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Semi-live (OK, not really!) keynote update Site News
Here's a short summary of what Apple has just announced at the keynote. BTW, video is all high defintion, Jobs stated (perhaps?) that's why it wasn't simulcast.

Read the rest for my notes, to the best of my 'typing while listening' skills. I have lots of photos and video that I'll try to upload a bit later today, after I get back to the hotel room -- not sure how good they are, but we'll see!

Keynote notes:
  1. Apple Retail: 101 stores around the world. Hosting over 1,000,000 visitors per week. London is the newest store; in its first quarter, it became the second highest grossing store in the world.


  2. iMac Update: Launched in September. Various quotes from media, including "5 out of 5" in PC Magazine. Is now the most popular Mac, after only one quarter.


  3. Mac OS X: Panther is the most successful OS release ever. 12,000 applications; over 14 million active users. Tiger is next. On schedule for first half shipment. 200 new features. Better Windows client; rehash many other already public features (Spotlight, Automater, Safari RSS, etc.).

    Spotlight updates live as the OS changes. Spotlight demo -- very impressive speed, sorting, image finding, etc. Spotlight demo crashed on slideshow; switched to backup system, instantly. The Finder has smart folders -- a folder of "Presentations," or "View this week." Spotlight view is one of the Finder views. New iTunes album artwork screensaver; makes screensavers from your iTunes covers.

    Mail: No more drawer. You can search via Spotlight in Mail. Built-in slideshow viewer for email-received images. Support for Smart Mailboxes -- just like iTunes smart folders. Add to iPhoto button right from slideshow.

    QuickTime 7: Most major upgrade in last decade. Current release of QT has been downloaded 330,000,000 times. Full HD playback, 24 channel surround, H.264 new video compression codec. Demoed a movie, scaling on the fly, onscreen controls. The movie demo was "House of Flying Daggers." Looked incredible.

    Dashboard: Calculator, Address Book, Calendar, Stickies, iTunes Control, Clock, Converter, Dictionary/Thesaurus, Stock Tracker, Flight Tracker, Translation, Yellow Pages, Weather. Lots of very cool new widgets! Widgets now pop-up below the dock when you wish to add one to your collection. Very cool interface, hard to describe -- screen 'slides up' to make room for the list of widgets. Widgets then "splash" onto the screen. The unit converter looks very useful -- MPH to KMH, currency, etc. The weather tracker includes animated weather indicators - rain, wind, snow, etc.

    iChat: Up to 10 simultaneous audio chats. Up to four people in a video chat with H264. Live demo with four people -- Paris, and two here, I think. Amazing (I shot a video that will be uplaoded later).


  4. High Definition (HD) video: 2005 will be the year of high definition video. Final Cut Pro HD already in use everywhere. Introducing Final Cut Express HD -- adds HD editing, Live Type titling, Soundtrack, seamless integrate with iMovie, integrates with Motion. Priced at $299, available in February, upgrade price $99.


  5. iLife: iLife '04 has been a huge hit. Introducing iLife 05, completely new version -- most apps have major upgrades. iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, iTunes.

    iPhoto: What's new: Better organizing & searching, more formats, more powerful editing, advanced slideshows, new books and designs, easier to use. Folders have been added, better keywords, added calendar view - find by month, week day, adds MPEG4 movie support, supports RAW completely throughout app; editing adds multi-picture editing view a toolbar of images, editing dashboard for brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature, tint, sharpness, straighten, histogram, exposure. It's a dashboard that lays over the images, so you can see and edit at once. Advanced slide shows let you set different transitions per photo, Ken Burns effect on images, and new books. Calendar searching is amazingly powerful: double-click a month to see the weeks, days with photos are boldfaced; click to see that day's photos. New slideshow mode makes some amazingly nice slideshows.

    New Make Book button shows a book chooser with themes, sizes. Very very nice looking designs. Books have double-sided printing; very easy to move photos from page to page; auto-layout makes things fit. Can enter edit mode from book creation mode to fix images as you build the book. Printed slide prices are being cut in half. More types of books: hardcover 11x8.5 (current), softcover 11x8.5, softcover 8x6, pocketbook 3.5x2.6. All at least 20 pages ($3.99, $9.99, $19.99, and $29.99!). Available worldwide on day one!

    iMovie: Dramatically faster, non-destructive trimming, more transitions & effects, MPEG-4 video editing, Magic iMovie - turn a camcorder into a movie with transitions, titles, etc -- automatically! The biggest feature is HD support in iMovie. HD editing works same as normal editing, but with HD stuff. Demoed an HD iMovie -- quality is stunning. One possible downside for now is that consumer HD cameras are still very expensive. Steve brings this up -- shows the new Sony prosumer HD camera and says it's "only" $3,499! Yikes! Brings up the President of Sony, Kunitake Ando, to talk about the camera and HD video! He jokes that Steve has told him he likes Sony products -- not "all of them, but most of them." He states that Sony will continue to make HD cameras smaller, lighter, and cheaper. As a side note, he's sitting basically right in front of me.

    iDVD: 15 new themes, including animated drop zones, one step DVD creation, and supports all DVD formats. Animated drop zones are movies in moving/sizing boxes, etc. I'll upload a video later showing some; they really are spectacular.

    GarageBand: Adding a Jam Pack for orchestral instruments. New features: up to 8-track recording, real-time music notation, pitch & timing fixing, recorded tracks are now as flexible as software instruments and loops, create your own loops, and a vocal transformer.

    To help show features, John Mayer has come back again. Played some piano, showed notes being added in real time. Did a four-track live demo recording, two guitars, lead vocal, and harmony vocal. Played back recording, turning tracks on and off.

    No update to iTunes; just the 'latest version.' Talks about the integration of the suite. Priced at $79, goes on sale on January 22nd, free with all new Macs.


  6. iWork: Building the successor to AppleWorks. Talks about AW lack of OS X integration, lack of iLife integration. Two applications: Keynote 2 is the first. Ten new Apple themes, animated text, powerful animated builds, presenter display, interactive slideshows, self-playing kiosk slideshows. Presenter display shows notes, timers, next slide, etc. New themes include Hard Cover, Watercolor, Scrapbook, and more. Animation demo shows a slide built with one click. Can also now output to Flash, improved PDF output.

    Other application is called Pages. Word processing with an incredible sense of style. Includes 40 Apple-designed templates, with multiple page layouts within each template. Looks like brochures in a snap. Multi-columned, photos, varying layouts of images, all the design is done. You add text and photos to finish, and can further customize if you wish. Pages takes care of font sizing, color, etc. A media button gives you an iPhoto library for browsing. Pages resizes, rotates, and places images in the placeholders. Includes alpha-channel transparency. Move images around, and text reflows; alignment guides like Keynote, live resizing of images, etc. You can have very unique looks for each page within a template, yet they all are visually tied together. Add charts, photos, text., and Pages works on all the sizing issues. Changing from one to two columns resizes everything on the page - charts, images, text, etc. Wow. Very wow. Hard to describe how simple it is. Keynote's designers wrote Pages. Compatible with Word, AppleWorks, and PDF.

    iWork will be $79, available January 22nd.


  7. Mac mini: A new member of the Mac family. Very small, like a flattened cube. Slot loading optical drive. Quiet. FW, USB2, Ethernet, DVI/VGA, Modem, slot-loading drive. This thing is tiny! Wow. BYODKM - Bring your own display, keyboard, and mouse. Will drive a 20" cinema display. Or "any" keyboard, mouse, and display. Comes wiith OS X 10.3 and iLife '05. Wants to price for switchers. $499 for 1.25GHz G4, $599 for 1.42GHz, available January 22nd.


  8. iTunes update: iTunes has now sold 230,000,000 songs to date. Now at the rate of 1.25 million songs a day, 500,000,000 songs per year! iTunes has 70% share of the market. Now in 15% countries with 70% of the global market. iTunes Essentials has been re-done, making it easier to find new kinds of music by artist, albums, time periods, etc.


  9. iPod: iPod and iPod Mini are the current family members. in 2003, the holiday quarter sold 733,000 iPods. In the 2004 holiday quarter, they sold 4,500,000 iPods!! Over 10,000,000 iPods have been sold, and over 8 million of those were sold in 2004. 10 millionth iPod was made on December 16th, 2004.

    Cars: People want iPods in their cars. Apple is working on them with Version 2. Other companies are going to join in. These include Mercedes, Nissan, Volvo, Scion. In Europe, Alfa and Ferrari will be rolling them out.

    Cell phones: Working with Motorola, Apple put iTunes on their new cellphones. Out Spring 2005.


  10. One More Thing: One year ago, iPod was 31% of all MP3 players. Then introduced Mini; iPod is now 65% of all players sold -- Flash went from 62% to 29%. So what's next? They want the other 29%. Competition has no wheel, small screen, tortured user interface. Apple doesn't want to make one of those; they want something different. Easier to use than an existing iPod. So they got rid of choices, and based it on shuffle: The iPod Shuffle. Smaller than most packs of gum. Weighs under an ounce. Play/pause button, volume up/down, previous/next song. Glowing LED above the controller. Shuffle play or playlist mode, set via a switch on the back. Remove the cap at the bottom, USB2 plug for fast transfer. 12 hour rechargeable battery. PC and Mac compatible. Turn it upside doown, and you can attach it to a lanyard around your neck.

    iTunes has a new "autofill" button that will browse your library by your criteria, and then build a playlist to fill the iPod Shuffle. Also use it as a USB disk drive, set via the preferences -- choose the ratio of disk space to songs.

    Competition: $149 for 256MB of data. The iPod Shuffle will come in two models: 512MB for 120 songs for $99, 1gb for 240 songs for $149. Shipping out of the factory today.

    Accesorize your iPod shuffle; Apple introduces a few: armband, dock, sports case (semi waterproof), battery extender for 20 hours of more time. All priced at $29 each, rolling out in the next four weeks.
To end the presentation, Overall, a very strong keynote -- the Mac Mini is amazingly small. Probably the hit of the keynote for me, though Pages and Keynote2 both look great, too!

-rob.
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Semi-live (OK, not really!) keynote update | 12 comments | Create New Account
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What about Excel?
Authored by: Ipstenu on Jan 11, '05 03:09:57PM

Darn it, I don't see a nice spreadsheet tool in that iWork yet, and that's going to remain my hangup. For $79 I may pick it up anyway, but I'm gnashing my teeth about an Excel clone.



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What about Excel?
Authored by: shavenyak on Jan 11, '05 03:58:13PM

I figured I was the only one thinking the same thing, since I hadn't seen any other rants. I'd think the average consumer can make better use of a spreadsheet than a presentation tool. I wonder if Apple is planning to remedy that later, or if they just don't think their target market needs a spreadsheet? If I'm still stuck with Office to get a decent spreadsheet, why would I buy iWork?



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What about Excel?
Authored by: jmschaeffer on Jan 12, '05 08:12:05AM
Ever hear of the free Openoffice clone for OS X? NeoOffice.

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What about Excel?
Authored by: maddys_daddy on Jan 13, '05 12:32:18AM

Or how about just OpenOffice, since it's already been ported to OS X?



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What about Excel?
Authored by: jmschaeffer on Jan 13, '05 01:26:14PM

Yes it has been ported to OS X, but not to the extent of NeoOffice. OpenOffice still requires X11 and does not run as a native app.

Here's text direct from the OpenOffice site regarding mac development:

For the last year and a half all engineering work focusing on a native Mac OS X OpenOffice.org version has been concentrated in the NeoOffice/J project, using a combination of Java and Carbon technologies to replace X11.
Due to various licensing, political, and fundamental engineering difficulties it is likely, for the near future, that native Aqua porting work will be based off of the NeoOffice.org project and not under the direct aegis of OpenOffice.org.



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What about Excel?
Authored by: Ipstenu on Jan 14, '05 10:00:21AM

Yeah, I've used NeoOffice (and a couple other freeware/open source sites). My real issues with them is that I'm picky about the interface (I like 90% of Mac's native stuff) and it's still in Beta. Also, I tried it once and had weird issues going between XP and OSX (it's not my fault! It's my work!) enough that I went back to MS Office.

But the point is this: If you're making an 'office' product with a 'powerpoint' tool and a 'word' tool, what sense is it to leave out 'excel'? More low tech users are likely to use a spreadsheet tool than a presentation one, and if you're pimping a MacMini for the masses, as well as an improved Pages tool, put in the spreadsheet.



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What about Excel?
Authored by: MorganizeIT on Jan 27, '05 10:23:46AM

NeoOffice/J is a great freeware product. I switched around 10/2005 and haven't used MS Office since. Yes, the interface looks awful, but I'm happy to live with that in order to stop using expensive, buggy, MS bloatware.



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Semi-live (OK, not really!) keynote update
Authored by: kirkmc on Jan 11, '05 03:57:17PM

A note: the iPod shuffle is _not_ shuffle-only; you can play your tracks sequentially, making it the ideal choice for audiobook fans.

I'm sold - even though I have two 40GB iPods, I'm going to get one asap. And, Rob, since you only listen to your music in random order, you'll get one too, right? :-)

---
Read my blog: Kirkville -- http://www.mcelhearn.com
Musings, Opinion and Miscellanea, on Macs, iPods and more



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Semi-live (OK, not really!) keynote update
Authored by: sierratarn on Jan 11, '05 04:54:49PM
The Mac mini is going to be huge. I've already been drooling over the auto customizing possibilities. Not sure how many (dozens) I'm going to use around the house for various things that have been on the to do list. More thoughts on my site.

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Semi-live (OK, not really!) keynote update
Authored by: kylephoto760 on Jan 11, '05 08:42:21PM

I was thinking about that very thing this morning. Set it up with a wireless ISP - talk about being good to go.



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Semi-live (OK, not really!) keynote update
Authored by: leenoble_uk on Jan 11, '05 05:06:35PM

Here's the first Tiger hint for you. Just checked out the new Tiger pages. this page (http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/automator.html) shows those with aching wrists how to get loads of porn really quickly using Automator.

I think we're going to need another site purely for Automator scripts. Already the proportion of Applescripts on this site is getting steadily greater as more people have discovered it. I've been guilty of that too though.

---
So, I said ... well, I can't actually remember exactly what I said. But it was one of the most enormously cruel and frighteningly witty put downs ever.



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Semi-live (OK, not really!) keynote update
Authored by: mclbruce on Jan 11, '05 11:39:45PM

Thanks for the excellent report and the movies and photos as well.

It's interesting to read about Dashboard. Sounds a bit like Desk Accessories v. 2.0! Times have changed from the early OS X beta where Apple wouldn't let people put anything at all on the desktop.

I think the iMac mini is Apple's version of the saying, "If life hands you lemons, make lemonade." The lack of fast G5 chips means no major improvement at the top end of the Macintosh range, so the only thing left to do is improve the low end. I hope it does well.



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