A Solid Macworld Expo Keynote Presentation

Once the news was out that Apple would pull out of Macworld Expo after this year's show, and that it was Phil Schiller, and not Steve Jobs, who would present the keynote speech, many assumed that there were no major announcements to be expected from Apple at this event. And still, I was surprised to overhear discussions about how "underwhelming," "boring," or simply "weird" the presentation was. After all, what Apple did announce were solid upgrades to existing products and even a bit more. Let me highlight three cool things presented last Tuesday.

When, where, and who?

Taking digital photos is cheap: a battery charge every now and then, and that's about all the running costs you'd incur while capturing memories with your digicam. In fact, the real cost is in the time it takes to organize all those pictures once you've imported them onto your computer's hard drive. The new Faces and Places features in iPhoto '09 nicely complement the already existing Events folder to make this process much easier.

"Faces" uses automatic face detection and recognition to not only find faces in photos, but also to find the other photos in your library that show the same person. "Places" displays photos on a map based on geo tags included in the photos, and you can also manually assign pictures to a location. So, now you can automatically sort and find photos based on when they were shot, where they were taken, and who is in them, and all this with a lot less effort than if you used another approach like manually maintained keywords.

Making that Magic Move

Unlike iLife, there are quit a few areas in which Apple's iWork office suite is lacking, and the '09 update addresses some of them. Full-screen viewing of a text document you are editing as well as outlining a document are found in many word processors, and both are welcome additions to Pages, as are many new cell functions that have been added to Numbers.

Among the new features in Keynote are very powerful, yet easy-to-use animations, including the "Magic Move," which smoothly animates an object from one slide to the next by automatically scaling, rotating, and moving it.

Recently, I held a talk on internet security and presented the method of using the first letters of the words in a sentence to build a secure password (e.g., "Remember this sentence" becomes "Rt$"), and used an animation to illustrate just how to do this. Creating that animation with discretely animated letters took a lot of time, and it broke when I had to change the slide resolution. Magic Move would have been just the thing to (re)create that animation quickly and easily.

Wanna share?

All three applications in the iWork '09 now support sharing documents online via a new service called iWork.com. Sharing and accessing documents is seamlessly built into the applications: just click the "iWork.com" toolbar icon, enter the recipients' names, include a little comment, and click "Share." Once uploaded, the recipients can download the document in several formats including MS Office, as well as view and annotate it in a browser.

I have never liked online applications like Google Docs, because, compared to a well-designed native application, the user experience is just awful. Instead of editing documents online, I have always preferred to do the editing in a native application and then share the resulting document online. iWork.com offers just that, and the integration into the iWork applications is so clean and seamless that I can't wait to try this out.

And there was more

In addition to many more new interesting features in both iLife '09 and iWork '09, Apple announced the new 17" MacBook Pro with a new, non-removable battery that is claimed to last for eight hours and to survive up to 1,000 recharge cycles. And almost as an aside, Schiller mentioned that all songs in the iTunes Store will be available DRM-free by the end of this quarter. The price Apple had to pay for getting the record companies onboard for this is a new pricing structure -- three pricing tiers at $0.69, $0.99, and $1.29 will be replacing the "all tracks for 99 cents" model --, but compared to the huge impact this will have on the industry as a whole, this is a ridiculously low price to pay (no pun intended).

To round off the keynote, Apple had invited Tony Bennett to perform "The Best is Yet to Come" and "I Left my Heart in San Francisco," and one could almost assume that there is some special meaning in both song titles for Apple here. More importantly, though, it was fantastic and unexpected to see this Jazz legend live on stage.

So, let's recap: three solid product upgrades, a new "cloud" service, a strategic shift to (at least partially) get rid of DRM in the iTunes Store, and a mini concert by one of the greatest Jazz singers of our times. If this qualifies as "underwhelming," "boring," or "weird," then that says more about people's unrealistic expectations (and music taste) than about what Apple showed off at Macworld Expo and Conference 2009.