The Main Meeting on January 19th was a blast! There were somewhere between 75 and 80 people filling the Resource Center, and after Nancy Siburg introduced the 2005 dBug Board of Directors, we got down to business.
Mike Matas and Andrew Kazmierski from Delicious Monster blew us away with the amazing capabilities of Delicious Library. If you have a collection of music CDs, books, movie DVDs, and/or video games, you should seriously check out this product. Delicious Library allows you to catalog your books, movies, music, and video games with ease. Browse though your digital shelves, check stuff out to friends using Apple's built-in Address Book and iCal, and find new items to read, watch, and play using Library's recommendations.
Mike and Andrew showed how easy it is to input all of the information about any of the items in your collection by simply holding the barcode on the item up to an iSight video camera. It quickly looked up tons of information about each item from Amazon including title, author, date, description, picture, etc., and added each item to the virtual shelf.
These guys really sweat the details. From the wood-grained shelves, to combining the product photo from Amazon with their own box artwork, to the Late label on a product lent to a tardy friend or relative, Delicious Library oozes Mac fit and finish. If you didn't win one of the three copies raffled off during the meeting, please do yourself a favor and visit their web site. We also have a copy installed on the main Resource Center iMac if you'd like to come down and try it out.
After a break, veteran Macworld Expo attendees and dBug members Jon Pfaff, Bruce Robertson, and Charles Wheeler turned us on to all of the hot new announcements from the show earlier in the month. After attending the informative sessions and scoping out all of the vendor booths on the exhibit floor, these guys boiled it all down to the latest and greatest, and dished it out for us with great style.
Probably the two products that made the most impact out of all of them were the Mac mini, which is garnering huge media and consumer attention, and a software product called Webstractor. The Mac mini was on everyone's mind at the show, and has already picked up huge momentum even before it shipped. People are devising tons of creative and unique ways of using this new computer in projects it wasn't even designed for. Webstractor allows you to easily capture and create a document from multiple web pages and edit as simply as you would in a standard word processor. No technical knowledge needed. Our presenters did not dissapoint. Not only did they wrangle a Webstractor discount for dBug members (see details on the ExChange), but they brought back a bunch of excellent swag from the show too.
Of course eveyone stayed for the big raffle. We gave out shirts, hats, bags, and other cool items from the Expo, Mike and Andrew from Delicious Monster gave away three copies of Delicious Library which were won by Ken Izumi, Caryn Roberts, and Allan Swensson, and Mike Grueter (well, really his son Andrew) won the ultra-cool iPod shuffle!
Plan to make the next Main Meeting if you missed this one, but you can at least capture a little of the feel by checking out these nice photographs taken by Dick Carter. See you next time!
