The Macworld Expo Best of Show awards highlight the products that stand out at the show. The Macworld editors took each Best of Show candidate under careful consideration, and finally came up with this list of 11 winners.
The Papershow ($200) uses a camera-equipped pen in conjunction with special paper that transmits your handwriting to a screen. You can show a slide with, say, a bar chart, and you can make annotation to the chart that appears on screen in real time.
With SkyFi ($150) and the SkyVoyager ($15) iPhone app, you can use your iPhone to control your GoTo telescope. The SkyFi is a Wi-Fi device that connects to a GoTo telecope’s RS-232 port. You can also use your Mac as a remote control.
With the U-Socket ($30), you can plug your iPhone, iPod, digital camera, or other device directly into the wall, without needing a power adapter. The USB ports output 5V at 600 mA, and they have power only when a device is connected.
AutoPark ($5) is all about parking your car. It helps you track the time left on a parking meter; uses GPS to help find your car; find nearby gas stations, banks, and bathrooms; and more. In major cities where meter maids are aggressive, AutoPark can save you from a costly parking ticket.
Inrix Traffic Pro ($10 for one year, $25 lifetime) helps you plan your commute with real-time traffic reports. It can tell you where there are incidents and events that influence traffic. The app even lets you access traffic cameras so you can see for yourself what’s happening on the road.
Kanex’s HDMI to Mini DisplayPort Connector ($150) is the first HDMI-to-Mini DisplayPort video-in adapter we’ve seen for the current crop of 27-inch iMacs. You can connect a Playstation 3 or Blu-ray player to the 27-inch iMac.
Billings Touch ($15) is one of the better time-billing apps of its kind for the iPhone. Though it syncs with Billings on the Mac, Billings Touch is full-featured and works well on its own. Billings Touch makes it easy to track your expenses, and you can even invoice clients from the iPhone.
The trend in the projector market is to go small, and more manufacturers are releasing pico projectors. The ShowWX ($500) is the only pico projector that uses laser technology that produces color that’s better than other, non-laser based pico projectors.
Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite ($10) offers a pair of full-featured office applications (Quickword and Quicksheet) that let you create, open, and edit Microsoft Word and Excel documents on your iPhone. You can also access files that are stored on online storage services like DropBox, Google Docs, and MobileMe.
Yapper is an online service that gives content creators access to easy-to-use tools to create an iPhone app—you don’t need to know how to code. Apps built on Yapper use your existing RSS feeds, have an optimized user interface, can cache content for offline reading, and more.
This ingenious application extends the functionality of the MacBook’s multitouch trackpad, allowing it to be used like a Wacom tablet. When using Inklet ($25) with the Pogo Sketch ($15) stylus, it even has pressure sensitivity, and it can sense unwanted trackpad touches.