I had a ton of fun at Macworld last week. I caught up with a bunch of friends and made some new ones, and even ran into some VoodooPad users. Here's the highlights:

iPhone
What more is there to say about this one? It's a very impressive piece of technology, but I wish Steve wouldn't be so hard on the 3rd party developers. So my initial excitement has completely worn off. Casey Fleser says in "No iPhone For Me" pretty much exactly what I am feeling. What a bummer.

Skitch
I saw a really cool new app named Skitch, made from the folks at Plasq. It's a neat idea- you've got a little window frame, with drawing tools around it and it even lets you take screen shots and such. And it's got a web service for uploading your images, and does some pretty awesome vector tricks.

Wait. That sounds familiar...

Oh, crap. It's going to kill FlySketch!

Actually, it isn't going to kill FlySketch. And I'm also very happy about what they are doing, because Skitch is going in a direction that I seriously considered taking FlySketch, but chose to go a different way instead (aka, bitmap editing. Good job on my part, predicting the future and all that!). I'll also be able to point to Skitch when folks want more advanced vector stuff, or if people don't like the way FS is going. (And the vector tricks Skitch performs are really really awesome. I bugged them about the technical aspects of it because I was in awe by what I was seeing.)

However, if someday Skitch 2 goes towards what FlySketch 2 is doing... well, then the Plasq sock puppet gets it :)
The Plasq Mascot


BBFolks
I finally got to meet the founders of Bare Bones Software, Rich Siegel and Patrick Woolsey. Also working the Bare Bones Booth was Seth Dillingham, whom I've known via email and blogs for a little while, and it was good to finally meet him. He's tall; very very tall. Even taller than Derrick Story, which I didn't think was possible.

They were all a bunch of good guys, and I hope to see them again at WWDC.

Mactank
I got to see a cool demo of a web app named Mactank, which is an "Email manager for small business". It looks like a really nice solution for the support burden that tend to get in the way of indie devs. While it won't get rid of email support (hahahaha), it looks like it'll make it a lot easier.

They've also got a plugin for Mail.app, named MailTemplate, which looks to be very useful as well (in fact, I'm trying it out now).

CocoaHeads
On Thursday, Brent, Paul and myself attended a CocoaHeads meeting at the Apple store in SF. The presentation at the meeting was over Cha-Ching, a new finance app by the folks at Midnight Apps. A very enthusiastic Juan Alvarez (the programmer behind Cha-Ching) gave the presentation, and I was very impressed by the app. I came away with about 10 different UI things that I wanted to steal from them.

Did I say that out-loud? Really, I meant "borrow".

I also finally met Scott Stevenson who is the guy behind Cocoa Blogs and Cocoa Dev Central (and he also does Cocoa tutoring, which he says is going well).

The End
And that's pretty much the highlights. Well, there was obviously more- the MacSB Dinner was great, hanging with the Panic crew and Dan Messing and friends, Ken Case stepping in with perfect timing to compete a joke, and of course catching up with lots of other friends as well. I'll certainly have to do it again next year.