Yesterday was a daze of adrenaline, caffeine, and perhaps a little alcohol. Here's a slightly more coherent recap of the day's events.

The biggest news, of course, was that we shipped yesterday. The app is called Keynote. This is a big rush; I have an actual box, actually up in my room, filled with a delicious CD and a nice big manual. I worked on it, and now it's been pressed and packaged and put out there into the world. Thousands of keynote attendees now have these packages in their hot little hands, and with any luck, they tore into those packages last night and played with our labor of love. And loved it. And when I get home next week, I can go up to Fry's, and find our box sitting on a shelf.

But more on that later.

Our team got user conference badges, so that we could attend the big launch. However, we wanted to take no chances. So, we got our sorry selves up at 3:15 in the morning, and trekked over to the start of the line. My aging body is no longer quite so capable of these feats as it was in college, but a 1.0 product launch only comes around once in a while, so it was time to make the sacrifice. The really shocking thing is that we we weren't the first people in line: these people were (but we were right behind them).

Life in line went by pretty fast for the first hours. We were pumped on adrenaline, and we passed the time joking and chatting and speculating. We sent off expeditionary forces to obtain coffee and pastries. I took off at one point to use the facilities, and when I returned, the line was gone! They'd opened the doors even earlier than expected. Thankfully, Mac-philes seem to be a pretty friendly bunch, and I didn't really see any angry glares as I swam back upstream to find where the rest of my compatriots were.

Unfortunately, the last few hours (after we'd been let into the main building, but before we'd made it into the auditorium itself) dragged on. A few kids right behind us in line tried to get a game of Starcraft going, which I would have happily joined except that I only had Warcraft III with me :). Our lack of sleep started to catch up with us, and our reading material grew thin. We were mostly circumspect (none of the stories I've seen so far have mentioned a rowdy Apple development group), but we were unable to contain boisterous cheers whenever one of our bosses (who'd scored VIP passes) walked by. I guess there's only so much you can be held accountable for when you've got that much pent up energy.

When the doors finally opened, we discovered that our VIP bosses had been sweethearts, and had staked out three rows right at the front of the non-VIP section for all of us. They were great seats, and put us right in the middle of all of the enthusiastic crowd reaction.

It was great for me to see how all of the animations and effects that we'd sweated so hard over were used so effectively during the keynote presentation itself. Everything was subtle, but beautiful, which made the core message that much more compelling and professional. As Steve Jobs revealed, the app has been used all throughout 2002, in various stages of development. I think it's a testament to how well the app supports making a professional presentation (without overshadowing it) that no one noticed that all of these presentations were doing things that nobody could do with other software that's out there.

In fact, even though SJ used many more of the visual effects in his presentation than he'd ever used before, it wasn't until he'd actually announced the app that people really caught on. It was really gratifying to hear the kind of astonished whispering that filled the auditorium at that point.

(As an aside, one thing that I think people still haven't quite realized is how well the app works with large, rich media. You can stick a huge digital photograph onto your slide, and animate it in or out, and you'll still get sixty or more frames per second, with no tearing or other artifacts. Previous solutions that didn't use OpenGL for playback are nowhere near as smooth, getting a very noticeable ten or fifteen frames per second.)

After the keynote (which was incredible, overall -- I'm very excited about all of the great stuff Apple's continuing to put out there), we went to get some lunch and then I crashed. I spent the afternoon hiding in my hotel room, checking the web for reactions. Then we spent the evening partying until we dropped. And a good time was had by all :).

And now we get to spend the rest of the week letting our brains breath, and then it's time to raise the bar all over again.  11:07:39 AM  (comments [])