WWDC is here; the big day is upon us! Or, rather, the latest in a string of big days; any day on which Steve Jobs publicly addresses the Mac faithful pretty much counts for a certain amount of bigness in our book. Unfortunately, AtAT couldn't justify the cost of a plane ticket and the thousand bucks admission as "economically viable," so we'll be sitting on the sidelines while all the cool (read: solvent) developers get to hear the goodies first-hand. For those of you poor slobs who find yourselves up the same creek, you'll have to resort to second-hand reports. Unless, of course, you have an Apple Market Center nearby where you can go to watch the shindig via satellite, or you have your very own satellite dish and can enjoy Steve's Reality Distortion Waves in the comfort and privacy of your own home. But that's a relatively small percentage of the Apple-watching population, we're guessing. Gee, wouldn't it be nice to be able to watch the keynote on your home computer screen, perhaps being sent as a digital stream over the Internet? Now that would be cool technology. Perhaps they could call it "webcasting," or something.

Yes, of course we're pulling your leg; yes, webcasting has been around for years; and yes, the WWDC keynote will be available via webcast. ZDTV's been pushing their upcoming WWDC webcast for a week, now; the irony of that situation, of course, is that Jobs' keynote is almost certainly going to spend at least a little bit of time on QuickTime 4 and how much cooler it is than competing technologies when it comes to live streaming over the Internet-- while, for several days, the only announced webcast of that keynote was ZDTV's, in RealVideo format. Personally, we were more than a little taken aback by Apple's apparent decision to pass up the opportunity to webcast the event themselves via QuickTime; it seemed like a perfect marketing opportunity was slipping through their fingers. Then again, this is Apple we're talking about-- their advertising savvy has been sharply better in recent years, but we think the world would end if they didn't make at least a minor blunder every so often. Missing a chance to show the world the intrinsic niftiness of QuickTime Streaming would be a small price to pay for the continued existence of civilization as we know it.

Then again, don't start any long novels-- Apple finally ended up doing the obvious thing, and now it appears that there's an alternative to RealVideo when it comes to checking out the keynote via the web. Tomorrow's hootenanny will be the first such event ever to be webcast via QuickTime 4, so if you want to tune in, make sure you've got the QT4 preview and warm up those browsers. We can't wait to see if this actually works-- and if the world is still standing at the conclusion...

Now, as for what Jobs and his trusty sidekick Avie Tevanian have up their sleeves in terms of keynote topics, most people seem to agree: in addition to the roadmap for future versions of the Mac OS, the Wonder Twins are expected to push QuickTime 4 as if it's the coolest thing since sliced bread, they'll almost certainly roll out Mac OS 8.6, and the odds are good that the new "101" professional PowerBooks will make their debut appearance. Beyond that, it's anybody's guess; a Reuters story seems to predict few gasp-inducing revelations, though.

Personally, we at AtAT have to agree; we aren't expecting any earth-shattering surprises-- certainly nothing like last year's Mac OS X announcement, which suddenly transformed Apple's next-generation operation system strategy from a royal pain in the butt for developers who would have to rewrite their applications from scratch into a much less harrowing need to rewrite perhaps 10% of their code. And no, we highly doubt that the anxiously-awaited consumer portable will be making an appearance, even though it would make for some nice symmetry with last year's early-May iMac unveiling.

That said, Jobs is a master of surprise, and he wields it with skill and precision. Who, after all, saw the iMac coming? Who foretold Mac OS X? But having such a shockmeister running the show is a double-edged sword; sure, sometimes we get a jaw-dropping surprise or two, but other times we find ourselves let down if "all" we get it what we fully expected. It's tough not to get our hopes up, but we're trying not to set ourselves up for a fall. In fact, every keynote that Jobs delivers that doesn't include him 1) ripping off his mask to reveal that he's actually Kreplak of Zelnar 7, and 2) commanding all earthlings to bow and scrape before his green-tentacled majesty under pain of death is pretty much at least a mild disappointment around the AtAT studios.

Finally, just a few quick iMac-related observations we noticed while we were out running errands this weekend. First of all, we must say we're impressed with Apple's marketing presence in our home town of Boston; while we rarely see iMac ads on TV anymore, it seems like we can't go anywhere in this city without catching sight of an iMac or an Apple logo somewhere. This weekend we noticed one "Think Different" billboard while approaching Central Square from the river, one "High-Technicolor" iMac billboard while entering Porter Square from the south, and one "Yum" wrapped bus passing one more "Think Different" ad on a big cylindrical structure right in the center of Harvard Square. While we were on the train, we noticed an Apple ad on the back of what we believe was a copy of Newsweek being read by another passenger, and when we stopped in at the local Microcenter to pick up some supplies, we were surprised and delighted to find that they had at least sixty 333 MHz iMacs, available in every flavor, stacked up right in the middle of the Mac area-- and one the way out a very happy looking kid was wheeling his new blue-and-white G3 to his dad's car. Whew.

But that's not all-- when we were in Newbury Comics picking up some tunes, we spotted the infamous iMac cover of the latest issue of High Times magazine. For the uninitiated, High Times is a magazine devoted entirely to the coverage of marijuana culture; it may not be the kind of image Apple's looking for, but like it or not, a Lime iMac sporting a giant marijuana leaf on its desktop graces the cover of the (we think) June issue, whose cover story is "Cyber-Pot: How Stoners Wired The World," and which investigates "the cultural crossover between hippies, nerds and computers." Apparently excerpts from a Steve Wozniak interview about his use of recreational pharmaceuticals figure heavily. Imagine that.

So there you have it-- when we're at AtAT Central, we're staring at Macs all the time, but these days we can hardly set foot outside without spotting the distinctive curves of an iMac or the immediately recognizable shape of the Apple logo. If there's a better indication that Apple is truly "back," we don't know what it is. So, how long before we actually get sick of seeing so many Macs? We'll let you know when it happens.