“Unfortunately I don’t have Photoshop running in X”

Here’s that workflow again. Click Import, can automatically erase after import… “It looks a lot like iTunes, doesn’t it?” Libraries of photos and photo albums. “I’ve got over a thousand photos in here, and I can scroll through it really easily…” He shows zooming out for a few hundred on the screen at a time. Can view by film rolls (applause, oohs in Tysons Corner). Photo albums–“playlists for iPhoto.” Editing: How do I crop? Button down, drag, and click Crop. Great transparency effect. Constrained aspect ratios for auto cropping, movable crop window. Or for a DVD, 4×3 aspect ratio… Spoke too soon about limited editing, can also convert to black and white or rotate, or do redeye. Can also pick other apps to open in. “Unfortunately I don’t have Photoshop running in X yet” (laughter, applause) “so I’ll go into Preview.

First new product: iPhoto

Digital cameras were 30% of all cameras sold last year in the US. “Today we are introducing our fourth digital hub application, iPhoto, and it’s killer.” The problem to solve for iPhoto: the chain of events: import, edit, print… use multiple apps, it’s a mess… “the chain of pain.” “We made iPhoto so that when you plug it in to your Mac’s USB or Firewire port, you click one button, it automatically imports, thumbnails, catalogs.” Plus cropping and printing. We have unified under a special print panel for iPhoto. Set the paper, the margins and press print. Looks like they’ve been very careful not to step on Adobe’s toes with Photoshop, which was a rumored sticking point. But “this is just the ante to play the game.” “With film, you end up with a shoebox…with digital photography you end up with a bunch of .jpg files that are very easy to throw away.” The digital shoebox…. it’s about save, organize, and share.

More apps

Demoing iDVD now. Again, the workflow bores me, but it’s important that people see how this is done. But I now know why the keynote was stretched to two and a half hours. iTunes: playing some George Harrison (thanks, Steve–more appropriate music choices for the keynote. How do I get the job of picking that up for him?) A brief wait for the iPod to come up and start syncing. “Any time now… Anyway, you know what it’s supposed to do.” (I see a new patch for the firmware coming soon.) “But what about this? What about the digital camera?”

Protective gear

“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

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.

Surprise hit: the math guy

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.” (!)

More devs

“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.)

Adobe’s news

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.”

First: the state of the mac

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.)

Waiting for the tree to shake

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.)

Waiting for Steve

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.

Gap replaces pig’s feet

Well! All in all, a surprising day. The first surprise was the lack of snow—though, given that it is Washington, DC, a city in which weather is as unpredictable (and boring) as a leaf in the wind, this wasn’t actually too surprising.

The gig at the Monastery went quite well. There were seven of us, so with me left as more or less a pinch-hitter, I sightread through the Mass and then relaxed and enjoyed singing the material with which I was familiar. I found sightreading much easier this morning, probably because it wasn’t 11:30 PM. Dim sum followed with Jim Heaney, his girlfriend Deb, and Skip and George. I regret to report that no chicken feet were consumed.

My next stop after Cheeselord Manor was to be the Littles. George was my neighbor at Virginia my fourth year, and when Lisa and I met Bethany with George at my five-year reunion we all hit it off tremendously. Bethany and Lisa have a lot in common—as Lisa points out, they’re both short Italian-American women with impeccable taste and fabulous hosting instincts. The plan was for them to meet me at the Monastery and to proceed from there. Unfortunately, through a snafu they couldn’t make it, and I drove from Chinatown to the Cathedral to plan the next move.

I went down the hill to Georgetown in search of a city map, as mine is currently locked away someplace. I found a good one in Olsson’s, but not before an unpleasant surprise. Au Pied du Cochon, which was a little hole in the wall that could be counted on for good single malt and bad cassoulet when my friends and I were hungry after singing the Tenebrae service at Georgetown, is no more. A Gap is in its place. My blood runs cold—my memory has just been sold: my bistro is a … true slime mold? [Note to self: get better rhyming dictionary.]

Afterwards I got in touch with George and Bethany and came to their house. Continuing in the same string of real estate luck that found them a townhouse complete with wine cellar full of 1974 Mondavis, they found a 3500 or 4000 square foot house up the street from the back gate of the Italian ambassador’s residence that was built in the 1940s and that they purchased from the original owner. I’ll probably have a few things to say about the house, but I’ll leave off now with the observation that the kitchen contained built-in steel pull-outs for foil and paper towels; the mostly unfinished attic contained a cedar closet previously used for minks; and the first floor powder room currently sports an intriguing combination of brown wood paneling and red and black lace wallpaper(!) that calls to mind some of New Orleans’ more notorious establishments. And a dog that likes cheese. I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings.