Happy Stevenote Day, folks-- especially since Tiger is here! Well, information about Tiger is here, anyway, which is all anyone really expected from WWDC other than new displays, a new G5-powered iMac, a Mac Tablet, an Apple-branded smartphone, a merger with Disney, and an announcement that Steve Jobs is running for President. We were expecting something truly stunning in Tiger, given the way Apple has chosen to hype it; faithful viewer Lee Stanford was the first to tip us off over the weekend to the nature of Apple's banners hanging in Moscone, each displaying the Tiger disc graphics and captions such as "Introducing Longhorn," "This should keep Redmond busy," "Redmond, we have a problem," "Redmond, start your photocopiers," and "Redmond, put your pants back on-- nobody wants to see that." (We're still awaiting independent confirmation on that last one.)

On its surface, though, from a layman's perspective, most of Tiger's new features might make the OS look like a relatively modest upgrade. Not that said features aren't impressive, mind you; the Widgets-in-a-flash magic of Dashboard alone has us yearning to trade up (though we can already hear the "Jaguar copied Watson" grumbles repeating, only this time with Tiger and Konfabulator-- kudos to those guys for already getting their home page updated, by the way), Automator may well revolutionize Multi-App Workflow For The Rest of Us (and even if it doesn't it's worth the upgrade price for its icon alone), and while we've got little enough call to videoconference with even one other Mac, that doesn't mean we aren't burning to drop $129 for the new iChat AV's ability to do it with three in that slanty-perspective sorta view.

But beyond that, what is there for regular shmoes to get excited about? Spoken Interface has a spiffy new name ("VoiceOver"), Safari does a solid job of integrating RSS feeds, and the new search functionality of Spotlight appears to leapfrog a major feature of Microsoft's Longhorn that was dropped so the initial release could hit the 2006 ship date-- but all told, for the typical Mac user, Tiger might appear to lack any fundamental ground-breaking new features worth the price of admission.

You know, like spinny-cube Fast User Switching. Real life-changers like that.

Well, as it turns out, you have to dig a little deeper to find the really slick stuff in Tiger-- and it's not going to seem slick to everyone. Geeks and developers, however, are probably going to like Tiger's 64-bit application support, its system-level indexed search and Core Image and Video libraries, and of course the release of Xcode 2.0. The geeks already know why these are cool; for you non-geeks, the upshot will hopefully be an influx of some really sweet software, which is nothing to scoff at. Sure, you could spend all day just playing with Exposé, but at some point most of us want to run some actual applications or something. Tiger's new geek-lust features will give us more-- and better ones-- to choose from.

Not buying it? Well, keep in mind that this is just a preview of Tiger showcasing ten specific features-- features presumably chosen for an audience of developers, mind you-- and there's plenty of time for Apple to elaborate on what some of Tiger's other "150 new features" might be. One of them, as faithful viewer Seth Johnson points out, is apparently that Dashboard's stock ticker Widget can see into the future, and if that's not worth $129 for a Tiger upgrade, we don't know what is. Sort of puts a whole new spin on the phrase "pays for itself," doesn't it?

But if, after all that, you're still underwhelmed by the descriptions of Tiger plastered all over the 'net, you may want a tour of the operating system by a guide with a working Reality Distortion Field. Well, you're in luck; there's now a QuickTime stream of Uncle Steve's Wild Ride, so you, too, can be seduced by the way that Steve says the word "boom" 112 times throughout the Tiger demo. Eye of the Tiger, baby!