With more than 450 exhibitors at this year's Macworld Expo, it's impossible to "see it all." Which is a shame especially because of all those countless small and medium sized companies whose product announcements are often drowned out by the major news from the big players like Apple or Microsoft. Hence, let me point out five products I stumbled over at the 2008 Expo which, in my humblest of opinions, deserve a bit more attention than they have received so far.

Go forth and virtualize Windows Home Basic or Home Premium on your Mac using Parallels or Fusion. It is ok now. Phew...

Sometimes you really want to keep your Mac awake. Here are two solutions that promise to help.

With iTunes now shipping the first ever iPod touch application (the property list that unlocks the built-in applications and 1.1.3 firmware features), I thought I might take the opportunity to describe the way an iPhone application works. If you're familiar with Macintosh application bundles, you'll find that the iPhone application is similar...yet different.

Monday morning ... iChat beeps at me to get my attention. The message is, "Hey man, what time does the keynote start."

If you've done iPhone command-line programming, you've probably run into the dreaded Purple app errors. The iPhone complains that it couldn't register with the bootstrap server. This happens when the iPhone attempts to run more than one Purple application from the command line.

Here's the freeware, Open Source, and rich web services that I mentioned in my personal blog last week: Bazaar: Distributed Version Control Software, Weather Channel Weather Layers for Google Maps, Publish With Blogger Using Your Own Web Host, Cyberduck 2.8.2 ftp/sftp Mac Client, Wik.is: Free Wiki Service from the Creators of Deki Wiki, and Time Magazine: 50 Best Websites 2007.

Given that the iPhone is all but undocumented at the moment with the SDK not promised until February, I find that it often helps to add the following code to my classes. It allows me to see what methods are being invoked and create those as needed.

Apple will presumably have a support document on this soon enough, but in the meantime, the newly-released QuickTime 7.4 removes many of the older audio and video codecs from export dialogs by default.

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is out. And, here's what's new... Microsoft really likes to have multiple versions of the same product. There are five versions of Windows Vista. And, there will be eight versions of Windows Server 2008 when it is released. So, we should be happy there are only three versions of Office for Mac 2008 to choose from :-) All three versions come with the five core applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage, and Messenger. Office for the Mac 2008 (which I'll call standard edition here) is US$399.95 (239.95 upgrade). Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition is $499.95 ($299.95 upgrade). And, Office for Mac 2008 Home and Student Edition is $149.95. The Media Edition adds the Microsoft Expression (60-day trial edition available). The Home and Student Edition doesn't have Office-specifc Automator Actions (more on this later) or the ability to work with Microsoft Exchange Server. However, it does provide three users licenses.