We got to go to the Mac Expo in London at the end of last week and saw some pretty interesting stuff. Last year we were mostly looking at the various printers that were available because Lori needed information for her degree, this year it was more gadgets and software.
Webstractor
One really interesting piece of software that we saw a quick demo of was Webstractor. It’s a web browser that remembers all the pages you visit in each session. “So what?”, you might ask. Well, this stores the actual content of each page including adverts and anything else you need to see the page as it was. You can then string a whole load of pages together just by clicking some of the links and a nice little stream of page thumbnails appears down the right hand side as you browse. You can then save the entire session into a single document, remove pages from the session history if you don’t want them saved, click back and forward through the thumbnails to jump to specific pages, and a whole load of other features. One of the really neat features if you frequently use the web for research is that you can choose to edit a copy of some or all of the pages and remove things like adverts, menu bars, etc to just get the content that you actually want. You can reformat it as though using a normal word processor, and then save the edited page together with the session pages that were used to make it.
Wacom Cintiq
Rather expensive but very cool bit of hardware. The 21″ version was at the Wacom stand, it’s a cross between a graphics tablet and an LCD monitor. Ideal for artists who want to be able to put the pen on the screen instead of trying to work out where on a normal tablet corresponds to the relevant display area.
There were lots of other things including the new iPod (with video) and plenty of magazine publishers with special offers on a huge range of vaguely Apple or Digital camera related titles. Unfortunately I left it too long before I wrote this entry and I can’t remember most of them. I’ll post some of the photos I took in a bit.