So, another MacWorld has come and gone. I must say, it was a pretty good one. The big news is probably best covered by some of the more Mac-centric sites, but I wanted to post a few things that caught my attention.

First off, the new iLife suite looks pretty sweet (ha ha ha). The most significant new feature in my opinion is the Garage Band podcasting features, integrated with the iWeb software for posting a podcast. While folks at the University of Minnesota have UThink which provides an easy way to post podcasts, other folks aren’t so lucky. I think it’ll be a big hit.

The other iLife updates are less substantial from my point of view.

The big news of course was the announcement of Intel based iMacs and laptops (the “MacBook Pro”). I won’t go into the nitty gritty on these, though I’ll be eager to get hands on with one.

For me, the single most exciting bit was the announcement that the Pro Apps (Final Cut, Aperture, Logic) will all be universal binaries by the end of March. This has been one of my big concerns – from what I’ve heard, the move from OS9 to OSX was rather painful for Final Cut, and I was worried that the port to x86 would be similarly difficult. After talking with some reps from the Pro Apps group a month ago, that fear was heightened by their “we’ll be on x86 someday” attitude.

Anybody who still has an older version of Final Cut will also be able to take advantage of the transition to Intel to upgrade to Final Cut Studio at a reduced rate as well. It remains to be seen whether the upgrade will apply to academic discount versions, but we can hope.

It’s exciting to know that the next generation of the platform is now in the wild. It’s an exciting time. Once the iMacs start arriving in the hands of end users, there will be much more to write about.