Complete WWDC Keynote Coverage

On Monday morning, at the keynote presentation of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, Steve Jobs gave his customary show: briefly covering existing products and news, and then announcing and previewing new hardware and software. MacFixIt editor Dan Frakes was in attendance and offers a comprehensive overview. If you'd like to view the keynote yourself, Apple has posted a QuickTime (streaming) video of the event. An Apple photo gallery is also available.

INTRODUCTION

Jobs welcomed WWDC attendees and gave a brief snapshot of their diversity: over 3500 registered developers -- a 17% increase over 2003 -- representing over 44 countries. He noted that WWDC is offering 200 sessions this year (many, he revealed later, focusing on Tiger, the next major revision to Mac OS X).

UPDATES ON CURRENT PRODUCTS

Retail Stores The first store opened approximately 3 years ago; today there are 80 around the world (mostly in the U.S.). The stores bring in 20 million visitors a year, and sell over $250 million dollars in third-party products each year. (He didn't clarify whether this quarter-billion-dollar sales figure included sales from the online Apple Store.) Jobs told developers that if they have a good product and Apple doesn't sell it, "we need to talk."

Music The iTunes Music Store currently has 70% of the market share of legal downloads in the U.S. With the success of the recent opening of the European version for the UK, Germany, and France, the iTunes Music Store is also the largest retailer of downloadable music in Europe, with 62% of online music sales.

The iPod is maintaining its lead over other "MP3 players," with a 50% share of the market in terms of unit sales. (Jobs pointed out that the iPod's share is much larger in terms of revenue -- the iPod is more expensive than many of the other models on the market.)

Jobs then talked about recent product introductions: AirPort Express, AirTunes, and the new BMW/iPod connection kit. (Apple and BMW actually had several BMWs in the lobby of Moscone West for attendees to "test drive" -- the iPod kit, not the car.) In discussing the AirPort Express, Jobs made two statements that raised a few eyebrows. First, in what many concluded to simply be a misstatement, he said that you can broadcast your music to your living room "and your kitchen, as well." Some attendees took that to mean the ability to send your iTunes music to multiple AirPort Express Base Stations simultaneously, but all reports seem to indicate that you can only broadcast to one at a time.

The other curious statement was that the AirPort Express' optical audio out jack will allow you to listen to 5.1 surround sound. On the same day, Apple added a Knowledge Base article explaining how to play DTS (Digital Theater Systems) encoded audio files through iTunes. Given that there are no 5.1 audio files on the iTunes Music Store, and you can't rip multi-channel tracks from a DVD-Audio or SACD disc, this comment led to a good deal of speculation as to where (and when) users might get such files.

In closing this section, Jobs said that Apple now has a presence in all the places people listen to music: computers, portably, the house, and the car. (Of course, most of us don't happen to own a BMW...) He then showed a new "Apple Music" video that tried to illustrate this sentiment.

Power Macs Jobs briefly discussed the current Power Macintosh G5 line, noting processors up to 2.5GHz, dual processors on every model, frontside buses up to 1.25GHz, and 8x SuperDrives, starting at $1999.

Readers may remember that in last year's WWDC keynote, Jobs promised Power PC G5 chips at speeds of 3GHz by this summer. Much has been made of the failure to reach this goal, so Jobs addressed it during the keynote. His explanation: IBM had expected that the transition from 130 nanometer to 90nm chips would allow them to make everything faster. Unfortunately, "the entire industry hit a wall" at 90nm, and no one has seen the expected speed gains. According to a chart he showed, from 2003 to 2004, Intel's fastest chip went from 3.2GHz to 3.6 GHz (an increase of 12.5%), whereas IBM's chips went from 2.0GHz to 2.5GHz (a 25% increase). So although IBM hasn't been able to provide as much of an increase as hoped, they're doing better than the competition. (He also quipped that at least Mac users get two of those processors instead of just one.)

NEW DISPLAYS

In an expected move, Jobs announced a new line of flat-panel Apple Cinema Displays. The current line of displays consists of 17", 20", and 23" models; the new line includes three new models:

• 20": 1680 x 1050 (1.7 million pixels), $1299, available in July
• 23": 1920 x 1200 (2.3 million pixels), $1999, available in July
• 30": 2560 x 1600 (4.1 million pixels), $3299, available in August

All are encased in aluminum enclosures that match the Power Mac G5 and include a one-piece stand with a smoothly adjustable tilt. Surprisingly light for their size, the new displays also have very thin bezels which make them ideal for multiple-display configurations. Jobs joked that the backs of these displays look better than the fronts of most competing models. (Most in attendance seemed to agree.)

In addition to their size and design, three things set the new displays apart from the previous model line:

1. All displays have built-in USB2.0 and FireWire 400 hubs; two of each port are available on the back of the display itself. (Interestingly, Apple chose to place the ports near the bottom-right [while facing the front of the monitor], so if you plug cables into these ports, they'll generally be quite visible -- a departure from the "avoid the cable mess" philosophy. More on that in the next bullet.)

2. The new displays have only a "single" cable, but at the end it breaks out into four connectors: USB2.0, FireWire 400, power (using an external power brick), and -- most significantly -- a DVI plug. Yes, Apple has abandoned the ADC connector, for two reasons. First, ADC simply couldn't provide enough juice to power the larger displays as well as peripherals connected to the USB/FireWire ports. But perhaps just as important, now anyone with a DVI port, including Windows users, PowerBook users, and people with older Macs or third-party video cards, can use an Apple Cinema Display without having to purchase a costly adapter.

3. The 30" model is significant in another respect: it requires a Power Mac G5 and a special video card. According to Jobs, the 30" model has such a high resolution that a single DVI connection can't drive it. Apple thus teamed up with Nvidia to create the GeForce 6800 Ultra DLL, also available in August. The GeForce 6800 features the new "dual link" digital signal standard, which effectively provides the power of two DVI video cards running in parallel. According to the Apple Store description, "Using over 220 million transistors it supports a 256-bit interface for an effective memory bandwidth of 35.2 GB per second which delivers 600 million vertices, 6.4 billion textured pixels per second. The GPU is built on an AGP 8X board and includes 256MB of DDR3 memory."

   A single GeForce 6800 can actually drive two 30" Cinema Displays. However, this power comes at a price: The $600 card effectively raises the cost of the 30" model to $3898. In addition, the card is so big that when installed in a Power Mac G5, it actually blocks one of the adjacent PCI slots, leaving you with only two.

Although still pricier than many competing models (at least for the 20" and 23" -- there aren't any competitors for the 30" yet), all three models looked great -- Jobs claimed that "Apple's competitors use the panels Apple rejects." The 30" model was simply stunning; you don't realize how big it is until you see a person standing next to it.

Over the past few years, many PC users (and even many Mac users with older Macs) have wished they could use an Apple Cinema Display, but were prevented from doing so by the proprietary ADC connector; considering that now anyone with a recent video card can take advantage of one of these new models, I suspect they'll be very successful.

Other display announcements Apple also quietly announced a couple of other new display accessories, available "this summer." The first is an optional VESA mount for mounting your display on a wall or articulating arm. The second is a new "magnetic mounting solution" for the iSight that allows you to mount your iSight on one of the new displays without the use of adhesive. According to the Apple website, this new mounting hardware will ship in new iSight boxes this summer, and will be included in the iSight Accessory Kit.

PANTHER and MAC OS X APPLICATIONS UPDATE

As a preview to the introduction of Tiger, Jobs dedicated a chunk of time to discussing Panther (OS X 10.3), Mac OS X adoption/transition, and OS X application availability. He noted that Panther was the "most successful OS release in Apple's history," both in unit sales and revenues, and stated that Panther has over 12 million users, over half of the Mac installed base. (Jobs said that Mac OS X is the only operating system in the world with 50% of the installed base, perhaps taking a jab at Windows XP, which hasn't been nearly as successful, in terms of adoption by existing Windows users, as Microsoft had hoped.)

More significantly, Jobs announced that "the transition to Mac OS X is officially over." No one was quite sure what that meant or how it was quantified, but the point seemed to be that most people who planned to move from OS 9 to OS X had done so. (Although Panther supposedly is running on 50% of the installed Mac base, Apple didn't note the breakdown of the remaining 50%, which is presumably a mix of earlier versions of Mac OS X and various versions of the "classic" Mac OS, especially OS 9.)

Mac OS X applications update Jobs noted that there are now over 12,000 applications for Mac OS X. One of the most significant of those is Microsoft Office 2004, and Jobs stated that at a recent dinner (at the D: All Things Digital conference) with Bill Gates, Gates told Jobs that Microsoft's relationship with Apple is "better than ever." Jobs also noted some of the significant software products coming to OS X: Borland Java development tools, Oracle 10G, new Quark products, PeopleSoft, and Sun's Java development environment.

A few developers also came on stage to show demos of their products. Alias's General Manager, Bob Bennett, discussed Alias Sketchbook Pro and Maya Unlimited, noting that the Mac represents 25% of their worldwide sales and, recently, 70% of the downloads for Sketchbook Pro. Karen Conroe of Ubisoft gave a demo of Myst IV: Revelation, to be released this fall for Mac and PC (simultaneously). Daniel Haver, CEO of Guitar Rig, demoed their new audio-unit based guitar simulator. Finally, Aran Anderson, President of Orbit, demonstrated what I thought was the coolest product of the bunch: a 200-times-faster-than-real-time satellite simulator that showed a 3D simulation of all non-classified satellites orbiting the earth, including networks between satellites, ground links, and coverage areas. Anderson noted that a few years ago, the calculations used by Orbit required a Defense Department supercomputer, but Orbit runs on a Power Mac G5. In a nod to OS X as a development platform, Anderson noted that he created Orbit in 3 months using Xcode on a PowerBook G4. (A free demonstration screensaver called Freefall will be available from Apple's website "soon.")

TIGER PREVIEW

The remainder of the keynote was spent previewing Tiger, the next major revision to Mac OS X. The 5th version of OS X -- after Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, and Panther -- Tiger will ship "in the first half of 2005, more than a year before Longhorn" (Microsoft's next major version of Windows). It will cost the customary $129 and include "more than 150 new features"; Jobs spent the next hour or so discussing some of the major ones.

64-bit According to Jobs, Mac OS X is the #1 version of Unix in the world in terms of unit shipments, and Tiger will bring true 64-bit computing. Tiger will feature 64-bit virtual memory for any process, a 64-bit system library, and LP64 support in GCC (a popular compiler for developers), while still allowing 64-bit processes to run alongside 32-bit processes.

Other higher-end functions Tiger and Tiger Server will include a number of much-requested advanced features such as fine grain locking/symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), access control lists, and built-in Xgrid computing. (Some of these features will be more easily accessible via Mac OS X Server; see below.)

Better Windows compatibility Tiger and Tiger Server will improve on Panther's compatibility with Windows by offering better SMB performance, support for SMB home directories, support for Kerberos authentication and NTLMv2, HTML email composition (although what HTML email composition really has to do with Windows, I'm not sure), and support for Word tables in TextEdit (which under Panther already supports basic Word files).

New search technologies: Spotlight Jobs' favorite new feature was clearly Spotlight, Tiger's advanced searching technology. According to Jobs, it's "easier to find something on a billion computers with Google than it is to find something on your own computer." I'm not sure about that -- especially if you learn to use the Finder's Find functionality in Panther -- but I agree with his overall point: locating a file isn't as easy as it could be, and the more files you have, the more of a hassle it is. He cited iTunes' "live" searching, which lets you find any song instantly by typing the name of the song, the artist, the album, etc., noting that finding files should be this easy. With this goal in mind, Apple developed Spotlight -- a seemingly catch-all name that refers to new "live searching" technology available to the Finder, as well as to other applications.

At the most basic level, Spotlight looks and works much like the Search field in Panther Finder windows. However, just as Panther's Find dialog lets you add and remove search criteria, Spotlight lets you do the same, right in the current Finder window, and the search results are updated instantly. Jobs gave examples of how people try to find things: "Keynote presentations from Phil that I opened last week"; "WWDC planning documents"; and "All CMYK images at 1200dpi from client." Using Spotlight, you can perform such searches fairly quickly. It supports all standard file formats and extensions, and adds a number of new criteria such as color space (for finding image files).

Although Spotlight makes searching easier, what really makes it useful in everyday use is that you can save your searches to the sidebar in Finder windows as "Smart Folders" -- just as clicking a folder in the sidebar will show you its contents, clicking a Smart Folder in the sidebar will show you the up-to-the-second results of that search. For example, you could create a Smart Folder called "Today's Docs" that displays all files in your Documents folder that have been modified today. If you create a new document, or make changes to an existing document, the Smart Folder's results/contents will immediately be updated to reflect that change. (If you've ever used Microsoft Entourage's Custom Views, the concepts are similar; however, using such a feature for finding files has actually been around since the planned "Live Folders" feature of Copland, back in the early 1990's.)

The technology behind Spotlight will also be available to other applications, both those from Apple and those from third-party developers. For example, you can create "Smart Groups" in Address Book that fulfill various criteria. Jobs gave two examples: a group that consisted of all contacts who reside in Paris, and all contacts whose birthdays fall in the next 7 days. The latter is a good example of smart updating: As days go by, the group's contents are updated -- people are removed and new people are added -- to reflect the next 7 day's birthdays. As another example, Jobs demonstrated Tiger's Mail using an account with over 50,000 messages in 18 mailboxes; searches were instantaneous. In addition, you can create "Smart Mailboxes" (which are basically identical to Custom Views in Entourage) that satisfy various combinations of search criteria and are updated in real time.

One last example of application integration -- and one I would never have suspected as a candidate for this technology -- is Tiger's System Preferences. Instead of the familiar favorites bar, Tiger's version includes a Spotlight search field. Typing the name of a particular preference pane highlights it in the main window; pressing return opens it. (In this respect, it's much like the excellent LaunchBar.) However, in the case of System Preferences, Apple has added "keywords" to each preference pane to help users find the right place to change a desired setting. For instance, if an ex-Windows user types "wallpaper" in order to find out how to change the Desktop background, Spotlight highlights the Desktop & Screen Saver pane. If you type "AirPort," "WiFi," or "802.11," the Network pane is highlighted.

Finally, Spotlight isn't limited to particular applications. Tiger will also feature a system-wide Spotlight Search, available from the menu bar. Using Apple's new Metadata Indexing Engine, Tiger indexes the metadata of every document, email, contact, image, etc. on your hard drive. Whenever a change is made -- a file saved, an email received, a contact edited -- the index is updated. (File contents are also indexed; that index is actually separate.) By clicking the Spotlight icon in the menu bar, you can enter your search term(s) and the results will appear in a drop-down list; click an item and it will be opened. However, you can also view the results in a window that allows you to preview documents, group and sort them (see the image on the Spotlight Web page), and even refine your search to narrow down the results.

According to Jobs, Spotlight also supports much "looser" searching than Panther. For example, you can type "image portrait" and you'll see all images in portrait format. Similarly, if you type in a person's name, you'll be presented with a list of all emails sent to and from that person, all documents created by that person, and all documents that mention that person; you'll also see that person's Address Book entry.

In many ways, Spotlight is similar to some of the ways in which Microsoft's upcoming Longhorn will use file metadata. However, Jobs pointed out that OS X will have it "years ahead of Longhorn."

H.264 In the "needs a better name" department, Jobs announced that H.264, the "next generation" of MP4 that has been ratified as the standard format for high definition (HD) DVDs, will be built into QuickTime in Tiger. Providing very high quality, H.264 is also extremely efficient, and scales from HD video all the way down to 3G mobile phones. (Later in the keynote, Jobs demoed a video iChat that used H.264; the video quality was indeed impressive.) Frank Cassanova, the QuickTime Senior Director of Product Marketing, demonstrated H.264 by comparing it to today's MP4, explaining that the former provides four times the resolution at the same data rate. (At the same data rate as today's DVDs, you can get HD quality.)

Safari RSS RSS ("Really Simple Syndication") feeds have become very popular, and many websites provide them to allow readers to get summaries of news from within an RSS reader. (MacFixIt's RSS feed is http://www.macfixit.com/backend/macfixit.rss). The version of Safari included in Tiger, called Safari RSS, will provide the ability to read RSS feeds -- both RSS and Atom protocols -- without leaving your browser. In addition to being able to view RSS feeds, Safari will automatically recognize if a website offers an RSS feed and, if so, provide an RSS button in the address bar that takes you to that feed. You can then view and sort feed results from within Safari. (A nice touch: a slider control lets you decide how long or short you want your RSS article summaries to be.)

Another handy feature of Safari's new RSS functionality will be the Personal Clipping Service, which allows you to search your RSS feeds. The reasoning behind using this functionality goes like this: Since search engines like Google search millions of sites, and the search sites' indexes often take a few days to update, their results are often too broad and not up to date. RSS feeds, on the other hand, are updated in almost real time, and they're sites that you specifically want to watch. By searching your RSS feeds, you can often get much more relevant and up to date results.

As a journalist, I've become hugely reliant on RSS feeds over the past year; they make keeping up to date on happenings in the Mac world -- and the world at large -- much easier than checking 20 websites multiple times per day. At the same time, until recently, RSS feeds have largely been the purview of the truly geeky. Putting RSS front and center in a "tool for everyone" like Safari is sure to increase exposure for, and thus the popularity of, RSS.

Some people have wondered if Safari RSS will hurt standalone RSS clients. Although I think Safari will be a satisfactory RSS client for many users, its functionality is nowhere near as complete as a that of a good standalone RSS client, such as the excellent NetNewsWire. Power users are going to want more than what Safari RSS offers, so I think there's room for both, especially in an expanding market.

[Non-keynote] Safari RSS will also offer a new "Private Browsing" feature. When activated, Safari doesn't keep track of any information from your browsing: No history, caches, information entered into forms, passwords, etc., are saved. Finally, in a welcome change for many, many Mac users, Safari RSS will provide the ability to save Web pages as archives -- including all images and links -- for later viewing.

Core Image (and Video) In Panther, Apple provided Core Audio, which integrates a good amount of powerful audio functionality into the OS itself. In Tiger, Apple will introduce Core Image and Core Video. (Interestingly, Jobs used the name "Core Video" in the keynote, but it doesn't appear anywhere on the Apple website; it appears that Apple is using the term "Core Image" to cover both image and video functionality.) These features integrate "ultra-fast, pixel-accurate image [and video] processing" into the OS, allowing developers to take advantage of this impressive functionality without having to reinvent the wheel -- they can access Tiger's image and video processing technologies from within their applications relatively easily, just as they would use OS X's text engine or Safari's Webkit.

Some background: Jobs explained that although CPU speed increases are slowing down, GPU (graphics processing units, those found on video cards) speeds are increasing dramatically. Therefore, it makes sense to take advantage of that processing power to manipulate images and video. Core Image/Video offer such features as floating point precision and realtime filters; over over 60 "Image Units" (similar to Core Audio's "Audio Units") are included. The technology used in Tiger is the same technology used in Apple's Motion software.

The demo, performed by Phil Schiller, was quite impressive. Schiller showed an app called FunHouse, created in one person week using Xcode, that provides access to all the Core Image Units and allows you to apply those to an image or video in real time. Schiller claimed that FunHouse was demonstrating over one billion FPU calculations per second. Some of the transitions and effects were spectacular.

In terms of system requirements, Apple claims that Core Image performance "ultimately depend[s] on the graphics card. Graphics cards capable of pixel-level programming deliver the best performance. But Core Image automatically scales as appropriate for systems with older graphics cards, for compatibility with any Tiger-compatible Mac." Apple doesn't yet say what a "Tiger-compatible Mac" is, but the Core Image page states that supported graphics cards are the ATI Radeon 9800 XT, 9800 Pro, 9700 Pro, 9600 XT, or 9600 Pro; ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 or 9600; and NVIDIA GeForceFX Go 5200 or 5200 Ultra.

.Mac/Syncing Apple's .Mac service currently has over 500,000 subscribers, and those users will be able to take advantage of Tiger's improved synchronization services. Currently available only to Address Book, iCal, and Safari, Sync Services will be available across the OS in Tiger. A new all-in-one preference pane will let you decide what to sync -- contacts, calendars, Safari bookmarks, account settings (Dock, Expose, Desktop, etc.) -- and when to sync it. For example, you can have your data synced on the hour, automatically. You can also choose to sync with just .Mac, or, if you have multiple Macs, to sync them to each other. If you have both a PowerBook and a desktop Mac, this means not having to worry about which computer has your latest settings and data. (Not having to manually keep the Docks on my PowerBook and my G5 in sync will be a welcome feature.) Even better, Apple has opened the sync technology to developers, so they can use Sync Services to synchronize their own application data between your Macs.

[Non-keynote] A new Sync Manager provides a summary of your scheduled syncs, past sync activity, and which applications are syncing which data.

Dashboard Many users will remember the controversy over Jaguar's Sherlock, which looked and functioned a bit too much like Karelia's Watson for many user's comfort. That controversy is sure to resurface with Job's announcement of Tiger's new Dashboard functionality. Jobs described Dashboard as "Expose for widgets," as if everyone knew what "widgets" were. However, if you've seen Konfabulator or Stattoo, you're familiar with the concept: small, single- or limited-functionality applications that you're likely to access frequently (or simply want to keep handy) -- MacFixIt founder and contributor Ted Landau commented to me that widgets remind him of early Mac OS Desk Accessories. Clocks, calculators, weather forecast monitors, stock watcher, and iTunes controllers are some examples of "widgets" provided by Konfabulator, Stattoo, and now Dashboard. In fact, it's this striking similarity between Dashboard and these existing utilities that has some people crying foul.

Personally, I've never been a fan of these utilities because, in my opinion, they have a tendency to "clutter" up my Desktop. However, this is one area in which Dashboard does offer some novelty: Instead of always being visible, Dashboard widgets are arranged on a (normally hidden) translucent overlay. Press a key, and the translucent overlay swoops in, anti-Expose-style, in front of your other applications. You can then view and use your widgets until you press the Dashboard key again to hide them. This implementation is much more useful to people like me who like the idea of widgets but don't want them cluttering up their screen. (As a side note, the developers of Konfabulator have released an updated version that incorporates a new feature called "Konspose" which -- you guessed it -- implements this transparent, anti-Expose overlay. Copying features can go both ways, Apple!)

Automator Jobs noted that Mac OS has long included AppleScript as an excellent way to automate actions -- in fact, OS X has the widest variety of scripting capabilities of any OS -- but the problem has always been that few users had the time, or the inclination, to learn how to use it. To help users take advantage of scripting, Tiger will include a new feature called Automator. Put simply, Automator is a visual scripting environment that helps users create interactive or fully active scripts. It includes over 100 built-in actions that supporting, and provide access to, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, GarageBand, Mail, Safari, iCal, and most other standard OS X applications.

Sal Soghoian, Apple's AppleScript guru, provided a demonstration using a .Mac account, iMovie, and iDVD. Using Automator, he was able to quickly automate the process of downloading a .Mac slideshow, creating an iPhoto album from those photos, and then placing that iPhoto album into iDVD as a new slideshow.

Creating such Automator Workflows is fairly simple. As shown on the screenshot on the Automator page (above), you first choose a category of action: iPod, Pictures, Movies, Text, etc. Then a list of actions that apply to that category appears: Play iPhoto Slideshow, Import Images, Create iPhoto Album, etc.; you drag one into the main task window to add it to your Automator Workflow. When you do, you'll be provided with options that apply to that action: what to name your new album, for example. You can string these actions together in sequence, using the results of one action to feed into another, until you've scripted, without any knowledge of AppleScript, your desired outcome.

Once you've created your script, you can run it immediately or save it for repeated use. If the script requires input, you can even have the script ask for such input each time it runs. Scripts can be saved for particular applications, and can even be shared with other users.

My impression was that a lot of people were very impressed by Automator -- it makes scripting accessible to even the most technophobic user. Although neither Jobs nor Soghoian stated that developers will be able to add their own categories and actions to Automator, given the widespread support of AppleScript in OS X applications, and how easy Automator appears to be to use, I can't imagine Apple not making Automator extensible via plug-ins or some other architecture.

iChat AV Jobs noted that Panther's iChat AV provided the first personal video conferencing that actually worked; however, Apple wanted to give users an even better experience. For starters, Tiger's version of iChat AV will offer better video quality, via the new H.264 codec (above). But more importantly, it will also offer users' most requested feature: conferencing.

iChat AV in Tiger will support up to ten people in an audio conference chat, and up to four people, including the local user (Jobs called this "you plus three"), in a video conference chat. During a video conference, instead of having a separate iChat video window for each person, you'll see the video feeds of the other people in your chat displayed on panels inside a single window. In the best use of eye candy of the day, each panel is angled as if the video conference participants are seated around a table with you -- a highly polished table that reflects each person's image.

[Non-keynote] When video or audio conferencing in iChat AV, one computer is the "manager" of the conference -- all communication goes through that person. In order to increase performance, iChat AV will dynamically switch the "manager" to whichever person's computer has the fastest Internet/network connection.

Xcode 2.0 [Non-keynote] Although Jobs barely mentioned Xcode during the keynote, an Apple press release announced Xcode 2.0, to be included with Tiger. New features will include Dead Code Stripping, Visual Modeling and Design, 64-bit development tools, an integrated Apple Reference Library, an Apple-enhanced version of GCC v3.5, graphical remote debugging, Auto Vectorization, an Ant build system, and support for Subversion Source Code Management.

Mac OS X Server [Non-keynote] Apple also quietly announced the Server version of Tiger. Noticeable among its features are a built-in iChat server for private, encrypted chatting and conferencing; a built-in Weblog Server; Mobile Home Directories; a Software Update Server that can be used to install software on connected Mac OS X client machines; Xgrid 1.0; an Internet Gateway Setup Assistant, which helps administrators set up network services; and Windows migration tools to help transfer user/group information from Windows servers or to act as a Primary Domain Controller and even host Windows home directories.

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