Today I finally was able to tear myself away from other duties and spend a few hours cruising the halls of Macworld Expo. The dominant mood was one of confidence - vendor after vendor told me how this has been the "best show in years" for them, and normal human being after normal human being told me that they could feel a palpable sense of excitement about the future. As someone who has been to every Macworld Expo (except one - damn!) since, oh, about 1987 or so, this one felt unusually smile-inducing. The Apple bandwagon is on a roll, and we're all along for the ride.

 

You've all already read about the big doings at the Expo: Apple's announcement of the iPhone (well, duh...), Adobe's deep demonstrations of the powers of Photoshop CS3 (bag a beta when you have a free nanosecond - you'll be impressed), Quark's way-cool Flash-enabling Interactive Designer, and even nifty stuff from gorillas under 800 pounds, such as the Axiotron ModBook tablet Mac that's being distributed by Other World Computing. So as not to waste your time telling you things you already know, let me fill you in on a half-dozen or so less headline-grabbing products I uncovered during my mad dash around the two Moscone Center halls that house this year's Expo.

 

---

 

It may look like a vase, but it's a USB/FireWire hub - with a bonus fan and light.

 

Okay, so the LaCie USB FireWire Hub ($59) may not qualify as a world-changing technological development, but its mere existence is yet another proof that Macs equal design, and that design appreciators are Mac lifers.

 

This stylish li'l device was designed by designed by Ora-Ïto, the same designer that created LaCie's Brick stackable hard drives. It provides four USB (2.0, of course) and two FireWire 400 connections; plug into any of them and a different color LED lights up around the base. In addition to the six ports, the Hub also provides a light and a fan. According to LaCie spokesperson Melissa Logan, it was "designed to look like a flower pot." We're thinking sea creature, but, hey, all art is open to interpretation, right?

 

Also being showcased by LaCie - in addition to their normal raft of storage devices - are the LaCie FireWire Speakers ($79), designed by Neil Poulton, the same I.D. whiz who whipped up LaCie's durable d2 case design years back. These speakers are connected to your Mac over FireWire - you don't connect them using your Mac's audio line-out port. The advantage here is that FireWire ports provide plenty of power (far more than that of USB), so you don't need a separate power brick. The FireWire Speakers sound remarkably good considering that the set doesn't include a subwoofer.

 

Oh, and if you were at that previous Expo when these speakers were originally "announced," and are wondering what took LaCie so long, Logan told me that "We didn't really announce them, they just accidentally got into the catalog," and that " We actually had to start over ... we had to go from one manufacturer to another." After listening to these speakers, the wait seems to have been worth it - though I look forward to hearing them in an environment devoid of the din that is Expo.

 

---

 

Belkin's demo of the Tune Studio was presented by an actual Real Live Musician (that's the Tune Studio in the center bottom of the image).

 

Belkin was showing a not-yet-released product, the Tune Studio. This nifty little mixer allow you to plug your iPod (full-size or nano) directly into it, and record up to four tracks of music - guitar, microphones, keyboards, whatever - directly onto the iPod. It works using the the iPod's Voice Memo function, but the audio is exceptionally clean: 44kHz, 16-bit WAV format; you can choose between two audio settings, ingeniously labeled "High" and "Low." If you don't want to record simply to your iPod (a great on-the-go way to use it, since the Tune Studio weighs, oh, about nothing...), you can also connect it directly to your Mac over USB.

 

According to a Belkin marketing type who joined the conversation between me and the aforementioned Real Live Musician, pricing for the Tune Studio has not yet been set, but should be "between $200 and $250."

 

---

 

The iMainGo is an iPod case and speaker system in one compact package.

 

Okay, so this little item is certainly not a world-changer, but I thought it was a great example of a simple idea done right. The iMainGo ($69.95) is a DayPlanner-sized iPod case that houses and protects your iPod, plus connects it to an in-case digital amplifier that powers a surprisingly robust in-case pair of full-range speakers and tuned base-enhancing ports.

 

Your iPod is cradled in one of the supplied (and cushioned) adapters, and its Click Wheel controls remain accessible - you don't have to open the case to get to your 'Pod's controls. According to an iMainGo spokesperson, at 80 percent volume the case's four AAA batteries should power the device for 30 hours. Oh, and if your iPod's software has an alarm function, the iMainGo can wake you up in the a.m. - or, of course, whenever you choose.

 

As of today, the iMainGo is available only in black, but nano-inspired colors are on their way soon, Also, unlike many Johnny-come-lately iPod add-ons, the iMainGo works with any iPod every manufactured. Hey 1st Generation 5GB holdouts: Feel the love!

 

---

 

Remember JBL's stylish Creature speakers? Here's one of their replacements, the JBL Spot.

 

Everything is a design statement these days, right? Including speakers - and JBL is kicking some serious designey hiney with two new sets of speakers, the Spot (above) and the Spyro (below).

 

Both speakers are 2.1 sets with small satellites and substantial subwoofers. Both have touch-sensitive volume controls, a separate control bass control on the back of the subwoofer, have six watts per channel of power for the satellites, 24 watts of power for the subwoofer, can reproduce a frequency range of 40Hz to 20KHz, and have a signal-to-noise ratio of >80db. They both cost $129.95 for the set.

 

The differences? Well, the Spot's satellites are cute li'l lumps, and the fullset comes with interchangeable black and white outer covers. Additional covers in different colors and patterns, however, are also available. The Spyro's satellites are odd little flowery thangs, and this set comes black, white, fuchsia, and something called "retro blue," all with chrome accents. Although the aforementioned Expo din makes it hard to evaluate speakers on the crowded show floor, the Spot and Spyro both sounded as if they had plenty of oomph.

 

Blobs (top)? Fleurs (above)? Your call - they both sound impressive.

 

---

 

It wouldn't be Expo without some serious storage mojo, now, would it? Hey, lovers of shiny spinning things, here's this year's.

 

You've all heard of eSATA, right? No? Okay, here's the ten-second tutorial: If you have a modern Mac, your hard drives are connected to the rest of the system using a technology called SATA, which is fast, reliable, and easy to configure. Recently, prominent drive vendors such as LaCie, WiebeTech, OWC, and others have begun offering eSATA external drives and RAID systems that bring the speed of SATA out from inside Power Mac G5 and Mac Pro cases with the help of PC cards.

 

Okay, now it's time to learn a new acronym: xSATA. Enterprise-level storage heavyweight AMCC introduced a new high-speed RAID box at the Expo called the Sidecar, which uses an enhanced for of eSATA called xSATA. Mahesh Patil, AMCC's Technical Marketing Manager, told me that xSATA stands for "external SATA," but, hey, that's what eSATA stands for, as well. But let's not quibble - xSATA could more correctly stand for Xtreme SATA.

 

You see, in AMCC's xSATA-based Sidecar RAID, which was specifically designed for Mac-based audio and video content creators, each of four drives enjoys its own individual 300-megabyte-per-second connection to your AMCC-host-card-equipped Mac. In an eSATA system, that same 300 megabytes per second is shared among the multiple drives in the array. Now, of course, sharing 300 megabytes per second ain't shabby, but having each drive in a four-drive array sucking down 300 megabytes per second is downright obscene.

 

Patil was realistic about the Sidecar's market when he said, " If you need top performance, then you want us. If not, eSATA is great, FireWire is great." But he was being modest. Both video and audio editors need exceptionally storage throughput, and they need it now - and if they don't want to lay down the bucks for fiber channel-based systems such as the Apple Xserve, xSATA may be the answer to their need - greed? - for speed.

 

The Sidecar can be configured as a RAID 0, 1, 10, or 5 array, plus that wonderfully named concatenation-of-drives configuration called JBOD - which, trust us, is an acronym for "just a bunch of disks." Ah, those witty geeks.