Okay, GAMES. Mike Rogers from Aspyr demos Harry Potter. Quidditch looks neat. Announced The Sims: Hot Date , and Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds.

Wolfram Research comes on stage with Mathematica. A couple months old, but for the technical computing crowd, this is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Also useful to calculus students. Also very funny goy demoing. He had an integrals joke. I laughed. Said he was rendering animations on his PowerBook in the background for like a week….

Mike Evangelist comes on stage to demo Final Cut Pro 3.0. Demos software real-time effects with ESPN’s The Life, which is edited totally in FCP. RT transitions, superimposed titles, and color correction. Not new news today, but still very, very sweet. RT also works on the fastest PowerBooks, for mobile RT. 🙂

Guy from Palm comes on stage, new USB cradles, bonus software for Macs, shipping in multiple languages. Palm Desktop Software product manager demos the new Desktop for OS X. Better drag-n-drop for Vcards. Demoed Palm sync. Public beta downloadable at www.palm.com/macintosh.

OS X update. Seeing Mac programmers becoming Unix programmers as well, and vice-versa. Press likes it 12 month transition period (on a clock face). At 6 o’clock in September, 10.1 shipped. Now it’s 9 o’clock. Now there’s tons of apps (>2500). Office:mac for X shipped last quarter, Steve applauds Microsoft. Next: Adobe. The Executive Vice…

Press likes the iPod. Steve is proud of the Apple retail stores, hit the 25 stores by 2001-end-of-year mark (27, actually). Point of stores if to try to convert “the other 95%.” 40% of retail Mac buyers are new Mac owners. 800,000 visitors in December to all Apple stores. State of Maine equipping all 7th…

Steve takes to the stage, the SteveNote begins.