Jobs said he would cover:
Jobs started by talking about OS X and its UNIX underpinnings before introducing Shantanu Narayen, Vice President of Adobe. Narayen talked about the Japanese editions of In Design and Photoshop.
Ergosoft CEO Yoichi Erikawa then talked about EG Bridge and EGword for OS X which bring an alternative and very powerful Japanese Language input method to OS X making it much easier to find complex constructions of the Chinese characters which make up the Japanese writing system. Erikawa stressed that this was a first for OS X with no similar solution being available for Windows.
Next the President of FileMaker gave a very impressive demo of FileMaker for iMode. iMode is the method that many people in Japan use to access the Internet via their mobile phones. He showed how it was very easy to edit a web enabled FileMaker database and have the changes show up on the display of a color iMode mobile phone.
This was followed by a demo of real-time effects in Final Cut and Maya.
Jobs then came back on stage to talk about the Digital Hub. Stressing its the software that is the most important part of any digital hub he reviewed iMovie 2, iDVD 2 and iTunes before talking about iPhoto and the so called “chain of pain” that occurs in trying to first get photos into a computer and then printing color correct images.
He the announced some good and bad news — the good news was that the demand was much more than expected. He said they had shipped 125,000 iMacs.
The bad news — since the iMac was introduced component prices have increased. Apple will increase prices US$100 in the United States and 20,000 yen in Japan across the board. The news was greeted with stunned silence.
Next he showed a Bluetooth mobile phone being used to get Internet access on a Mac. Bluetooth will be built into the next release.
The information in this story was provided to MacCentral by our friends at Tokyo’s English Mac User Group. We will be updating this story throughout the keynote.