THE TRANSMUG REPORT – THE ULTIMATE iFAN EVENT
Sharlee Merner-Bradley and Emmanuel Lemor at one of TransMUG’s latest quarterly lunch meetings.
BY CHRISTINE LEMOR-DRAKE
For 2012, Macworld has become Macworld/iWorld 2012. The new name says it all: Steve Jobs was not there; Apple® was not there; but the creative juice that has always been there was definitely in the air. Computers, iWhatever, accessories and a lot of apps. Since TransMUG has belonged to the community of Apple User Groups for years, members of our group had in past years volunteered to help visitors find their way on the exhibition floor. The space has considerably shrunk, and these opportunities are gone. But, we still see some of the key Apple Groups staff. We met with Sandy Foderick who offered us a lot of nice Apple-branded merchandise to give away at our quarterly meetings. Hint: Our next meeting is around the corner. On the Friday of the show, a few TransMUG members met for lunch and shared their discoveries. So many gadgets! Like the iKlik plastic “multi-angle viewing stand” or the Crimson aluminum cage for your iPhone®. Mac® applications at a discount, none bigger than the 90% reduction on the Concept Draw suite of mind mapping and project management tools! And a lot of cleaning freebies… You could find some new and improved technologies like the affordable, cloud-connected, portable scanner Doxie Go Wi-Fi, or the new Thunderbolt drives from Western Digital. And we met with the Readdle people, who had interesting solutions for PDF processing, for printing, and for note-taking for the iPad®. With an ever growing number of amazing developers, the iOS platform is maturing at a fast pace.
All in all, Macworld/iWorld has become in great part an inventors fair, and one can only wonder how many of these entrepreneurs, lured by the promise of multimillion sales of apps, will still be standing next year. But first and foremost, Macworld is where TransMUG was founded in 2003, and this is where we will meet again next year, for lunch on the Friday of the exhibit, to celebrate our 10th anniversary. In the meantime, our group has more to offer: you can come with all your questions to our quarterly meetings, generally set prior to the NCTA General Meeting; visit our website, TransMUG.com, where you can join the group by adding your name to our mailing list; or follow our tweet feed, @transmug, to stay in the loop—we retweet articles and reviews on Mac and iOS matters relevant to our profession. And if you are already signed up, don’t forget that on the Yahoo! Group mailing list you can always find a colleague to answer your questions. CLD
