Wednesday at Macworld Expo marked a distinct change from the hectic activity around the keynote and the open of the show floor. The big news today was the announcement of the Best of Show awards from Macworld. The products recognized this year are…

Best of Macworld 2009

• iPhoto ’09
• Cisco WebEx Meeting Center
• Things
• Ecamm Network BT-1 Bluetooth Web Cam
• Filemaker Pro 10
• HP MediaSmart Server
• Livescribe Pulse Smartpen
• Daylite Touch
• Sling Media SlingPlayer for iPhone

Our Impressions

iPhoto ’09 is a great upgrade and worthy of the attention, despite the appearance of Google’s Picassa for Mac as a possible competitor. We love Things around here, and quite a few of us actually use it to try and stay on top of, well, things. We introduced you to the Ecamm Bluetooth Web Cam on Monday. Filemaker Pro 10 is a nice update. I talked to a few developers today that are looking forward to the new scripting features, but the UI overhaul is just something that’s long overdue. Daylite Touch really redefines what an iPhone app is capable of doing. We had a chance to talk with Marketcircle yesterday and will share our impressions of using the app soon. One thing I can let slip now, this is definitely not going to be a $.99 app store purchase. Daylite Touch is a full-featured app that rivals what you can do with a desktop app and you should expect it to be priced accordingly.

The Rest of the Best

The HP MediaSmart Server is a really interesting solution for home users that want to store and share media. SlingPlayer is very cool and something to keep an eye on as soon as it gets released to the app store this quarter. We’ll bring you more info on that announcement soon, along with some details on the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, and Cisco WebEx Meeting Center.

Other Announcements

If you’ve been wondering what happened to the Xserve RAID team after that product was discontinued, several of them have resurfaced at startup Active Storage. I had a chance to talk with Alex Grossman on Wednesday and I am very impressed with the attention to detail, and the particular attention to the needs of Mac users, that Active Storage has put into their products. If you are looking for high-density storage solutions that you can easily manage from the Mac, you may not need to look any further than Active Storage.

Intelliscanner has a new update to their SoHo and Mini scanners. If one of your New Year’s resolutions was to get organized and catalog stuff around your house, you’ll love this little scanners and the accompanying software.

Axiotron recruited Steve Wozniak to demo their new Modbook Pro this week. The Modbook Pro, as the name suggest, is based on the MacBook Pro system just as the Modbook is based on the Apple MacBook.

Ambrosia, one of my favorite developers, is announcing iToner 2 and WireTap Studio 1.0.7 this week. iToner 2 adds three new features: ClearTone to help get the audio levels right so your ringtones always sound great on the iPhone, cropping tools to edit snippets right in iToner, and 40+ professionally mastered ringtones that you can use right out of the box. WireTap Studio has been updated to improve performance and add some new control schemes .

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• A 2011 Green IT Forecast

Ecamm Network have announced the world’s first webcam with Bluetooth wireless technology. The new BT-1 webcam combines top-notch video and sound with complete freedom from wires. This is the first Bluetooth webcam supported by OS X, and will be priced at $149.99 when launched in a few months time.

Technical Details

The BT-1 streams H.264 video and AAC audio, taking advantage of Mac OS X’s rich media capabilities to provide a truly seamless experience. The detailed specifications are:

• 640×480 H.264 video and 48 kHz AAC stereo audio
• Compact 2″ x 2½” x 5/8″ design
• Compatible with iChat, Skype and more
• Standard tripod mounting screw
• 4 hour talk time
• Includes a flexible mini-tripod and USB charging cable
• Works on all latest Macs with Leopard and Bluetooth v2.0+EDR or better.

Designed for video chat, the BT-1 frees Mac users from the constraints of a built-in camera, allowing for maximum versatility in camera position, pan and tilt. The included flexible mini-tripod makes for easy desktop mounting.

“Introducing this new class of wireless products is very exciting,” says Ecamm’s Glen Aspeslagh. “Users will be impressed with the quality and ease of use that we’ve built into the BT-1.” It will be interesting to see actual footage taken with the camera to judge just how capable Bluetooth is at streaming the required video quality from different distances.

The BT-1 Wireless Webcam is expected to be available worldwide beginning in March. The suggested retail price in the U.S. is $149.99, and Ecamm Network will be showing the webcam at the Macworld Conference. If you’re already sold, pre-orders are currently being taken and you can also sign up for more information through an email newsletter.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How Speech Technologies Will Transform Mobile Use
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

I turned to Ecamm’s PhoneView program as it has been much Twittered about lately and is from the makers of the most excellent Call Recorder software (highly useful for Skype interviews). Along with providing access to SMS history (which is what I really wanted) it also claims to provide easy access to your iTunes media, photos, notes, call history and contacts, including the ability to drag and drop each file from the iPhone to your desktop.

After downloading the trial version, just plug in your iPhone and it will automagically recognize the device and load up the data from it:

While I will not be showing the SMS retrieval portion (it would pretty much be a gigantic redacted block), the notes feature,

call history feature (with export to tab-delimited file capability),

and disk view mode make it a very handy tool.

This is one app where I highly recommend tweaking the default preferences since it will come up each time you connect your iPhone if you do not disable that ability.

I was all set to purchase PhoneView, but kept having shopping cart issues and really wanted to get the SMS bits off of it prior to both clearing the SMS databases and installing iPhone OS 2.0.2, so I turned to a less interactive solution that requires a bit of command-line-fu.

First, grab unravel, a small Perl script which you will use to rifle through your iPhone backup files (which are liberally generated these days). Then, using the Finder’s “Go to Folder…” option (via the “Go” menu), enter: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

Each of the weirdly named directories contains various backups of your iPhone data. Copy the Perl script to the most recently modified folder. Now, you will need the full path of that folder to continue and I suggest using either the Finder toolbar or keyboard-shortcut version of Open Terminal Here to make your life much easier. Either manually, or via “Open Terminal Here”, fire up Terminal.app, change directories and run the Perl script (yours may be named unravel.perl.pl or unravel.perl depending on how you or your browser saved it).

You can browse the results by going to ~/iPhone/Backup in the Finder. The SMS database is in ~/iPhone/Backup/Library/SMS and I recommend grabbing the open source SQLite Database Browser to look at and export any of the SQLite databases.

If you can get through Ecamm’s shopping cart, the $19.95USD is a pretty good deal as it gives you a decent interface and free upgrades for life. If you just need to grab information once in a while or have some casual interest in what can be pulled from the iPhone backup files, then unravel may be a good option for you.

What extra tools do you use to manage your iPhone data? If you’ve used unravel or PhoneView, sound off in the comments!

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile Q4: All Eyes Were on Android, 4G and the Rising Tablet Tide
• Report: A Mobile Video Market Overview
• In Q3, the Tablet and 4G Were the Big Stories