and so it begins

with blather about the new apple stores, 101 to date, 1,000,000 visitors a day. now we`re on the new imac, more blather. we know all this. i`m waiting to be impressed. does this mean the noted reality disrtortion field doesn`t extend into the over flow room.

ooooh tiger, shipping first half of this year, but all the features we knew about all that already. oh wait, a preview.

steve`s demoing spotlight, which is the content finder built into tiger from almost anywhere, in any format. and it crashed, sort of.

next up is the mail app, integrated with spotlight, more integration with all mailboxes, smart mailboxes; allowing you to sort by content; and a slideshow built into the mail application.

also coming with tiger is quicktime 7 with a new codec H.264 and on-screen controls, realtime scaling etc, etc, etc

now dashboard; a series of widgets, including weather, currency exchange, calculator which thus far is the most impressive thing i`ve seen.

ichat also gets a bump, with up to four to video conferences at once using the new H.264 codec and up to 10 simultaneous

audio chats.

on to more stuff, steve has just declared 2005 the year of High Definition Video and just introduced FinalCut Express HD for editing HD.

and as expected iLife `05, with new versions of iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie and GarageBand, not updates for iTunes just yet. more editing features for iPhoto as well as support for RAW format.

in an interesting development, i can`t seem to log into journalspace from the overflow room`s wireless network anymore.

so i`ll just keep typing and hope for the best. imovie has new features including support for HD.

interesting developments, on stage now is the president of Sony to talk about their HD consumer cameras and is singing Apple`s praises as part of making 2005 the year of HD.