Expo Walk Day 2 Part 2 by David Weeks

Expo floor walking is tiring work, so after the morning tour was complete, I headed back to the Media room for food and drink. One nice Media perk is a freebie $20 meal voucher.

Who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch?

However, we’re in California (the land of high prices and higher taxes), and this IS a trade show with a captive audience, so a $20 bill doesn’t go as far as you’d expect. A hot box lunch with a piece of fruit, a big bottle of water, and a cookie runs over $19.

Suitably nourished, I launched for Part II of the Floor Walk, to visit vendors whose products I’ve reviewed, as well as some whose products are worth reviewing.

First stop was Netopia, the Timbuktu people.

is the kind of small publisher I like to watch. CEO Reza Farhad demoed Workstrip and WebStractor for me. WorkStrip is a productivity enhancer that allows users to save “workspaces” consisting of multiple applications and documents. WorkStrip provides previews of multiple documents, as well as the ability to open all the files in a workspace at once. I often work on projects with many files from different applications, and this looks like it’ll ease my file management workload.

Softchaos’ Webstractor is a “site sucker.” Site suckers download an entire web site for off-line reading. Webstractor does more than just suck down web site; it has search capabilities, and can help manage the information you’ve captured. As I spend many hours in the back of airliners, this looks promising.

Full reviews of both WorkStrip and Webstractor are forthcoming.

MyMac’s Expo gang (Weeks, Nemo and Owen Rubin) rendezvoused at the Hewlett Packard booth for a long session with HP Product Manager Rick Spillers.

Scalable Ink separates the print head from the ink cartridge. This keep costs down, and allows new print head technology to be used in printers with differently shaped ink cartridges.

I’m in the queue to review the new 3310 all-in-one, so we’ll see if HP’s claims to better/faster/cheaper are right. Watch this space.

While we at MyMac like working with HP, it’s no total PR lovefest. Fellow reviewer Owen Rubin and I spend several minutes with HP Macintosh Software Engineer Andy Mitchell frankly speaking our collective minds about the state of HP’s Macintosh printing/scanning/copying software. Over the years, HP has improved the quality of their Mac software, but I continue to have intermittently frustrating experiences. More than I’d like, my Mac loses contact with my PhotoSmart 2610. The only certain way for the Mac reconnect to the 2610 is to reboot, and that’s a significant hassle. Andy, Owen, and I discussed some of the HP’s issues with OS X’s Fast User Switching. HP is aware that Fast User Switching can be problematic for their print drivers, and said that improving compatibility with FUS is one of their top priorities.

Wrapping up with Spillers, he left us with the good news that HP has recompiled all their current and recent (going back several years) OS X print drivers to be Universal Binaries. If you buy an Intel iMac, or the new MacBook Pro, your version of OS X will have ALL these new Intel-compatible drivers included. This was a huge amount of work for HP, but it’ll make life far easier for those early adopters of Intel-powered Macintoshes.

Stand by for Part III of Expo Walk; it ain’t over ’till it’s over.