Macworld 2009 keynote

I just finished watching Phil Schiller's keynote presentation. He did a really great job. He captured the essence of Steve Jobs' enthusiasm and showmanship, brought some of his own style of humor and eagerness, and demonstrated that Apple can still be Apple without Steve Jobs.

I was extremely impressed with the products showcased.

Some of the software enhancements in iLife and iWork '09 are, simply put, stunning. iPhoto '09 in particular stands out as a real big leap forward with its Faces and Places functionality.

Faces in particular just blew me away. It uses advanced software (which is becoming commonplace) to recognize faces in photographs, and lets you tag specific people. This type of functionality is great and a welcome addition to iPhoto, but alone is not revolutionary. But Apple takes Faces to the next level by searching through all of your photos and finding people you've previously tagged in photographs that have not been tagged yet- and makes recommendations that make it easy for you to subsequently label people. Even better, iPhoto can automatically crop photos to make the subject's face the focal point of a shot. There's a lot of additional polish to the implementation; they've really taken the basic technology- the idea that the software can identify people- and extended it to enable some profound user scenarios.

Ditto Places. Apple's implementation of geo-tagging goes well beyond simply letting you know where a photo was taken. I won't go into the details here, but watching the functionality in action amazed me.

I was also extremely impressed with Apple's integration with Facebook and Flickr. Finally, Apple is acknowledging that there are online services beyond MobileMe that are the norm for online photography. Now that I can use iPhoto as my interface to Facebook, I'm much more likely to use both iPhoto and Facebook. And the two-way syncing of face data between iPhoto and Facebook is really slick.

There were a ton of other really impressive things shown, including really cool updates to iMovie, a whole new educational aspect to GarageBand, a wealth of updates to the iWork apps, and iWork.com, an online extension of the iWork suite aimed at collaboration functionality.

This is starting to sound like a press release or a poorly executed fake blog post written by an Apple PR hack, so I'll stop now and won't go into the other things covered in the keynote.

But overall I was very impressed, and Apple demonstrated why they are Apple: their software is so slick, so polished, and so finely tuned to let people do things with their computers that will amaze and delight.

Did I mention I liked the keynote?