Well, that was a bit of a surprise, yeah? No Pismo in sight-- in fact, you may have noticed that Uncle Steve was very careful to avoid mentioning PowerBooks at all throughout his entire keynote. Oh, sure, there was the little snippet about Apple's share of the overall laptop market, but nothing specific to PowerBooks themselves. In fact, the only hint we got about Pismo came when Steve was talking about AirPort and let slip that "all Apple systems are now AirPort-ready." Uhhhh, all except the PowerBook, right, Steve? Unless you've got a new one to show us, that is...

So Pismo was MIA, much to everyone's shock, but at least this means we can indulge our pipe dream about a light-up PowerBook keyboard for a few more weeks. Apparently AppleInsider was right when they reported that Pismo had fallen way behind schedule. In fact, there was no new hardware sharing the stage with Steve; Pismo was considered a sure thing, but plenty of people were also expecting faster G4s, multiprocessor G4s, and possibly even a 17" iMac. Instead it was a software-only kind of day-- though Steve was no less enthralling because of it. Still, we're a bit wobbly after having sat through an entire Stevenote (and a marathon one at that!) without a single "bake-off" showing off the Mac's speed when compared to a high-end Wintel system. Perhaps we'll go back and watch some older keynotes just to restore our bake-off balance. (By the way, if you missed this latest keynote, you can still see it via the miracle of QuickTime 4's streaming video-on-demand.)

Now, for those of you on pins and needles over this whole Pismo thing, fret not-- the current "bronze" PowerBook is definitely end-of-lifed; we seem to recall several reports that CompUSA has it marked as such in their system, and while we wouldn't necessarily trust CompUSA any farther than we could comfortably spit a rat, every indication is that Apple's ready for Pismo-- it's just that Pismo isn't quite ready for Apple. Let's see, now... there's a Macworld Expo in Tokyo next month, right? Well, as the Next Big Apple Event, we suppose that's a reasonable venue for Pismo's debut, though we'd expect a U.S. unveiling to be more likely. Guess we'll be seeing a "Media Event" sometime soon-- unless, of course, Pismo is much further behind than people think. Remember Wall Street? The original PowerBook G3 Series missed event after event before finally showing up in May of 1998 (and being completely eclipsed by the iMac). So let's just say we're used to this kind of thing, and while we expect Pismo within a few short weeks, we aren't going to be overly surprised if it doesn't surface until May.

So Steve had no new hardware to show off. No problem-- he had plenty of software to keep our attention, not the least of which was Mac OS X. Yes, Apple's next-generation operating system has finally been officially announced, only just over three years after Apple first purchased NeXT as the basis for a replacement for the ill-fated Copland. By our watch, Mac OS X is late, late, late-- but given the cool stuff we saw, we're perfectly willing to wait a bit longer. Damn, that was jaw-dropping.

First of all, let's talk about the new interface. The good news is this-- at least it ain't "Brushed Metal." It's called Aqua, and it makes all Mac interface elements look suspiciously like Robitussin Liqui-Gels. It's the "liquid look," a look that Steve described as "when you saw it, you wanted to lick it." It's the interface equivalent of the iMac: fruit flavors and "Ice" with lots of transparency and translucency. It'll take some getting used to, but so far we like it. From what little we've seen, it may well violate a slew of Apple's own Human Interface Guidelines, but from the sound of things, Apple's writing a whole new set of rules starting with Aqua.

Then there's the Dock. This thing is amazing. It's the Windows Task Bar, only attractive and well-designed-- it's a floating row of icons centered at the bottom of the screen; each icon represents a minimized window, a running application, an alias of a document, or just about anything else you want to drag into it. As items are added, it grows horizontally. When there are too many items to fit and the Dock hits both sides of the screen, adding items to it causes all icons to shrink slightly, so the new icon fits. If you put so much stuff in the Dock that all the icons are quite small, simply moving the mouse cursor over the icons causes a nifty rippling magnifier effect. You really have to see it working to appreciate how neat this is-- Apple's posted a 6 MB QuickTime movie showing the Dock in action.

There's plenty more to like-- the way that legacy "Classic" applications retain the Mac OS 9 Platinum look, the crazy things that are possible with Quartz (Mac OS X's 2D graphics architecture based on Adobe's Portable Document Format), the way that all interface elements move to give elegant visual feedback about what's going on, etc. But it's not all perfect. Things that get the AtAT "thumbs down" so far: well, there's the new "Finder" for one. Anyone who's spent time with NeXTSTEP or Mac OS X Server knows that Apple's new "Finder" is mostly just the old NeXT file browser redone in Aqua with the name "Finder" slapped on it. So much for the flexibility of multiple windows and putting things where you please; the new "Finder" restricts you to a single window in the interest of "simplicity": "Now, double-clicking on items in the icon or list views no longer brings up separate windows. Instead, the view on the new folder replaces the old folder view within the single File Viewer window. By focusing the file system into a single window view, Mac OS X makes smarter use of screen spaceŅand eliminates the problem of proliferating windows." Ugh. Why can't I just drag this from here to there? We're still hoping that Apple puts a real Finder in place before Mac OS X actually ships.

Overall, though, Mac OS X is shaping up to be a real winner. There are going to be growing pains, to be sure-- after all, the Mac interface hasn't changed fundamentally all that much since 1984, and Mac OS X introduces some real startlers. But it'll be worth it-- if for no other reason than Mac OS X will look about a gazillion times better than Windows 2000 when viewed side-to-side. If Bill isn't nervous, he probably should be...

So there was no Pismo, but Mac OS X was introduced-- and the other big announcement of the day was Apple's "Internet strategy." Okay, yeah, there's QuickTime, and Akamai, and the partnership with EarthLink (thank Steve it wasn't AOL or MSN!). But the real guts of the strategy, while not explicitly stated as such, is this: make it easier to use the Internet with a Mac than with other computers. Sounds simple, right? But Apple's gone about it in a very intriguing manner.

First of all, there are these two new "any platform" sections of the Apple site: iCards and iReview. iCards is, in Steve's words, "the 'Apple' of Internet greeting cards." Other Internet greeting cards are tacky, hokey, and make him "slightly embarrassed to be a human"; by contrast iCards are classy, elegant, and are emailed straight to the recipient's mailbox as an attached file, rather than as a URL to visit. (Personally, we would almost rather have URLs instead of sixty iCards cluttering up our mailbox, but that's just us.) iReview is something "unique," Steve claims-- reviews of web sites serving as a directory of the Internet. The reviews are written by Apple, but anyone can add a "reader review," just like at Amazon. It's a nice idea, and time will tell if it'll catch on. (Sadly, there's no iReview for AtAT yet-- perhaps some of you nice people should suggest one?)

So iCards and iReview are meant to draw more surfers to Apple's web site. Then, right in between those two buttons is a third button, iTools. This is where things get really interesting. iTools are Internet tools for Mac users only. In fact, they only work for Mac OS 9. iTools are downloadable modules that extend Mac OS 9's capabilities with respect to the Internet. For example, iDisk lets any Mac OS 9 user mount a 20 MB virtual hard disk right on the Desktop; files dragged to it are stored securely on Apple's servers. And what's really neat is that you can drag photos into your iDisk and then use those photos to create new iCards, or easily create a web page served from Apple's servers by using the HomePage iTool. The hope, we presume, is that word will get out about how easy and fun it is to do this stuff, and people will buy Macs instead of Wintels partially to get access to iTools.

Of course, for that strategy to pay off, iTools is going to have to be easy and fun. Right now, the reality falls a bit short of the hype. We've been messing with iTools since they first became available, and maybe it's the load of all these people trying to use them at once, but we've been having problem after problem. First of all, maybe it was because we were behind a firewall, but we couldn't get the iDisk to work at all until later tonight. Once we got it working, it was incredibly slow. We did manage to upload a few pictures, though, so we tried using them to send a custom iCard. No go-- the names of the images showed up, but the pictures themselves were broken. Then we decided to see whether we could use them in an online photo album with HomePage. Again, no go-- HomePage was taken down completely. And when we tried to log back into our iTools account later, our password was no longer accepted; we were able to reset it in real-time, but once we were finally able to log in, we got the lovely error message, "We're having a problem with something you tried to do." Huh.

And, of course, we're not the only ones who have been having some trouble with iTools. Faithful viewer Harold notes all kinds of inconsistencies with the iTools help pages (why does it say "AppleWorks Help" on one page?), and even Uncle Steve himself was having a devil of a time getting through his keynote demos because things just weren't working. Not quite ready for prime time, perhaps? Hopefully Apple will get these kinks worked out soon, before the buzz about iTools is nothing but negative.