Day: January 7, 2002

“It’s time. Starting today, all new Macs will boot up into OS X.” Switch booting still possible. This was rumored and he’s right, it’s time. Get rid of the OS 9 legacy. Time to turn the corner.

Now, the digital hub. “It’s a strategy: personal computers will be the center of our new digital lifestyle.” Two categories: devices that are dramatically enhanced by a Mac (e.g. camcorder and DVD player), and devices that aren’t even useful without a computer (e.g. MP3 player, digital camera). iTunes, iPod, iDVD, iMovie… “And now for a brief demo of those apps in case you haven’t seen them.” (Groans at Tysons Corner. Someone says, “He’s such a tease.”) Showing a middle school student, Jonathan Winslow’s project movie made in iMovie. Laughter for the boardslide while drinking a Slurpee, and for “And this is why you use protective gear.”

Lucasfilm, Dan Gregor. This is big: Lucasfilm was rumored to have an agreement with SGI that they wouldn’t mention any other platforms. George Lucas on video. Talks about Mac OS X in the animatics department. The other new trend for the 00s: cool places to work (“My name is Dan and I work at Skywalker Ranch.”) Demonstrating animatics with texture and lighting on Maya. What if he changes his mind? AfterEffects. “We render in layers.” Shows the opening shot: “hero layer, background layer, traffic” (over Coruscant). “It’s the marriage between the apps and OS X that makes it possible.” This is one of the few times Steve’s brought up a customer.

Theodore Gray, Wolfram Research, for Mathematica. Demonstrating an integral live? “Okay, so it’s math, but look at the typography! Everything looks better in Mac OS X, even that. Yes, this is useful for math students; the homework of the world doesn’t stand a chance.” He’s going to get a lot of high school students hitting the Hotline servers tonight looking for this one… Now showing animations. “I was whipping something up in the background. I would never try to do this on any other operating systems.” A sample of animation of potential around a threeD polygon. “This would have been great for designing a vacuum tube. It’s too bad they didn’t have Macs and Mathematica.” (!)

“Next up, Palm.” Tom Bradley, COO of Palm to show off new Palm Desktop beta. The engineer from Palm is very engaging, much like a pine board. Instant Palm Desktop from the Dock menu, drag and drop VCard and VCal from Palm Desktop to a file (scattered applause). “How do we sync in OS X?” Hotsync demo. No word about infrared sync. “You can now download the public beta” (scattered giggles from the crowd, since the server’s only been allowing a handful of people on at a time.

Now Apple’s Mike Evangelist about Final Cut Pro 3.0. (What a great name! The 80s and 90s were about weird job titles, the 00s will be about ideal last names for business!) Demo of Final Cut Pro. Realtime effects engine, color correction (oohs and ahs. I gotta say, I’ve never done digital video and the workflow is boring the hell out of me, but I can appreciate the complexity of what they’re doing as a programmer.)

Maine: “1 down, 49 to go…. We know that Texas is going to be a challenge, but we’re working on it.” Now Mac OS X: Same screen shots we’ve seen since since 10.1. A new UNIX Based badge. “We’ve seen more and more Unix programmers become Mac programmers, and more and more Mac programmers become Unix programmers.” (I can attest to that.) Last three months a focus on getting developers to ship apps, and “the floodgates have opened.” 1500 apps in October, 2500 apps in January (after 10.1 came out). Microsoft Office for Mac OS X (polite applause–then Steve says “and I just wanted to give them a round of applause.”) What’s up with Adobe? Shantanu Narayen, executive VP of Adobe comes on stage. “All of our applications are going to take advantage of the Mac platform.” This morning we announced After Effects 5.5 is now shipping for OS X. Russell Brown: Illustrator 10, InDesign 2.0 (native Photoshop files with transparency, autowrap around photos, export to XML), GoLive 6.0… waiting for…”Why don’t we take a look at Photoshop. It’s real, it’s almost here…” Lots of automated stuff with AppleScript. Spellchecking in Photoshop of editable text. InDesign 2.0 is now release candidate. “I think we’re the poster child of applications for OS X.”

Here comes Steve. People in the store are applauding. “We have some great stuff to announce today, so let’s get started.” He starts with the update: iPod: Between November 10 and December 31, 125,000 iPods sold. And they’re building more. Retail stores (the crowd here applauds). 40% of the customers buying CPUs in Apple stores don’t already have a Mac. 40,000 people at MacWorld. Last month Apple retail stores had 800,000 visitors (over 27 stores). “Last update: the great state of Maine.” (Every 7th and 8th grade student and teacher gets a networked wireless iBook.)

The screen just lit up but no audio yet–oh, there we go. Music: “Runnin’ Down a Dream” from Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever album; “Shakin’ the Tree” (the Peter Gabriel version)… suddenly I’m not clear whether this is from the video feed or whether the guy in the store is playing it from iTunes. There must be eighty or a hundred people packed into the theatre here in McLean. I’d like to pause and thank Apple’s enlightened policy of putting unrestricted Airport access in all of their stores. Closeup on a guy’s woodgrain custom PowerBook in the audience; a couple of water bottles next to an optical mouse and flat panel screen on stage. There’s an old iMac at the center podium, away from all the flat panel machines (probably to be used for the obligatory Photoshop shootout). Gee, an old iMac–wonder wy they chose that to be center stage. (Foreshadowing with hardware placement, a new trend at MacWorld keynotes.)

I’m blogging from the Apple Store in McLean, Virginia, waiting for Steve Jobs’ announcement about the new product lineup. They’ve pulled up a bunch of extra chairs for all the Apple fans. There are three other PowerBooks (another Pismo, a Titanium, and an iBook) all surfing away while we wait. I’m going to try to realtime blog the announcement–we’ll see if my machine keeps up. What did I do on my road trip? Sat on my butt and watched a satellite transmission from San Francisco.