Last week, Apple abruptly canceled all plans to Webcast Steve Jobs' WWDC 2000 keynote address live over the internet. But maybe it was just by coincidence that the presentation kicked off promptly at 10:00am — a rare occurrence by today's Apple.

Attendance for this years conference is up almost 40 % from last year at 3579 registered attendees. In 1999, 2563 developers attended the annual developers meeting, while only 1801 made the journey to San Jose in 1998.

Steve Jobs provided developers in attendance with figures that reveal significant growth in Apple as a company and an alternative computing platform. Company earnings have soared over 700 million since last years conference. Apple has also seen 37% unit growth year over year. Revenue gain is up to 32% year over year, while earnings are chiming in at 56% gain year over year.

Apple's marketshare in Europe rose from 3.0% to 4.1% since 1999, while it soared from 5.7% to 7.8% in Japan and from 4.5% to 5.1% in the State's on the sale of 4 million Macintosh units. 3.5 million iMacs have also shipped since its introduction 2 years ago, and as Jobs stated, it still has "no credible competition."

New data from Apple's most recent quarter showed that 28% of iMac owners are first time computer buyers, and 17% are Wintel converts, which means that 45% of iMac buyers are new to customers to Apple. Out of these new iMac purchasers, 88% are up and running on the Internet, 65% are engaged in e-commerce, and 61% did not consider any other form of computer purchase than an iMac.

In the QuickTime department, Apple announced that over 36 million copies of its media software had been downloaded (or over 50 million copies when you consider shipping computers (Macs and Windows) and Possibly 100 million or more considering that with QuickTime licenses by Apple to other developers who ship QT with their products). There is also an average of 11 new QuickTime licensed products daily and Apple ranks #1 in the world in delivering Music trailers, according to Nielsen online, besting AOL and film.com. Additionally, there have been 12 million downloads of the Lord of the Rings trailer, 7 million of which were the larger 30 MB file.

Jobs announced a new version of QuickTime in the works that should feature MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 codecs for both local and streaming media, native Flash 4 support, an AltiVec accelerated QDesign encoder and QTVR Cubic panoramas: "all the way up, all the way down."

"We have a nice revenue stream and a bunch of satisfied customers," Jobs went on to say about Apple's WebObjects technology. Apple has over 3000 WebObjects customers, including AT&T, Sony, AAA, Disney, UPS, British Telecom, making it the #1 application "platform" on the web. Jobs announced during his speech that for $699 developers can purchase a WebObjects license that comes with an unlimited transaction server, development tools, and anything else they should need. Later this year, Apple will roll out a completely Java-based version of WebObjects for the server-side, so that it can run on any Java enabled platform. "[It's] an astounding way to make things to run on the Web. We use it for everything [from Apple.com to the Apple Store and more]," Jobs said.

Apple's "Entree of the day," however, was Mac OS X. After noting that over 50,000 individuals had registered as Darwin (the core of Mac OS X) developers, Jobs announced yet another roll-out schedule for Mac OS X. In other words, the latest delays. A public beta of Mac OS X should now be made available sometime this summer, with the final 1.0 release not expected to surface until January 2001. Developer Preview 4, however, was announced and made available to developers during the keynote.

Developer Preview 4 is said to be "developer complete," meaning all development tools and APIs should meet upwards of 98% of the needs of all developers. Some of the new changes in Developer Preview 4 include:

* Platinum size controls - old Aqua controls were too large, and didn't help developers who were porting their apps.

* Mac-like Finder - additional small changes which make the release look more "Maclike," such as non-adherence to grids and so forth.

* Application names in top left hand corner in BOLD.

* Reformed dock with applications on left hand side, separated by a space, and docs with minimized windows on the right hand side.

* Ships with IE 5.0.

* Ships with full OpenGL, though not hardware optimized.

* Ships with Java 2 New QT player - no channel drawer 50 apps in the release, all Carbon or Cocoa.

Ed Zander, COO and President of Sun, was welcomed on-stage to speak during Jobs' Mac OS X presentation where he made such comments as "I haven't been to a Jobs revival in years..." and "I have no reason to suck up to Steve cuz I don't work for him."

Some latter demonstrations showed a solid version of Palm Desktop, Adobe InDesign 1.5, and Quake 3 running at 54.6 frames per second all under Mac OS X Developer Preview 4. But perhaps one of the most exciting announcements was that of Alias | Wavefront's Maya package coming over to the Macintosh. Richard Kerris, Director of Maya Technology performed a live demonstration, noting that the folks at Alias | Wavefront are finding amazing performance in the combination of G4 and OpenGL, and are extremely happy to be delivering Maya on MacOS X.

A shipping version of the product will be made available in January 2001 — about the same time Apple will finally roll Mac OS X onto store shelves.