The Quiet Zone

The Quiet Zone at MacWorld is several rows of small booths off in the far left corner of the hall. While there’s no truly quiet area, the area devoted to smaller developers is free from the bass-heavy thumping of demo music, or the the snake-oily voices of pitchmen doing product demos with their speakers cranked up to 11.

I like to wander the quiet zone, seeing what the little guys are doing. Some of the smaller developers are doing innovative work that deserves to be recognized. Even Microsoft started small, once upon a time.

Circus Ponies (gotta love that name) had crowds stacked three deep watching developer Jason Adams run his latest creation, Notebook, through his paces. Wanting to get a closer look, I came back a second time, but the crowd was no smaller. On the third try, I was able to get close enough to see and hear. Notebook is on sale for a show price of $39.95, and after watching the demo on Expo day one, and reading reviews later that night, I happily slapped down my credit card. I wasn’t surprised to learn that Circus Ponies had already sold out the stock brought to the show, so my copy will be Snail Mailed.

Some day soon I’ll have to ask Jason the story behind the name "Circus Ponies"

Bare Bones Software is another developer camped in the Quiet Zone. Bare Bones writes and distributes BBEdit, MailSmith, SuperGetInfo, and TextWrangler. BBEdit, Bare Bones’ best known application, in has recently been revv’ed to version 8.03. Like Circus Ponies’ booth, I had to wait for several minutes to get within hearing range of the demos. BBEdit’s popularity with the web coding crowd was immediately apparent, as I could hear many different languages spoken; HTML, PHP, Perl, XML, and other assorted dialects. BBEdit is a polyglot application, as it speaks all these languages fluently. I use BBEdit in my real job, analyzing thousands of airline pilot schedules, and I’d be lost without it. MyMac.com readers can plan on a review of BBEdit 8 soon.

MailSmith is Bare Bones’ other main application. I’m becoming frustrated with Entourage 2004’s slow search speed, and MailSmith is reputed to have speedy searching I got a fine demo, and loved many of the features (GREP searching) but found that the lack of ability to send HTML email to be a deal-breaker. I hate HTML email, but from time to time, I do need to send formatted emails. Entourage handles HTML sending with aplomb, so I’ll have to stick with it, even though I fume at it’s pokiness during content searches.

These are just two booths that stood out from the crowd back in the Quiet Zone. Plenty of other small developers are doing well, and the crowds in the Zone show it!