A Few of My Favorite Macworld Things

Had a great time at Macworld this year. Got to put a lot of names with faces - it was great meeting you all. And saw some really cool things.

Read on for some of my favorites from the Expo like Slingbox Player, Griffin Air Curve, BeeJive 2.0, TubeToGo, TileStack, and more.

Sling Player for iPhone

First up is the awesome Slingbox Player for the iPhone. It's due out near the end of January. It streams video over wifi or 3G from your Slingbox. In addition, it gives you full control over the device that the Slingbox is connected to -- just as you would expect. The bad news is that it will cost at least $30 according to the rep at Macworld.

Griffin AirCurve

The Griffin AirCurve is an interesting hunk of plastic. It just looks like a hunk of plastic that you can dock your iPhone or iPhone 3G in. But, without using any power, it can increase the volume of your iPhone by 10 dB using an acoustic tunnel (think Bose Wave radios). It also has a pass-through port that you can feed your charging cable through to charge while you are docked.

How does it sound? Honestly really good. The speaker in the iPhone 3G is already really good. This dock just amplifies it. Think of this as the cheapest iPhone sound dock available.

BeeJive 2.0

I've only had a short while to try out the updated BeeJive, but so far I'm really impressed. BeeJive as you may know is probably the best IM application in the App Store. It includes all the usual features you'd expect including AIM, YIM, GoogleTalk, etc. communication. New features in this version include file transfers, photo sharing, and voice notes. I'll try to have a full review to you soon.

TubeToGo

This app, which has been submitted to the app store and should be available any time now, allows you to watch TV remotely from your iPhone over 3G or Wifi, or iPod Touch over Wifi. It does this in an interesting way. Using the equinux product TubeStick you can record video from a either antenna or cable and then they can be synced to either an FTP site or Mobile Me. This app also allows you to view a program guide and schedule recordings remotely. We'll have more after we get a chance to try it out.

TileStack

The iPhone has come a long way already. These two product show that fairly well. While they are very different in their targets, they are both what I would consider rapid application development products.

TileStack from Code Flare is a free web-based product that can best be thought of as HyperCard for the web. You can upload HyperCard stacks or create new ones from their web interface. But the coolness doesn't stop there. Code Flare has the mojo to be able to convert those stacks into native applications for the iPhone that can be sold through the iTunes App Store. They already have on application, Triple Play Draw Poker (iTunes Link) in the app store. For their part, Code Flare will be keeping a part of the revenue from the app though.

ModelBaker

ModelBaker from Widget Press takes a different path. It's a fantastic looking MVC based RIA development environment based on a standard LAMP platform. Whoa, way too many acronyms there, let's try again.

Using a simple to use application, ModelBaker let's you create iPhone web apps that can be served from any standard Linux based PHP and MySQL server. You can define the different screens and the databases through the application and rapidly deploy those applications to the web. Looks amazingly powerful and I can't wait to dig in deeper.

Those are just a few of my favorite things from the Expo. We'll be taking a deeper look at all of these things and many more things in the coming weeks.