[Note: what follows are our notes typed up live during this morning's Stevenote. Odds are you were watching it yourself, but on the off chance you want our take on the proceedings, here they are. Even if you don't want it, it's all you're getting, so deal. ;-) ]

New Apple retail stores: Two stores opened in May (Tyson's Corner in McLean, VA and Glendale Galleria in L.A.).

Four more stores in August:

• 1) Willow Bend in Dallas, TX
• 2) Mall of America, Minneapolis, MN
• 3) Woodfield Mall, Schaumburg, IL
• 4) Northshore Mall, Peabody, MA

Showed a preview video of Tyson's Corner store. (Same one from WWDC, available on Apple's web site.)

Showed the Glendale store opening video. (Again, same as on web.)

Next up: Mac OS X.

Introduced on March 24th (116 days ago).

Over 1000 native applications shipping today. 29% of developers at WWDC planned to release native apps within 3 months, 55% within 6 months.

"10 on X": ten great applications coming soon to Mac OS X.

1) Microsoft: Kevin Browne giving the demo of Office 10 is Mac OS X ONLY. (Cocoa??) "Redesigned 700 toolbar buttons with smooth graphics" to look Aqua. Genie effect formatting palette. (Fast!) Drop shadows in Excel cells, translucent graphics right in spreadsheets, etc.

2) Adobe: Shantanu Narayen intro, Ted Alspach demoed Illustrator, Golive, and InDesign. Illustrator launches twice as fast as it does under Mac OS 9. Auto-slicing of entire graphics into individual images for optimal web delivery, tight integration between all three applications. (No Photoshop shown. Hmmm...)

3) Quark: Brett Mueller intro, Mike Garcia demoed the native version of XPress for the first time publicly, getting ready for beta now. Now supports better layer control. Build tables right in XPress; XPress also now allows the quick building of web pages from print designs.

4) FileMaker: Dominique Goupil demoed FileMaker Pro running on Mac OS X. (5.5 has been native and available for two months, shipped 50,000 copies so far just in the U.S. alone.) FileMaker Server 5.5 is now up and running under Mac OS X, July 30th ship date, using Cocoa technology. 100% of FileMaker products will be Mac OS X-native by fall.

5)Connectix: Kurt Schmucker demoed Virtual PC for Mac OS X. Technology preview available today ("VPC Test Drive" free download for any registered user of VPC 4.0.) Showed one installation of VPC with multiple x86 OSes-- Windows 98, 2000, XP, etc. Showed AutoCAD (not available for the Mac) running within VPC in Mac OS X, with a complete design of a car.

6) IBM: Toby Maners intro, Jeff Cousins demoed a preview of ViaVoice for Mac OS X. Features dictation into practically any text field in any application. Demo of full voice control as well as dictation. ("Set Speech Mode To Command," "Set Speech Mode To Dictation.") Available later this year.

7) World Book: Michael Ross demoed World Book 2002 on Mac OS X. Upon launch, application plays random music and displays random images chosen from the encyclopedia's database. Over 25,000 multimedia-rich articles. Available now for $59.95, for Mac OS X only.

8) Blizzard: Frank Pearce demoed Warcraft 3, available this winter for Mac OS X. Planning a simultaneous worldwide release (cross-platform). First Blizzard game using an all-3D engine. ("Warcraft 3 will feature plenty of carnage... net play is going to kick ass.")

9) Aspyr: Mike Rogers demoed Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2, available now; demo basically consisted of a single session. Steve finished up by saying "that's not the last we're going to see of Tony Hawk today." If Tony's here, I'm gonna freak.)

10) Alias Wavefront/Maya: Richard Kerris intro, Dan Pressman demoed Maya for Mac OS X. First showed a QuickTime movie of robots on an assembly line, then demonstrated real-time interactive animation building with realistic physics. Taking orders starting today.

Next up: Apple's work on Mac OS X. Apple has shipped four updates so far. Over 300,000 downloads of 10.0.4 so far.

10.1 demo; will be free download, available in September: "Performance, performance, performance." Faster menus, faster window resizing, faster everything.

Aqua enhancements: moveable Dock, better System menus, DVD playback, CD burning in the Finder (for data), better support for digital cameras, support for over 200 PostScript printers, better plug and play for USB printers, AFP servers over AppleTalk, built-in SMB client (Windows networking built-in!), WebDAV support, AirPort configuration.

Menus are REALLY DAMN FAST. Application launch: Preview launched in less than second. Text Edit opened in one bounce. Sherlock: less than a bounce. Mail: one bounce. How about third-party? IE: one bounce. (!) Six apps selected at once, all launched simultaneously in about a second or two. (On what hardware?)

New minimize effect: Scale. MUCH faster than Genie; no warping, just a linear scaling.

Finder: true real-time resizing of windows, even in List view. Resizable columns in Column view (finally!).

System menus in the menu bar next to the clock: Modem, Speaker Volume, Displays, Battery, AirPort, etc. can be moved out of the Dock and into the menubar.

New DVD Player: Whoops, crashed the first time when Steve tried to play Toy Story 2. Worked on the second try, though (without reboot, of course).

iTunes under 10.1 supports menus off the Dock icon.

Brightness and volume controls finally appear to work reliably, and have MUCH nicer onscreen feedback.

Disc Burner demo: blank disc takes a long time to mount. When it does, functions much like under Mac OS 9. "Burn" button now available as a Finder toolbar button.

After fumbling with the controls (he couldn't turn it on) Steve aborted a digital camera demo after basically breaking the thing.

The Dock: Prefs launched in about a bounce, and now the Dock can be pinned to the bottom, left, or right of the screen.

Portables: the new iBook has been grabbing rave reviews since it was announced on May 1st. Apple shipped 182,000 in its first two months on the market-- more than any other portables sold in one quarter in Apple's history. (Gee, no 14-inch screen option? Color us shocked.)

The titanium PowerBook G4: more rave reviews. No news here.

Desktops: 3 new models of the iMac. 500, 600, and 700 MHz. 128-256 MB of RAM, 20/40/60 GB drive, CD-RW all across the board, $999/1299/1499. (And the audience goes mild.) Colors: Snow, Indigo, Graphite. (In other words, we were 100% right, so nyah nyah nyaaaaah.)

Power Macs: Now entering the 2nd generation, code-named "Quicksilver." Same enclosure, new faceplate in a lighter grey/silver, very similar to those spy photos of the prototype but with opaque drive bay covers. As expected, 733 MHz at the entry level. 867 MHz is the mid-range, and high-end is dual-800 MHz. (Yes, we were right again.) All systems ship with GeForce 2 standard (dual-display in the high-end dual processor system). $1699/2499/3499. All but entry-level have SuperDrives. First two are available today; the dual-processor is due next month.

Bake-off: 1.7 GHz (they couldn't find a 1.8 GHz one) Pentium 4 vs. Power Mac G4/867 running Mac OS X. Same 1 GB of RAM, same hard disks, same graphics cards, both running Media Cleaner 5. Deinterlacing a source QuickTime video, re-encoding in Sorensen: Mac, of course, finishes way out in front.

Bake-off part 2: Photoshop! Of course, this time the Mac is running Mac OS 9; wonder why? ;-) Standard scripted compositing tasks, this time on a Monsters, Inc. promo. And of course the Mac beats the pants off the Pentium 4. 45 seconds vs. 82 seconds (87% faster).

Jon Rubinstein, Senior Veep of Hardware Design comes up to dispel the Megahertz Myth. (Holy yikes! Pipeline stages, clock frequencies, etc... a lecture on chip design? But I already failed this once in college!)

Those new LCD displays: Now $2499 for the Cinema Display. Still $999 for the 17-incher, $499 for the 15-incher.

New video for the Quicksilver Power Macs. Standard promotional stuff.

Steve got the digital camera fixed, and backtracked to demo the Mac OS X 10.1 Image Capture app, which automatically launches when the camera is plugged in and downloads all photos to the Pictures folder. Preview now includes a panel to set the screensaver.

"One last thing..."

iDVD. Consumer DVD players will be in 1 out of 4 homes by the end of the year. iDVD can encode MPEG-2 video for DVDs at just under real-time on a dual-800 MHz G4.

Preview of iDVD 2. Adds the one big thing that will take the DVDs you can make to the next level: motion menus. Plus new themes (such as Brushed Metal, Parchment, and Claim Check), soundtrack in slideshows, and even background encoding (using Mac OS X's multithreading), and 90-minute DVDs up from 60 minutes in the current version. Will be a free upgrade in September, running on Mac OS X.

And no, Tony Hawk isn't present-- Steve just used one of his videos in the iDVD 2 demo. Oh, well. The application looks REALLY nice, though. ;-)

We are treated to a screening of Apple's new commercial for iDVD, called "Elope." It's cute. You'll like it.

Final message from Steve: in this tough economy, most manufacturers are retrenching, while Apple is forging ahead. This year, the company has introduced a slew of products and initiatives-- the Apple retail stores, Mac OS X, the titanium PowerBook G4, the iBook, SuperDrive-equipped G4s, iTunes, iDVD, etc. (We have never heard one man say the words "this year" so many times in two minutes.) After a couple of rounds of applause for Apple's employees and their families, the lights came up and we were out of there.

Th-th-th-th-that's all, folks...