Macworld Expo 2006

Well, it’s that time of year again. It’s the time of year when the King of the Reality Distortion Field presides over the Mac universe to let us know what is and should be the next big thing. I always look forward to each Steve Jobs keynote because of the anticipation and buzz it causes. The media has, of course, been all over this year’s Expo. For some reason, I feel like something insanely cool will be introduced tomorrow. There’s bound to be something introduced that will change the way people think about or use their computers. My hope is that there is a mix of hardware and software announcements so I have some new programs to play with on my trusty Power Mac G4. In either case, I will be glued to my Mac news sites to keep up with what’s going on up in San Francisco.

Now, I would like to throw in my two cents about what I’d like to see Apple (AAPL) do tomorrow so here it goes.

Intel-Based Notebooks

Apple needs new notebooks like it needs air. The iBooks and PowerBooks feel slow compared to Windows-based notebooks. It’s time for Apple to release Intel-based notebooks and let a real comparison of Mac OS X and Windows XP commence. For the first time in history, Apple and Microsoft will be playing on the same field, and a real, meaningful comparison of the two operating systems can be performed. My bet is that OS X will blow the socks off of Windows XP, but only time will tell.

What is this iWeb thing?

I have seen a few rumors referencing some new web page creation tool from Apple. My hope is that Apple took a page from the Microsoft playbook and just bought RapidWeaver from the guys at Real Mac Software. RapidWeaver is one of the best programs I’ve ever used, and as far as I’m concerned, it is already an iApp. It would fit seamlessly with the rest of the iLife suite of applications and would make .Mac even more valuable.

Now, if I could have everything I wanted in a web development program, I would have RapidWeaver with the ability to create PHP/MySQL applications automatically. It would be great if I didn’t have HTML pages and CSS files spread out in directories for each photo album. RapidWeaver could create the PHP-based pages and create a MySQL database to store the data for each of the albums. To make the application completely easy to use, they would need to find some way to make it insanely easy to upload the web site and database to .Mac or other hosting service that supports PHP. I have no doubt that the guys at Apple and Real Mac Software could pull off something like this.

So that’s about it for now. We’ll all know more tomorrow morning.

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