MacWorld Expo San Francisco 2004
Payam and I went to MacWorld Expo today. It's a smaller show this year, area-wise, as seems to be the trend in many trade shows these days, but there seemed to be a lot of people there, to the point where it was uncomfortably crowded, like shopping after Thanksgiving.
We stopped at every booth with iPod accessories in search of the ideal iPod cover. There was the leather, the neoprene, and the plastic; the bulky, the form-fitting, the modular and expandable.
The Apple-provided iPod sleeve is pretty nice. It looks good, and it's easy to get the iPod in and out of, but I have a couple of problems with it. First, there is no access to bottom connector, so I end up having to take it out of the sleeve while I'm in my car, to plug in the charger. Second, you can't see the display while it's in there.
We both settled on a blue iSkin eXo2. It's like a rubber glove for the iPod. It has access to both the bottom connector as well as the plus on top, and has windows for the display and controls. The only time you would need to remove the iPod from the iSkin is while docking, and you can just pull the bottom half back (it's strechy) to dock it. A bit awkward, but docking isn't the common case for me. I found that I also need to pull the top half back, in order to connect my NaviPod IR remote, so it looks particularly goofy docked on my stereo. All of the stretching weirded me out when I saw it online, but in practice it seems like it can handle it. It's not perfect, but outside of the docking issue, it's just right. Well, I might add a clear hard plastic window over the display to prevent scratching. It looks like they thought of that, (there is a notch under the window frame) but didn't include it.
We found James, whose O'Reily book on Panther just came out. A lot of people were asking about that book, and it looks like a great read. He got me a copy as well as a copy of the new Postfix book, which I really need after having upgraded my home server to Panther and noticing that the postfix.org docs are not very good unless you already know Postfix. More on that later.
Update: the iSkin web site says that the plastic window is included, but neither I nor Payam got them. Not sure what to make of that. Payam says he's going to call them and ask about it.