While Macworld’s offices are based in San Francisco, I live in Portland, one of the best wired cities in the U.S., and and a place with plenty of open wireless access points (take that, Denver!). With all due respects to the Golden Gate, I’d rather commute 600 miles than move back to the Bay.
One of the things that makes Portland such a great city to live in is its vibrant Mac community – home to companies like Extensis, You Software, Dr. Bott, LaCie, HP’s Mac group (across the river in Vancouver), PowerMax (owner of the excellent independent Mac Stores), Jiiva, SmileOnMyMac, and Xerox, among others. It’s also where you’ll find VersionTracker/MacFixIt, MacOSXHints.com, and CreativePro.com, and boatloads of Mac users. It’s enough to make us forget that little Intel company over in Hillsboro.
Among the Portland Mac literati is James Duncan Davidson, who writes one of my favorite weblogs, x180. His blog is is full of ruminations on the Mac – with a technical/programming slant – and our wired life in general (he takes some good pictures, too). James is also the author of O’Reilly’s Running Mac OS X Panther , and MacDevCenter has just published James’s interview with the guys who run Panic Software, another member of the Portland ‘crew.’
The guys at Panic publish good stuff – Transmit, Unison, Audion and CandyBar are their main apps – and the interview is well worth reading for anyone interested in the state of Mac software development. I think there more smart, small companies creating great products for the Mac right now than any time I can remember, and Panic is one of them.
And if, for some reason, you decide that you have to go down to the Pearl to say hi, take them (or James) over to Pho Van for lunch. It’s well worth the trip.