The fact that Steve spent a chunk of time leading his flock through the intricacies of Mac OS X 10.3, code-named "Panther," came as no surprise, given that Apple itself has been hyping that aspect of WWDC for ages, now. Still, there were a few curveballs in the Panther demo-- not the least of which was Panther's logo. (What, no furry black X? Apparently panthers are metallic, grey, and angular. Who knew?) Overall, the speculation about what might be included in Panther seems to have been pretty much hit and miss.

For one thing, the rumors were right: the Finder now has that brushed-metal look that spontaneously popped into being a few years back with the QuickTime Player and has been slowly infecting just about every application that Apple has seen fit to ship-- and since the Finder is just another application, really, we suppose it's not terribly surprising to find that the contagion has spread once again. Luckily for us, we're pretty neutral on the Brushed Metal Outbreak, but we know there are some Mac users out there who hate the look so much, we're convinced that Brushed Metal killed their brother and shot their dog. Will the Finder's new ultra-fast searching, support for labels (woo-hoo!!), and improved iTunes-like "user-centric" layout allow them to see past their hatred of all things brushed and metal? Only time will tell. For our part, we're starting to think that the new screen-eating Finder layout with all the volumes and favorites on the left in every window is the pivotal element in Apple's secret plan to sell lots more 23-inch Cinema Displays.

For another thing, the (earlier) rumors were wrong: there's no sight of the alleged "Piles" feature that always struck us as a little superfluous anyway. (We admit it, we just put stuff in folders. We feel so 20th-century.) But there is something we don't recall having heard anything about, albeit in our extremely out-of-touch status: Xcode. Apparently Apple has completely revamped the nifty but aging Project Builder development environment and slapped in all sorts of nifty features like quicker builds, the ability to fix bugs while compiled code is running and continue without recompiling, linkless builds for faster debugging, predictive compiling (which gets a head start on compiling code even before you request it), the ability to distribute build tasks across multiple Macs, and lots more. If you aren't a programmer, this probably means nothing to you, but hey, it is a developers conference, ya know.

Now, we're not going to delve into all 100-odd new features in Panther, like built-in faxing and that cube-spinny implementation of fast user switching-- heck, you can do that on your own time-- but we will say this: Exposé is the single coolest thing we've ever seen, anywhere, in any context, period. On the one hand, Apple's new "pick a window, any window" feature is insanely practical; AtAT's primary production Mac has, for instance, forty applications running on it at once, and finding the exact window we're looking for occasionally takes upwards of an hour and a half. On the other hand, Exposé also sends windows scurrying in all directions like a big mess o' coachroaches scattering when you turn on the light, and that amuses us to no end. Literally. We've been playing with the QuickTime demo of Exposé for the past six hours in a Homer Simpson-like "bed goes up, bed goes down" sort of fashion, and we don't plan on stopping until Panther is installed and we can use the real thing instead.