Have you been to Macworld Expo 2008? If so, what were your favorite products, or announcements, at the show that you think deserve more public attention? Major announcements like the MacBook Air or Microsoft Office 2008 are all over the media, so let's skip those and see what the more obscure products news were.

I've covered my personal MWSF2008 favorites in my blog post. What were yours?

Greetings,

Jochen.

Übercaster and Abaltat Muse.

The former is a podcast-production program with some ingenious features for realtime storytelling. For example, you can trigger sound bites and musical "bumpers" by clicking icons, but there's also a stealth mode that lets you trigger the clips simply by pointing at them, so your mic doesn't pick up the acoustic mouse-click sound. The developer enhanced the feature by adding a customizable trigger delay to prevent accidental triggering if your cursor brushes the icon.

I also liked features like onscreen countdowns, a script with built-in event triggers, and batch processing that lets you export a show in multiple formats (e.g., MP3, AAC, and AIFF) with one click. It made me think twice about the suite of programs I currently use to produce my podcast.

Abaltat Muse is an algorithmic music-generation program that derives its control input from video. In the example I saw, the bass part was driven by the amount of red in the image. The virtual band is composed of MIDI tracks, which can be exported to GarageBand or Logic and easily modified. Seemed like a fun way to start a soundtrack project.