Well, after an initial bout of network connectivity while waiting for the Keynote, the WiFi network here at WWDC seems to have gone to hell in a handbasket - nobody appears to be getting online. Thus, I'm writing this in a text editor while waiting for the "Mac OS X State of the Union" session to begin.

So, about that Keynote. With two hours for Steve Jobs' patented Reality Distortion Field to wear off, what's still banging around in my head?

Panther is sweet. A lot of new features and usability tweaks. Unfortunately, only a few of them look to be the type of features that can be easily marketed in a bullet list. Like the Matrix, it's hard to be told about Mac usability - you have to experience it for yourself. Expose', for example, is a great method for window/application switching, one of the Neat Visual Things about Panther - and it's damn hard to explain in text. See what I mean?

There really needs to be an upgrade path for Joe User. $129 every year is far too aggressive (especially when you add in another $99/yr for .Mac), and the installed base will fall behind if you don't give them some sort of path. Give us a use for those Proof Of Purchase coupons, Apple!

iChat AV is damn cool. Looks like Apple did a fair amount of Human Interface research here - shown in how much Steve harped on camera placement for video conferencing. I already have friends who thing iChat is damn cool (if only it ran on their cobbled--together whitebox PCs). This is, as Steve said, Video Conferencing that just plain works. It is, after all, what Apple does right - makes things that just plain work. Can't wait until I actually have network connectivity and I can download the public beta and try it out with my new iSight.

iSight? Apple gave away their new iSight firewire videoconferencing camera to all attendees. That's about 3800 people receiving free cameras that will sell for $129 retail. And Apple's still getting a bargain - because these things are very cool, sexy toys that each one of these 3800 developers will go home and show off. Hardcore Apple geeks will always be the best marketing.

Safari is at 1.0. I need to stop by David Wyatt's weblog and give him some props. Hope the dev team gets to take a brief break before starting on 1.1. Now that the WebCore SDK is out, we'll start seeing a lot more clean HTML rendering in OSX apps - and a lot of apps that "require Safari 1.0".

The G5 Power Macs represent the biggest change since - if not a bigger change than - the migration from 68K to PowerPC processors. Everything - CPU, RAM, Video, Disk/IO, System Bus - has seen either revolutionary or evolutionary changes. Do I need one Right Now? No - I'll wait for the revised systems, and look at a tech upgrade for my G4/933 next summer or so. It'll be interesting to see what works and what breaks when the G5 systems ship in August. Steve really put the family jewels on the chopping block by stating that the G5 would be at 3GHz within 12 months - every pundit in the tech industry will be watching (and many of them hoping) to see if Apple makes it.