavily hyped here, from 3D-graphics tools like Alias/Wavefront's Maya, purportedly the biggest Mac application ever created, to the various video, sound, graphics and website creators from other vendors.
Adobe's space here is often a big attraction for "creative professionals," and that's the case this week, though the attention now comes with an edge. People want to know when the new stuff from Adobe will be shipping.
During Jobs' keynote address on Monday, Shantanu Narayen, an Adobe vice president, demonstrated OS X versions of many of the company's applications, including After Effects, InDesign, GoLive and Photoshop. But Narayen's cameo was more memorable for what he didn't announce -- shipping dates for InDesign or Photoshop, arguably one of the most popular applications for the Mac.
Here at the Adobe booth on Wednesday, eager-beaver graphic artists were pestering Adobe reps for a date when they could get some of the items.
"'Shipping soon' is all I can tell you," chided one Adobe designer, shooing away a Machead who wanted to know about InDesign for OS X. He was wondering if he could buy a copy right there, right away.
Photoshop is another story entirely. Nobody knows when an OS X version of that will come out; when asked for a press demonstration of the product last week, a spokeswoman for Adobe said that all demos before March would require a non-disclosure agreement.
Adobe's tardiness isn't the only thing disappointing people here. Daniel Gerstein, Ken Jacobs and Sean Coll -- three teenage guys who were walking around the show floor in shabby, not-too-pleasant-smelling duds appended with dozens of computer company buttons -- were somewhat frustrated with the dearth of stuff.
"We love Macs," Gerstein said, "and we're here to just have fun. We're not businesspeople or anything, we just live Apple." The three were getting tons of convention-type freebies, but Gerstein said the show seemed more low-key than in the past. He knows well of what he speaks -- this is his sixth Macworld.
"I'm disappointed there wasn't anything more from Mac. Nothing big." He liked the new iMac just fine, but "it's not as big as last year, when the Powerbook G4 came out, or the first iMac."
Other than the wares from Apple, one of the most innovative products here is a somewhat unknown one-and-a-half-year-old application called eZediaMX. Formally, it's called a "multimedia authoring and content integration" tool, but think of this program -- whose third version is debuting here -- as being a more powerful, easier version of PowerPoint that includes some features of Photoshop and Macromedia Director.
What does that mean? It means that with fewer than three mouse clicks, you can make a video and audio-equipped interactive presentation or music video or animation. Mike Berg, a representative at the company's booth here, said the software is great for educational settings, for all those kids that Jobs always says his products are better for.
Berg said that one of the reasons his company developed eZedia is that "we found other things out there, like Director, were too hard for people to use. We wanted to make things easier."
