Station in the Metro

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 President of Adobe, Shantanu Narayen, comes up on stage to remind you how important Adobe is to you, and to beg humbly for your forgiveness for taking so long to come to Mac OS X. After Effects 5.5 is now shipping (YAY!). Demos of Illustrator 10, Indesign 2.0 (supports native photoshop files with transparency), GoLive 6.0… and FINALLY! Photoshop. (“Almost here!”) Demoing AppleScript with Photoshop, building the Fellowship of the Rings release poster. New Spell Check in PShop. Adobe calls themselves “the poster child for Apps on OS X.” HA!

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 and 8th grade students and teachers with iBooks, statewide. That’s 36,000 iBooks, if you’re counting. Steve says “One down, 49 to go.”

Steve takes to the stage, the SteveNote begins.

FACT: I’m really hungry. I eat some apple muffin and have some Bottled Frappuccino…. The keynote has not yet started, but there’s some nice Peter Gabriel music to tide us over.

Okay, 11:55 EST, here we go…

The requisite 4 Macs/PCs are on a table on stage for the inevitable speed-tromping tests. Another Mac is on stage, 90 degrees to the audience for Steve’s also-inevitable OS X demo, hopefully for 10.2, but that’s where I end my speculation. Everything from here on out is hard, solid fact.