Happy Stevenote Day, folks-- especially since Tiger is here! Well, information about Tiger is here, anyway, which is all anyone really expected from WWDC other than new displays, a new G5-powered iMac, a Mac Tablet, an Apple-branded smartphone, a merger with Disney, and an announcement that Steve Jobs is running for President. We were expecting something truly stunning in Tiger, given the way Apple has chosen to hype it; faithful viewer Lee Stanford was the first to tip us off over the weekend to the nature of Apple's banners hanging in Moscone, each displaying the Tiger disc graphics and captions such as "Introducing Longhorn," "This should keep Redmond busy," "Redmond, we have a problem," "Redmond, start your photocopiers," and "Redmond, put your pants back on-- nobody wants to see that." (We're still awaiting independent confirmation on that last one.)

On its surface, though, from a layman's perspective, most of Tiger's new features might make the OS look like a relatively modest upgrade. Not that said features aren't impressive, mind you; the Widgets-in-a-flash magic of Dashboard alone has us yearning to trade up (though we can already hear the "Jaguar copied Watson" grumbles repeating, only this time with Tiger and Konfabulator-- kudos to those guys for already getting their home page updated, by the way), Automator may well revolutionize Multi-App Workflow For The Rest of Us (and even if it doesn't it's worth the upgrade price for its icon alone), and while we've got little enough call to videoconference with even one other Mac, that doesn't mean we aren't burning to drop $129 for the new iChat AV's ability to do it with three in that slanty-perspective sorta view.

But beyond that, what is there for regular shmoes to get excited about? Spoken Interface has a spiffy new name ("VoiceOver"), Safari does a solid job of integrating RSS feeds, and the new search functionality of Spotlight appears to leapfrog a major feature of Microsoft's Longhorn that was dropped so the initial release could hit the 2006 ship date-- but all told, for the typical Mac user, Tiger might appear to lack any fundamental ground-breaking new features worth the price of admission.

You know, like spinny-cube Fast User Switching. Real life-changers like that.

Well, as it turns out, you have to dig a little deeper to find the really slick stuff in Tiger-- and it's not going to seem slick to everyone. Geeks and developers, however, are probably going to like Tiger's 64-bit application support, its system-level indexed search and Core Image and Video libraries, and of course the release of Xcode 2.0. The geeks already know why these are cool; for you non-geeks, the upshot will hopefully be an influx of some really sweet software, which is nothing to scoff at. Sure, you could spend all day just playing with Exposé, but at some point most of us want to run some actual applications or something. Tiger's new geek-lust features will give us more-- and better ones-- to choose from.

Not buying it? Well, keep in mind that this is just a preview of Tiger showcasing ten specific features-- features presumably chosen for an audience of developers, mind you-- and there's plenty of time for Apple to elaborate on what some of Tiger's other "150 new features" might be. One of them, as faithful viewer Seth Johnson points out, is apparently that Dashboard's stock ticker Widget can see into the future, and if that's not worth $129 for a Tiger upgrade, we don't know what is. Sort of puts a whole new spin on the phrase "pays for itself," doesn't it?

But if, after all that, you're still underwhelmed by the descriptions of Tiger plastered all over the 'net, you may want a tour of the operating system by a guide with a working Reality Distortion Field. Well, you're in luck; there's now a QuickTime stream of Uncle Steve's Wild Ride, so you, too, can be seduced by the way that Steve says the word "boom" 112 times throughout the Tiger demo. Eye of the Tiger, baby!

So ooooooh yeah, Tiger. And sure, there are bound to be a few users disappointed that Tiger apparently won't include such long-requested features as Free Cash™, iRevengeAgainstMyEnemies, and fully-integrated, system-level dog-walking capabilities-- but we're all big kids who've learned to accept that we can't always get what we want, right? After all, it's a sad fact of life that no one's going to walk your dog for you. Well, unless you hire one of those dog-walking services, we suppose. Or blackmail a family member into help you out. Come to think of it, you could probably even get a random guy off the street to do it if you could convince him that you were holding a loved one at gunpoint-- or that you were Sting! He'd probably do it if he thought you were Sting. Especially Sting with one of his loved ones at gunpoint.

Come to think of it, actually, there are lots of ways to get someone else to walk your mangy little dog; Tiger, however, is not one of them (for some reason), and so like we said, some users are bummed.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment, though, is this thorny little matter of when we'll finally be able to get our itchy little hands on this piston-hot bundle o' fur. When Steve pulled the sheet off of Panther at this very same shindig last year, Mac fans (who, in the typically overoptimistic manner of our people, had been expecting a Panther release by August or September) were upset that the closest thing that he'd give to a release date was "by the end of the year." We can only imagine what sort of hysterics those same people are experiencing now that Tiger has been promised to ship "in the first half of 2005." Seriously, think about it; that could be over a year from now. We're honestly supposed to wait that long before we can start moaning endlessly about how the new white-logo-on-blue-background Apple menu is really lame and distracting? (Oh, sure, we could start moaning about it now, but it just wouldn't be real, y'know?)

But c'mon, chin up-- it could be lots worse. We could be back in 1996-2001 waiting forever 'n' ever 'n' ever 'n' ever 'n' ever for Apple to quit flapping its gums about Rhapsody/Mac OS X/whatever they were calling it that week and changing its name and feature set and just freakin' ship it already. Or we could be Windows users (which is heinous enough to start with) listening to Microsoft flap its gums about Longhorn and not expecting anything to ship until 2006 at the earliest. Suddenly "first half of 2005" doesn't sound so bad, huh? And we're guessing that the developers appreciate having a little more lead time to build Tiger-specific functionality into their software with the SDKs they were given today. Heck, even as an end-user, aren't you a little relieved that it'll be up to another year before you have to pony up another $129 to stay current? Seems like we usually hear complaints about Apple issuing Mac OS X upgrades too often.

And don't forget, we were warned about this sort of thing just last month, when Apple's Chief Software Technology Officer Avie "If Anyone Calls Me a 'Wunderkind' Again, I Swear I'll Go Mental on Him With a Two-By-Four" Tevanian commented publicly that Apple would be "slowing that pace down a little bit" now that Mac OS X is a whole lot more mature than it was. So relax, earn a few more pennies' worth of interest on your $129, and spend some more quality time with Panther before you have to bid it adieu.

Besides, a ship date in "the first half of 2005" might be as little as six months away. Remember, folks, Panther beat its end o' the year shipping deadline by over a month, so Tiger's 1H/2005 projection doesn't necessarily mean a year from this Wednesday. At least, it's a nice thought to cling to if you're desperate...

Enough about Tiger; as far as new hardware is concerned, the most recent rumors were right: we may not have any new Macs to drool over today, but at least we have some seriously crazy displays to suck our credit cards dry. Finally, displays that match the G5 enclosure! Displays that can plug directly into matching PowerBooks without an expensive and dorky adapter! So IBM didn't make it to 3.0 GHz; so what? Who's going to notice a GHz or so missing from your new Power Mac when it's jacked into an aluminum-clad colossus with enough pixels to drown a giraffe?

We admit that we weren't crazy about the design at first, but it's growing on us, and we're told they look much nicer in person. What we did like right off the bat were the specs; as rumored, Apple still has three displays in its lineup, but now the smallest one is a 20-incher, which is, frankly, almost ridiculous while also being pretty freakin' cool. The mid-range model is the new 23-incher, while the top of the line is the Godzilla of all LCD displays, a 30-inch (well, technically, 29.7-inch) titan with 4.1 million pixels splayed out in a 2560x1600 resolution. All three have a nifty tilt stand; all three have two USB 2.0 and two FireWire ports built in; all three connect to industry-standard DVI ports. And if the contrast, brightness, and response time numbers on Apple's tech specs page can be believed, all three are apparently so gorgeous you'll never want to look at anything else ever again. Which we suppose could present a bit of a problem, actually, but hey, cross that bridge when you come to it.

Now, again with the caveat that we're currently just giving our breathless initial impressions and anything we say of a vaguely factual nature may dissolve like so much cheap toilet paper in rain once subjected to the sobering light of subsequent research, are we understanding this right-- that this sick new 30-inch aluminum behemoth requires a G5 and a special graphics card? Because if so, all those hopes that Apple's abandonment of ADC for DVI might lead to Wintel users buying Apple's superior displays don't quite pan out. As far as we can make out, the 30-incher has too many pixels to be filled with a single DVI channel, so in order to drive this thing you have to have Apple's specially-engineered, G5-only NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL graphics card, which pushes two DVI links through one cable. (So the 30-incher is actually being driven more like two separate displays that have been welded together at the seams.)

So evidently it's not Wintel-compatible-- which is just as well, because when was the last time you met a Wintel user willing to shell out $3,299 for a display, let alone another $599 for the only graphics card that'll drive it? Indeed, even though the 20- and 23-inch models are technically Windows-compatible, we can't see many folks in the Windows crowd laying out the ducats to buy them when (admittedly lower-quality) displays with the same resolutions are available for hundreds less. And yes, we are a little wigged out that Apple's cheapest display (not counting the older 17-incher, which is still available for $699 in that same second-class-citizen way that Apple has sold G4s for the past year) is now $1,299. We figure that if we ignore it it'll go away. La la la we can't hear you la la la la laaaa!!

We will say this about that Apple DDL card, though: you just gotta love the moxie it took to put two dual-link DVI ports on that thing. Yes, assuming you've got $6,598 (and a desk the size of Montana), you can actually hook two 30-inchers to your G5 and enjoy 8.2 million pixels of screen real estate spanning a combined five diagonal feet. But a word of caution to anyone rich and crazy enough to try this: running a mouse cursor across a Desktop that size all day will almost certainly give you one Popeye arm, sans anchor tattoo (unless you really want one). To be forewarned is to have forearms-- ones that don't look like an anaconda that swallowed a Volkswagen.