I had to head to Birmingham today for an Encounter weekend team meeting. The keynote started at 11am, and I didn't get here until Noon.

So did I miss keeping up with the liveblog of the keynote? Not a chance. :-) It's the Mac Holy Day.

Macrumors.com had an excellent iPhone formatted site for keeping up with the keynote. They posted pictures and a self-updating text feed.

So onto the announcements. There were no real surprises, and I'm sure Steve was pissed about that. He likes to keep the surprises. The iPhone update was a nice tideover until the full SDK comes out that allows 3rd party applications. The best feature is that Google Maps now can figure out where you are based on looking at which cell towers it can see. I tried it out a couple of times today around Helena and Birmingham and it worked really well. 2nd best feature is the ability to save a bookmark as an icon on your home screen.

Apple TV. I'm close to wanting one of these. Right now I have a Mac mini hooked up to my HDTV, so I really have no need for it. I can play pretty much anything with it. I would have to transcode some files to get them to play on the AppleTV. So you can now rent movies via iTunes. Great... pricing is decent. Terms... not so great. I totally agree with Rob Griffiths at Macworld magazine, as a parent, having to watch a movie within 24 hours after starting it is sometimes difficult. I know that the studios are the ones proposing these lousy terms. Xbox Live has similar terms. I would rather see a deal that works like this. After renting the movie, you can watch it as many times as you want in the first 24 hours. After that it expires. But... you get to watch it once, regardless of how long it takes you. Even if it takes you 2 months, you can watch the whole movie once. There's a pretty good chance in our house that we would rent a movie, only to not be able to finish it, wasting the rental fee. For that reason, I doubt I'll use it more than once or twice.

Time Capsule. I'm a big fan of Time Machine, the feature that automatically backs your machine up and allows you to go back in time to retrieve older versions of files. See Apple's brilliant ad for this feature here.

And the major new announcement, the Macbook Air. I'm going to reserve total judgement until I can see one in person, but my initial reaction is positive. I love the size of it. It would be a fantastic laptop for a college student. I hope they roll out the multi-touch trackpad to other models. Lack of ethernet isn't that big a deal. After all, you could add it via USB if you had to. I've only used Ethernet on my laptops a handful of times. Lack of an optical drive isn't that big of a deal either. Toast has a great feature where you can burn discs to a networked machine's burner. They need to build that in. I do wonder about how you install Windows to run without the optical drive, even with the remote disc feature. I'm sure you could install Windows into Parallels that way, but what about boot camp?

I don't swap batteries often, so I guess it's ok that it doesn't have a user serviceable battery. I think for any executive, it would make a great machine, or for a writer, or a presenter, business traveller. For design work, I would still go for a Macbook Pro. The processor inside the Air is a lot slower than what's available in the Pro. The video card in the Pro is much better too.

I have one of the new Mac Pros on order. A Dual Quadcore 3.0Ghz machine. :-) That's going to be my workhorse for the next few years.