By David Engstrom

I am just a country bumpkin (as much as you can be a country bumpkin in the Burbs of Silicon Valley) so I approached My first visit in about 12 years to sophisticated city of San Francisco with a certain amount of trepidation. Not only was it my first visit to San Francisco in a very long time (Ok, Ok I'm a cultual Neanderthal, what can I say) but my first Macworld attendance and more importantly my first live Keynote address by Steve Jobs!

Getting there on time required some sacrifice on my part. I keep Internet publishing hours - that means that I hit the sack between 4 and 5 am and arise to a new day between 12 - 1pm. Arriving at Moscone Center for a Keynote at 9AM would mean wiping the sleep from my eyes at about 6AM. This problem was compounded by the fact that I hadn't had any sleep at all during the previous 24 hours and was recovering from whatever pestilence my siblings children infected me with during our holiday gatherings.

BANG, BANG, BANG came the knocking at my door promptly at 6AM wresting me from a fitfull sleep during which I had dreamed repeatedly that all the iMacs scattered around the Moscone Center had been loaded with Windows 98! I shook those cobwebs out of my head, hooked an I.V. bag full of espresso to my arm and stumbled out to my brother's car, which would be our transportation to Macworld.

With my brother behind the wheel we careened down highway 280, which leads from Palo Alto to the Emerald City - that sure woke me up quick! My brother's car has been rejected several times by junkyards! It is a tenement building on wheels. The whirring and grinding noises coming from all the gears and bearings that seem near collapse, make it almost impossible to hold on a conversation inside the car. As I glanced over at the speedometer (we were doing 80mph - the speedometer's top speed) my brother asks me "I wonder how much a new transmission would cost?" I gave a tug at my seatbelt as visions of the car disintegrating around us into a thousand pieces and us skidding down 280 on our butts at 80mph, passed through my head! [Note: donations to the "buy Don a new Prius" fund graciously accepted - Ed]

By some divine intervention we made it to SF in one piece. Because we thought parking near the Moscone Center would be a bear we parked at a friends house some ways out from the Center and took some public transportation hops to get there - which was surprisingly efficient and quick.

When we got to Moscone Center, about an hour before the Keynote, people were already streaming into the building. We however had an Ace up our sleeve - or rather around our necks. Since we are Press we have Press Passes which mean basically that we are fawned over where ever we go and our way into the Keynote auditorium would be trouble free, bypassing the teaming throngs of regular attendees trying to get in.

On our way through the lobby we passed a besieged Sinbad (the comedian celebrity) who was treating an unwanted fan like the one-night-stand he would rather forget. The genial Andy Ihnatko (macHOME backpage commentator) ambled by with his trademark hat and sideburns.

We made our way into the big hall where the keynote would be given and were escorted at every turn by Apple employees smiling and greeting us - we had to remind ourselves not to let it all go to our heads.

When we got to the big hall it was about half full (it would fill up to capacity very quickly). I believe that at that moment in this hall was the highest per capita amount of digital cameras in the world. They came in all sorts of shapes and sizes and everyone was using their viewfinders to adjust to the room lighting before Jobs came on - it gave a sort of surreal quality to the auditorium as you saw the stage mirrored in all the camera viewfinders in front of you.

And then the wizard arrived......

When Steve Jobs took the stage he went into a brief upbeat pitch about how many Macintoshes had been sold last quarter (1,350,000 or 1 every 6 seconds - a record for Apple), the current retail market share (11% for Nov.), that 17% of purchasers of Mac portables were Wintel switchers, that 44% of iMac purchasers were new Mac owners and that demand for the high-end iMac Special Edition had outstripped supply. All this good news was received with enthusiastic applause by the audience and a thousand silently clicking digital cameras.

Sina's Kids

Next was a demonstration of the iMovie program that comes with the new DV iMacs. For the demonstration Jobs ran Sina's iMovie, which was a delightful montage of the head of the iMovie product team's kids doing what kids do best having a lot of fun. You'll see this Movie cropping up in Apple's new round of commercials - the kids laughing in the commercials on one of the DV iMacs will be Sina's kids.

Mastering your own digital movies on the computer is the next killer App, according to the people in Cupertino, and to spotlight this belief Apple is adding a slew of heavy weight directors to its Think Different Campaign, including Hitchcock and Coppola among others.

Speaking of commercials Jobs did his now standard "clap-o-meter" commercial evaluation asking the audience to clap for which of the three commercials Apple previewed they liked best. Judging by the response Jeff Goldblum may be put out of work by a couple of giggling kids!

Beyond the Box

During this part of the keynote Apple unveiled its Internet Strategy. This was one of the two main parts of the keynote. Apple is attempting to integrate all its Internet related assets and weave them into a seamless, multithreaded tapestry. Those assets are considerable, represent excellent marketing and customer service opportunities for Apple and are being implemented with the same elegance, simplicity and usefulness that Apple has always strived for and has been hitting right on the nose since Jobs returned two and half years ago.

Jobs listed Apple four main Internet assets as:

1) QuickTime - Now with a 33% market share, over twice as much as Microsoft's MediaPlayer and only 25% behind RealPlayer which has been established much longer. More importantly in the under 21 year age group, which is a key group for marketing, QuickTime came out on top. Jobs also touted Apples QuickTime streaming media partners and its 12 million dollar investment in Akamai (which helps stream content efficiently around the Net) which has since ballooned into a one billion dollar return - at least on paper.

2) Internet Ready OS 9 - 1 million copies have been sold in the last 60 days

3) The Apple website which receives 1.5 million visits each day.

4) The AppleStore which is doing 1 billion dollars of sales each year - 300 million during the last quarter.

So as most of you know by now Apple has redesigned their Web site by putting a series of Tabs at the top, making navigation to its main sections easy and straightforward. Jobs in the keynote went over the new sections:

iReview - These are a listing of Web sites that Apple has reviewed giving each a star rating. The idea here is to pick out the best of the Net for each category so that new users are not wandering around trying to find something of relevance. Jobs said that there were 250 reviews as of the Keynote and that by April there should be over a thousand. The reviews are interactive, a la Amazon, and you can add your own rating for any site in the database.

iCards- Allows you to send quality email cards in a variety of different categories that appear in-line in the email you send. You can also import your own images so cards can become truly customizable. Jobs first showed some e-cards from Blue Mountain which were coarse and crude in comparison and which he said made him "embarrassed to be a human being". One thing that Apple should copy from Blue Mountain is to create a humor category and perhaps make it so that you can attach a sound file - these are the kind of touches that make Blue Mountain cards attractive to relatives as they send gag cards to one another.

The above two sections are available to anyone on the Net the next new feature of Apples Web site, iTools, is not. You have to be running OS 9 to take advantage of iTools.

iTools consists of:

KidSafe - A KidSafe module you download to your computer that works in conjunction with the multi-user features of OS 9. You can then set up the browser for your kids to use the KidSafe module. The way it works is that when your child tries to log onto a Web site the browser first checks with the KidSafe database of over 55,000 hand picked sites. If the site is in the database it will appear in the browser as normal. If not you get a message saying the site you are trying to access is not an approved site. Jobs said that regular software filtering does not work and that Apple's approach is much more reliable. This KidSafe iTool should be very popular with Teachers, Librarians, and Parents. It is difficult not to over-estimate the amount of fear many parents have about letting their children wander freely around the Internet, given all the negative hype in the Media. Parents can also add sites to their KidSafe site lists

Mac.com - You can now get a email account from Apple under the domain mac.com

iDisk - Apple will make available to you 20MB of disk space on their servers. You can store whatever you want here and a disk icon will appear on your desktop when you log-on to iDisk, giving you drag and drop access to your space. There is also a public folder in your iDisk where you can put things you would like to allow others to have access to. You will need to give them your log-in name. Also from your iDisk, personal photos can be read into iCards, to make cards to send to others, or into your Homepage, where they can be made available on the Net. You can also store QuickTime movies in your iDisk. There they can be streamed out to the net either through your Public Folder or by way of your personal Web page.

HomePage - You can now setup your own personal HomePage hosted by Apple, importing your own graphics etc. Apple makes it all easy walking you through the 10 minute process of creating your own Web site.

The last thing Jobs announced on the Internet front was a strategic partnership with an ISP to provide Internet access for Mac users. Jobs said it was a tough choice between Market leaders AOL, EarthLink or MSN. The audience was holding its breath, worried that we were once again going to see Bill Gates image appear on the screen as Jobs intoned another collaboration with Microsoft. The sigh of relief came when Job announced that Apple was going with EarthLink and investing 200 million in the company. This is a curious partnership and it got mixed reactions both in the audience at the keynote and in discussions afterwords. The rumor was that Apple would get 10% of the fees for every Mac customer who signed up with EarthLink. In any case Jobs, talking as though he was speaking to an audience of friends or family members, encouraged everyone to switch to EarthLink. Jobs trotted out some big wig from EarthLink who said that they we excited to be working with Apple etc etc.....

This marked the end of Jobs presentation dedicated to Apple's Internet strategy. All in All it was pretty impressive stuff. Most of all these features could be found around the Internet, in one form or another, however Apple has once again done an excellent job of integrating them into a very useful whole and has presented them in a elegant and attractive way. What is shows is that Apple is continuing to move forward in a thoughtful and meaningful way to make the Mac user's experience better and better and to develop more deeply Apple's connection with its user base by offering it well integrated services.

Jobs said that he expects Apple to be one of the 10 most profitable Internet companies.

Mac OS X

Finally we got a look at the new Client interface of OS X and this really wowed the crowd. Apple plans to have a single OS strategy with a gentle migration to the new OS. There will be a 12 month roll out with a final beta in Spring, retail in Summer and pre-loaded on machines by next January.

The new OS will have a Linux like kernel said Jobs. The "killer graphics" will be based on PDF (Portable Document Format), Open GL and QuickTime.

OS X will have three new APIs :

Classic - for Mac OS 9 applications. No need to rewrite older applications they will run in the classic environment without modification, but will not be able to take advantage of the advanced features of OS X.

Carbon - Current applications will require some work (one to 3 months according to Jobs) to become carbonized to take advantage of the new features of OS X

Cocoa - Complete object orientated environment - you can write an application in any object orientated language including Java

The new OS X interface is called Aqua - a liquid theme that Jobs said makes you want to lick it (Ok Jobs can get a bit carried away). The audience again was very pensive when Jobs announced that he was going to be unveiling the new OS X interface - worry about how much of a difference it would be from the classic Mac look and feel. However the crowd was quickly won over as Jobs went through one slick, entertaining feature after another. A big hit was the dock at the bottom of the screen that can be hidden when not in use, but springs up like a rolling wave when you bring the cursor down to the bottom of the screen. Jobs grabbed a QuickTime movie while it was playing and put it into the dock and said when the OS is ready to ship the movie would continue to play in the dock if you wanted it to.

OS X was a big hit and it is going to be a very fun OS. User experience is what Apple is all about and with OS X you are going to get user experience in spades - lots of eye-candy.

At the end of the OS X presentation Jobs said that 100 developers had committed to OS X and then he proceeded to trott out a few of them. None of them had seen the user interface for OS X before and they were blown away. Adobe's Bruce Chisholm thanked Apple for helping them sell 500 million dollars worth of Macintosh applications. Rob Burgess of Macromedia was almost speachless after the demo and said a few incoherent things about supporting Mac OS X, but babbled like he had just come from a revival meeting where he was touched by the light! The one guy that seemed ill at ease was Kevin Brown of Microsoft who came across as tense and nervous in front of this admittedly hostile crowd.

After the big hit of the OS X presentation people began looking for their camera bags thinking things were pretty much over, when Jobs said there was one more thing. (People who follow Jobs know he's a "one more thing" kind of guy).

Jobs went on about how he had been interm CEO at Apple for the past 2.5 years and how he was also CEO at Pixar and I was thinking "is this guy going to bail on us now that he has gotten Apple running on the rails again"? Then he let the crowd in on the news that he was dropping Interim from his CEO title and would be staying on as Apple's permanent CEO. Well the crowd exploded at this news and it was the first time Jobs looked uncomfortable on stage - like a Roman architect suddenly hauled up in front of cheering legionnaires and proclaimed Ceasear.

Jobs quickly shared the glory with everyone else at Apple and the Keynote came to an end.

It appears that Apple is firing on all cylinders now. They are moving aggressively and creatively to define a place for themselves in the High-Tech/Internet environment, taking advantage of their established assets.

I took the CalTrain home, which for two bucks fifty (off-peak price), injects commuters into Silicon Valley on the hour. My brother and partner would remain in the Emerald City, smoozing vendors, picking up news coups and schleping around the after hour parties............. and looking for a cheap transmission.

The image I had in my mind as I watched San Francisco slip away was of a TV program that plays late at night, seemingly continuously, on our cable system. It is put on by the local community college and consists of a non-descript guy droning on and on about Windows NT, in front of what looks like a very bored audience.

I thought to myself "OS X is going to make Windows NT look like a "paint by numbers" operating system".

David Engstrom
Publisher
MacReviewZone