Living the good iLife by the Bay

I am enjoying MacWorld San Francisco this week for the first time in my computing life (or my iLife, as I guess Steve Jobs would describe it). I spend significant time in my Texas life experimenting, testing and toying with Mac software. I've been a Mac user since 1987, a relationship longer than anything except being a parent and a writer. (I married my lovely bride Abby a few years later, so it's pretty darn close there, but the Mac did appear first. Sometimes Abby must feel like she's got a rival when I disappear into my study to study the Mac. She's a Mac user herself, which has got to help her patience with this passion of mine.)

But I'm not in that study this week. It's been a thrill for a few days to have it all a few steps away instead of on the Internet. I had one experience yesterday on the show floor that paid for the whole trip — because I couldn't have gotten it anywhere else in the world, and I needed it this month.

(If you're a Mac addict or just admire the Mac from afar, you should read the show roundup at Macintouch by Henry Norr. He's been a Mac reporter about as long as I've been covering the computer business — the middle '80s — and his article has got just the right mix of wonder and dismay in his article, shaped by his analysis.)

As for me, I blog quite a bit to practice journalism these days, a lot of it for The 3000 NewsWire and some of it out here using Blogger. But I'm launching my writing workshop practice this year, and I want The Writer's Workshop to have its own The Write Stuff blog. Nothing could be better for branding than to have that blog up at The Writer's Workshop site. But getting that to happen looked like I'd need to install complex software (Moveable Type), then wrestle to configure it. Not my strong suit, but I could force it with enough trial and error. Plenty of time to do that, all keeping me from writing.

Enter iLife '06, the most significant part of this Macworld's announcements for me and my writing career. The iLife software now includes iWeb, Apple's first page layout program and one that includes automated blog-building ability. These days you can create beautiful blogs with very hard software, or ugly blogs with very easy software. Yes, Steve Jobs blew his usual share of smoke at us during his keynote on Tuesday. (Apple even had Intel's CEO enter the stage from a haze of dry ice fog, as if he'd just left a chip clean room. You can see a Webcast of the keynote at the Apple site.) But away from the smoke, iWeb really looks like it can give us Web page cutters beautiful and easy together. How do I know? On the Apple show floor, one of the support team helped me build a test blog and put it up at my own site.

So I got my very own 20-minute primer on iWeb in the new iLife from a first-rate Apple staffer on the floor. We even built a test blog and hosted it on one of my sites (workshopwriter.com) using the tools Apple includes with every new Mac. (Well, almost; we had to download a decent third-party file transfer tool, because Apple’s built-in FTP didn’t want to let us write to my Web site.) The staffer (I suspect he’s in development or support, he was so good) said he's encountered the same FTP problem himself from time to time.

Plainly put, I couldn’t have gotten that kind of experience anyplace else in the world. Surely not even at a Genius Bar at an Apple store on anything except a really slow day. (I visited the Apple Store's mothership on Stockton last night; my appointment to solve a Mac sleep problem started 20 minutes late. They had a queue eight deep.) I believe that at least this month, nobody in Austin's Apple Store would know iWeb as well as Apple’s own staff here in the Bay Area. Especially so early in the product’s life. How early was it? I told a couple of the Apple kids at the Apple booth that I'd just bought iLife, and it was so new they wanted to see the packaging for it. I pulled it out of my backpack to show them. That’s how you can be sure you’re plenty early in the lifecycle of a product.

How much more fun could San Francisco be? Well, last night there was Lestat, the just-premiered musical with music and lyrics by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, (Goodbye Yellow Brick Road's creators, doing a musical together for the first time), based on three Anne Rice Lestat novels. The book for the show — already scheduled for a Broadway opening later this spring — was written by the woman who wrote the screenplay for Beauty and the Beast, then the book for that movie's subsequent musical (already the sixth-longest running show in Broadway history). I was pumped, and bought a great sixth-row seat direct from the theatre's box office, a cast comp turned back. (That's a trick my Abby taught me in London the year we were married, combined with a tip my pal Birket Foster showed me in San Jose at a hockey game. Always ask them if there's any returns.)

But what I saw needed quite a bit of work. This is a tryout town for Broadway. Much like New Haven's Taft Theatre in the movie All About Eve, the Curran now sees its share of wrinkled newborns. Lestat is still pretty wrinkly, though it lifted me up a few times. More on that tomorrow. Even wrinkly, the experience was still worth the $85 ticket, to me.

I miss that bride of mine. But when I'm back home tomorrow, I'll have this week's sandbox Mac time tucked away as a wish fulfilled. To paraphrase my friend Kathy Jacobs O'Brian, the iLife is good out here on the Bay.