Giganto-mini PowerBooks aside, January 7th was actually the International Day of the App. Indeed, we didn't actually keep count, but we're pretty good judges of these things and we estimate that the Stevenote was well into its sixteenth hour before Jobs wrapped up his demo of Apple's forty-fifth new or revised application and finally made with the aluminum already. That's not to say that each and every app he covered wasn't a solid addition to Apple's software farm, however, and there were even moments when we started to doubt the centuries-old maxim that "only hardware doth a keynote make."

No, one of those moments was not when Steve-o mentioned last week's bumping of iCal and iSync to 1.0.2 and 1.0, respectively. Don't get us wrong, we like the apps, but iCal's revision merely fixes bugs and improves performance-- and, frankly, we've never really found that processing delays in our calendaring software were costing us precious untold hours of lost productivity each week. iSync's emergence from public beta status tidies things up a bit, but despite finally attaining that elusive 1.0 seal of approval, we find it still insists on duplicating every event in our Palms and copying every contact's home email address as a work address as well. Oh, and for some reason it keeps renaming Phil Schiller "Sexy Beast" during the syncing process, but we're assuming that behavior's a feature, not a bug.

The updates to Apple's stable of creative iApps (as well as their integration and unification as iLife, the "Microsoft Office of the digital hub") came as a more exciting bit of news. Granted, the news that iPhoto 2 will now let us choose the music for our slideshows directly from our iTunes library was greeted here at the compound by the sound of crickets chirping, but the one-click Enhance and the Retouch brush, if they work as advertised, may save us a lot of routine trips to Photoshop. The addition of nifty new effects and something resembling actual audio editing to iMovie 3 will surely bring interminable vacation footage to a whole new level. And how 'bout chapter marker support in iDVD 3? Now your avant garde masterpiece "Ninety Minutes In The Life Of A Rock On My Porch" can allow your viewers to jump right to Minute 24 (the rock on the porch), Minute 59 (the rock on the porch), or even the climactic Minute 88 (the rock on the porch with a bug on it). Sundance, here you come.

Actually, though, if you're looking to take your work to Sundance, you're probably going to want a little more oomph than iMovie 3 has to offer (yes, even with the new Fairy Dust effect). What's that you say? As a starving artist, there's no way you can shell out a grand for Final Cut Pro? Fear not, Eisenstein-- at $299, Final Cut Express gives you most of the power at a fraction of the price, thus allowing you to skip fewer meals to raise the funds. Be warned, though; your art will certainly pay the price for your reduced corporeal suffering. Skimp on the martyrdom and misery and your next film will be less Citizen Kane and more The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.

For most people, we expect that Safari was the real software draw of the day. Finally, Apple's "first web browser"! (Somewhere, Cyberdog is weeping quietly to himself in a corner. Oh, how fleeting fame!) We've taken it for a spin, and so far we're giving it a thumbs-mostly-up; it's fast, no doubt about that, and so far it's rendered most pages (including this one) pretty darn close to how they're intended to look. It's still a little twitchy, though-- while our server was getting pummeled by extra Expo-induced traffic, other browsers simply waited a bit longer for the page to load fully, while Safari frequently pulled a Mr. Mercurial, threw its hands up in the air, shouted something about the network being dropped, and then stormed off and fired somebody in an elevator. Still, that's the coolest bookmarks implementation we've yet seen; is it cool enough to pry us away from OmniWeb's oh-my-god-how-did-we-ever-live-without-these location Shortcuts? Only time will tell.

For our money, though, the biggest news software-wise is Keynote. C'mon, the application built just for Steve so he could put together those splashy and droolific keynote slide shows, now available to any shlub with a C-note in his grubby little fist? That's huge. Web browsers come and go, but how often do you come across software that lets you be Steve anytime you want? We predict high sales among the obsessed (Mike Dell probably placed the first order), as well as a sudden run on black mock turtlenecks...