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I had the great privilege to attend MacWorld this year compliments of my employer, and I’m happy to bring back reports from the field. Some of my photos are a little blurry, but let’s just pretend that adds to the magic and mystery of Macworld. Click below for the full story!

Obviously the big announcement was Apple’s iPhone. One of my personal favorite things about the iPhone is how Apple psyched everyone out, completely. Normally, the weekend before Macworld, everyone knows everything, but this year was different. There were rumors, sure, but no one could say with certainty what exactly was coming. If you watch the keynote stream on Apple, you’ll hear people freak out, but only if you were there could you catch the collective aroma of the Mac faithful pooping their pants in unison.
You can learn about the phone’s crazy features at the Apple website, but I’m going to point one important thing that may have been overlooked. One of the most genius pieces of info Steve gave was that the phone has no buttons. Why doesn’t it have any buttons? Well, why should it? If you want to add a new feature to a phone and you’ve locked yourself into a particular configuration, you’re going to have to spend the money to get a new design worked out for your next release. With Apple’s design, it’s infinitely scalable – you can make it whatever you want, or whatever you need to. Genius.

Another interesting bit of the convention was the Microsoft Office 2008 Sneak Peek. Ok, I lied. It wasn’t entirely interesting. Word 2008 looks like Pages in iWork ‘06. Designer templates, auto-popping-up guides for alignment, and even an ‘inspector’ icon. Did they not copy enough of OS X in Vista?

And in the same vein, I was fortunate enough to check out the presentations of Adobe’s CS3 betas, including Lightroom. Yes, it looks a lot like Aperture. It’s pretty slick though, and seemed to be working really nice, but overall the interface looked pretty much just like Aperture! Does Apple have Adobe, and Microsoft, scared to the point where they need to play catch up? Don’t make it like Apple… make it your own, and make it better!

The last really interesting thing I saw was the ModBook, a MacBook modification created by Axiotron and OWC. If you haven’t heard of it yet, the ModBook is a modification by which your awesome MacBook is turned into an awesome tablet Mac. Andreas Haas, co-founder of Axiotron, gave a great introduction and demo of the ModBook during the unveiling. Essentially, it’s a MacBook with a Wacom tablet underneath the screen… everything else is stock. The modification process is “non-destructive” in that the case mod doesn’t change anything on the computer that can’t be changed back. Everything else is the same, with the addition of a GPS receiver. They had some artists and photographers on hand to demo the tablet in context, but if you’ve used a Wacom tablet before, it’s basically that, but right on the screen.

So, those were the highlights of Macworld’s opening day. No doubt the announcement of the iPhone overshadowed pretty much anything else that happened that day, but if you’d like to check out pictures of the rest of the show, click here to see the gallery.