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.