WWDC is here; the big day is upon us! Or, rather, the latest in a string of big days; any day on which Steve Jobs publicly addresses the Mac faithful pretty much counts for a certain amount of bigness in our book. Unfortunately, AtAT couldn't justify the cost of a plane ticket and the thousand bucks admission as "economically viable," so we'll be sitting on the sidelines while all the cool (read: solvent) developers get to hear the goodies first-hand. For those of you poor slobs who find yourselves up the same creek, you'll have to resort to second-hand reports. Unless, of course, you have an Apple Market Center nearby where you can go to watch the shindig via satellite, or you have your very own satellite dish and can enjoy Steve's Reality Distortion Waves in the comfort and privacy of your own home. But that's a relatively small percentage of the Apple-watching population, we're guessing. Gee, wouldn't it be nice to be able to watch the keynote on your home computer screen, perhaps being sent as a digital stream over the Internet? Now that would be cool technology. Perhaps they could call it "webcasting," or something.

Yes, of course we're pulling your leg; yes, webcasting has been around for years; and yes, the WWDC keynote will be available via webcast. ZDTV's been pushing their upcoming WWDC webcast for a week, now; the irony of that situation, of course, is that Jobs' keynote is almost certainly going to spend at least a little bit of time on QuickTime 4 and how much cooler it is than competing technologies when it comes to live streaming over the Internet-- while, for several days, the only announced webcast of that keynote was ZDTV's, in RealVideo format. Personally, we were more than a little taken aback by Apple's apparent decision to pass up the opportunity to webcast the event themselves via QuickTime; it seemed like a perfect marketing opportunity was slipping through their fingers. Then again, this is Apple we're talking about-- their advertising savvy has been sharply better in recent years, but we think the world would end if they didn't make at least a minor blunder every so often. Missing a chance to show the world the intrinsic niftiness of QuickTime Streaming would be a small price to pay for the continued existence of civilization as we know it.

Then again, don't start any long novels-- Apple finally ended up doing the obvious thing, and now it appears that there's an alternative to RealVideo when it comes to checking out the keynote via the web. Tomorrow's hootenanny will be the first such event ever to be webcast via QuickTime 4, so if you want to tune in, make sure you've got the QT4 preview and warm up those browsers. We can't wait to see if this actually works-- and if the world is still standing at the conclusion...