This morning's Seybold Keynote, still in progress, was kicked off with an opening by Steve Jobs, while Phil Schiller continued the presentation. Mac OS X 10.1 is due in stores on Saturday. The first "major" update will be a free to registered owners and CDs will be available at authorized Apple dealers (Apple, however, will charge $20 for shipping and handling of CD updates.) Schiller and Ken Bereskin focused on the performance improvements of OS X 10.1 noting vastly improved application launching, more responsive windowing, improve copy speeds, and faster startup times as well as improvements to the Aqua interface, including a moveable dock (side or bottom), redesigned system preferences, and new system control panels. OS X 10.1 also offers support for DVD playback (and drag & drop write access to DVD-Rs), keyboard shortcuts, and a new "scale" effect (in addition to the "Genie" effect).

Schiller and other Apple product managers, Sal Soghoian (AppleScript), John Zimmerer (ColorSync), Mike Evangelist (iDVD) demonstrated various system components and technologies. AppleScript Studio, an advanced scripting environment for professionals, is due out and the end of year, while iDVD 2, announced at Macworld Expo New York, is due out in October.

Other demos of third-party applications included Excel X (Bereskin), GoLive for X (Adobe's Bryan Lamkin & Sam Hui), Lightwave, and Maya (Alias|Wavefront's Andrew Pearce). Office v.X was plugged by Schiller who said that it could demonstrated at Apple retail stores.

by MacNN Staff