For what it's worth, stylistically, Phil Schiller did a great job. He managed to be informed, enthusiastic and most of all natural. These are the three things that Steve Jobs brought to the Keynote. Of course rehearsing matters most. I am in the middle of watching the Palm presentation and they have ways to go in that department.
With the exception of the iPhone announcements, I seem to go in a cycle with the Keynote. If it's software, I'm underwhelmed at the announcements, particularly as reported by the tech press. Then I watch the Keynote and get excited. Invariably I find something in the announcements that makes me feel as though Apple reads my mind.
Case in point, there are two new 'smart' features in iPhone 09 that excite me because they mimic and streamline my own processes – Faces and Places. I have smart folders for important people in my life as well as folders for the places that I go. This is partially automated but still requires a bit of work.
Faces uses face recognition technology to create a smart folder for a particular person. So with a little bit of help at the start, you can see all of the pictures of your Mom, girlfriend/boyfriend, best friends etc. It's truly amazing and I know the technology behind it will extend to other things.
Places uses geo-tag information to separate pictures by location. The inclusion of GPS technology into phones and cameras means that you can capture where you took a picture. Places uses that data to automatically combine pictures taken in the same location. You can also manually designate a location.
These two technologies will streamline the organization of my pictures and make it easier to include location data in things like those cool books you can print through iPhoto etc. Even cooler, the face recognition data travels with any uploads to Flickr and Facebook. And if someone else tags people in the picture, that data travels back to iPhoto. Amazing.
I'll be picking up a copy of the next iLife suite as soon as its available so I'll report more on this in the months to come. I also have some good things to say about the iWork suite, which is finally powerful enough to replace the Office suite in many circumstances. More on that in another post.
