Well, I’m fresh back from my trip to Macworld Expo, courtesy of the tech group at my high school that I’m an “honorary member” of. (The “honorary” part means that I don’t actually do anything with them due to my busy schedule.) But yep, we got to go to Macworld as a field trip, meaning we got to legally miss all of our classes today to do so. Oh, I can just feel your jealousy rising.

The general consensus among us was that there was too much stuff for the three and half hours that we were there. (We finished getting all registered by 10:40 AM, and had to leave at 2:15 PM.) It didn’t help that there were two exhibit halls in separate buildings, a block apart from each other. Obviously not the ideal setup, but Moscone North was hosting the United Motorcoach Association of America or something like that. Wow. So, my schedule pretty much involved registering at Moscone West at about 10:20, then going through the West Exhibit Hall at 10:40-12:15, then getting lunch nearby until about 12:45, and then spending 12:45-2:15 in Moscone South. Unfortunately, I only got to see about half of Moscone South’s exhibit hall, which is very, very big.

However, this year, I spent most of my time talking with the smaller developers, which took up the majority of the West Hall and most of whom were together in the Developer Pavillion (aka “Tiny Town”) in South Hall, behind Apple’s humongous booth. I actually really enjoyed that, because in general, the smaller developers are much more approachable than these huge companies with the humongous booths, and they’re much more interesting. I actually got exposed to quite a few new apps that I’m going to have to check out (look at wallet, here comes the fire…). So although I obviously didn’t get to see everything I had hoped (the MacHeist, Micromat, and Microsoft booths were all on my to-do list which I didn’t get to), I still had a good time, a much less stressful time, and came back with some great goodies.

Included in my goodies was the official Macworld San Francisco T-shirt, this time a black T-shirt with blue and white lettering. I also got a WireTap Studio T-shirt from Ambrosia Software. WireTap Studio just looks so cool, so I’m really going to have to try it out. One of the companies actually was interested in doing a promotion with PreviewCast, and gave me his card, so there may be some interesting news coming from that soon.

Oh, and I got OmniFocus, the totally-awesome GTD application from the Omni Group for only $30. The regular list price is $80, and I got more than half off through a Macworld discount and a student discount. I’ll definitely be spending some time trying out OmniFocus and you can expect a detailed review here soon.

Don’t worry, you haven’t heard the last of my Macworld experiences yet, but I thought that I’d share just some of what I did at the exhibit hall today. One of these days, maybe I’ll actually be able to spend a full week at the conference.

P.S.: Sorry, but I didn’t get any pictures there this time. But I did get something else just as good! Hint hint…

Tags: Apple, developers, exhibits, Macs, Macworld, Moscone, Omni Group, OmniFocus, PreviewCast, recap, San Francisco, School, trip, WireTap Studio