David Pogue, Dictate by MacSpeech,

I am so tired. I got to M West at 8:30 and am in line for the David Pogue presentation.

Update: In the room. Rotating disco lights and loud music. Just the thing at 9 am.

Later: David had the head of the Microsoft Mac BU, talked about Office 2008. Much more exciting was Andrew from MacSpeech, showing the new Dictate program, which is replacing iListen (thank goodness). It uses the Dragon Naturally Speaking engine. I am a major fan of DNS and even bought a Windows laptop once to run it, which I dumped as soon as the Intel MacBook Pro came out.

He dictated text on stage, which is a noisy, echoey environment. Did very well. Then he handed the microphone to David, with no training of the software, let him use his speech profile, and yet David was also able to dictate almost perfectly. Just amazing.

MacSpeech

He also had people from Computer History Museum who showed interesting artifacts, such as a hand wired prototype of the Mac. They also read from some early Apple documents. A 1977 financial project drawn as a straight line on a log scale (for all you geeks) projected they would make something like $83M in 1983. That year they actually made a billion. (I hope I got the dates right.)

Computer History Museum

Then the 5 most fanatical Mac Geeks in the audience told there stories, and David sang a couple of his new parody songs. I hope my recordings came out ok.

Highlights from yesterday:
After a false start, when I forgot my badge. Realized a block away, so I was able to reboot. I cruised the Moscone South exhibit hall for a while, and met my old friend Cindy for lunch were we swapped stories. Back to the show and watched a presentation on blogging for beginners by Dan Pourhadi of macuser.com. As a blogger for about a week, it fit the bill. A bit of cruising, and I realized I was exhausted and walked back to the room.

Dan Pourhadi's Blog
We went to dinner with Cindy and Julie, and engaged more conspiring.

I am getting tired of typing. I can't wait to be able to get back to dictating.