A scanner, a keyboard and other Macworld goodies

Continuing last year’s tradition, I’m listing a few things featured at the Macworld show in San Francisco that caught my attention. I didn’t attend so this is just stuff that I read about…

First, solving an annoying shortcoming of most USB keyboards, Canadian peripheral maker Matias introduced some Mac keyboards with USB 2.0 ports. Most keyboards have a USB port or two for connecting a mouse but the ports are invariably the old-fashioned version 1.1 ports which are limited to slow-speed connections (hard drives need not apply). The Matias keyboards can hook up your iPod or other gear that really needs the faster USB 2.0 ports.

Another intriguing if overpriced doo-dad is Intelliscanner’s mini barcode scanner. It’s listing for $299 but it’s a cool if geeky way to keep track of anything in your house that’s bar-coded, like books, DVDs or even bottles of wine. And it comes bundled with a couple of different database programs for looking up the bar code data in those various categories. Scan away and then connect to your computer’s USB port to upload the data.
I’ve rapidly become a fan of Mark/Space’s Missing Sync for Palm software which helps me get the most out of my Treo 700p. And I’ve slowly become less and less a fan of Apple’s .Mac program that seems to be a worse deal for the money every year. But .Mac has so far been irreplaceable for syncing things like address book entries across a couple of different Macs. And some third-party software rides the .Mac sync train as well, like Yojimbo and Entourage. At Macworld, Mark/Space announced a new program called SyncTogether that may finally make .Mac completely superfluous (or at least prompt Apple to improve the dollars to donuts ratio).

Finally, in the category of expensive, Frankenstein-like Mac manifestations, a company called Axiotron was showing what they called the Modbook — essentially the screen and brains of a Macbook transplanted into a tablet computer with a touch screen and Wacom pen. I don’t want one but you’ve got to give them high marks for trying.