Consider that the event is known as the Worldwide Developers Conference, not Macworld Expo. Despite that, far too many people expected the sun, the moon and the stars when it comes to new product announcements during the Steve Jobs keynote address.

Certainly it’s not as if Apple isn’t partly guilty for raising those expectations. The Power Mac G5 was first unleashed at a WWDC. Ditto for the Mac Pro, and the first news of the Intel transition came at one of those events, too, but developers needed to know how to advance their software to Universal status. It made plenty of sense, and certainly introducing hardware that caters to advanced users, including those same developers, is appropriate for that venue.

So I suppose it was a little strange to read claims that there would be brushed metal or aluminum-clad iMacs too. Well, it is true that some developers might be attracted to the iMac, particularly if they don’t have the big bucks for higher-end hardware. But the iMac is still the quintessential consumer computer, right?

Indeed, devoting most of the keynote to Leopard made perfect sense. That’s what developers came there for, to receive a feature-complete beta, and attend numerous workshops about how best to program for the new operating system.

Some of you are disappointed that Jobs confined his presentation to just ten out of a promised 300 features, but each of those items contains more than a single feature. There may be dozens, particularly in iChat and Mail. Each will get a separate bullet point when the entire list is posted.

All right, some of the stuff announced last year was repeated, but the intervening months have made such enhancements as Time Machine and Spaces no less significant. The same may be said for the rest of the pack, but the newly unified interface is especially significant.

You might regard Leopard as a sort of coming out party for Mac OS X. More than six years after the initial release of version 10.0, the scattered components of the original Aqua interface have finally taken on a high level of consistency. Critical Finder and desktop navigation issues have been addressed, and the new Core Animation feature makes everything look just great.

The question is, of course, whether your Mac is suited to Leopard, or even whether it’ll be supported. Now I don’t claim to have any final information about system requirements, but I would be willing to suggest that those with a G3 need not apply. Those models simply don’t have the graphics or CPU horsepower to cope with Leopard’s advanced eye candy.

Of course, it’s fair to say that most of the G3s are quite long in the tooth, although late model iBooks are only four years old right now. Unless you have a really right budget, maybe it’s time to find something in Apple’s product line worth upgrading towards. And if you do have a tight budget, don’t worry about Leopard. Your time will come.

In any case, when you look at the entire picture, can you honestly say the keynote was a yawner? I mean, Jobs did deliver what Apple promised as far as Leopard is concerned. While developers are prevented from nondisclosure agreements from giving us the inside details of all those special workshops on building great Leopard-savvy applications, they are clearly getting what they paid for.

Despite that, I gather that someone is selling a T-shirt expressing graphically the awful nature of the keynote, that it somehow was an abysmal failure. Apple’s stock price is still pulling back somewhat, although I can’t imagine what makes some of those Wall Street analysts tick.

We know, for example, that the iPhone will apparently be released on schedule. The public beta of Safari 3 for Windows is out there in all its glory, more or less. Oh yes, a number of Windows users are complaining about bugs, and there are reports of security issues; there’s already a 3.0.1 update available to address the latter.

Unfortunately, they are forgetting that it is a public beta. It is basically a preview of a product that won’t be finalized for a while. It is supposed to have defects, and one hopes that Apple will simply issue ongoing updates until a final version is available to prevent them from going off the deep end.

At the same time, I would hope that there will also be a final version of Safari 3 for Tiger. It would be nice to want everyone to upgrade to Leopard, but that’s the sort of migration that will take a while to complete. Tiger is, after all, a mighty stable and complete product as it is.

In short, I am not disappointed in the WWDC happenings at all. They delivered the goods on Leopard, just as they said they’d do. What more can you ask?

A lot of companies have long-range plans that seldom extend beyond the end of the current quarter, to ensure high income and increasing profits. Sure, Apple does well with its quarterly financials too, but they clearly have a strategy that will carry through for a number of years.

Take the plans to expand and extend the Mac to the Windows world. At first, it was just QuickTime and iTunes, the better to sell more iPods. As of Tuesday afternoon, Safari joined the fray, ostensibly to give Apple more traction in the browser wars.

But there’s a larger purpose here, and it’s not to have bigger market share numbers on a Web log. Instead, it’s all part of Apple’s vision to convert Windows users to the Mac platform in greater numbers than ever. At least that’s my not-so-humble view.

Let’s take a little journey through time to October, after the promised release of Leopard. A Windows user who has already experienced iTunes and perhaps Safari buys a brand new Mac, and begins to set it up.

After going through the setup assistant and all, the new Mac switcher will notice some of the differences, such as the Apple key instead of the Windows key on the keyboard, and the monolithic menu bar. But a glance at the Leopard Finder will be familiar territory, because it is so heavily influenced by iTunes. From the Sidebar to the Cover Flow feature, the learning curve to navigate the Mac file system won’t seem nearly so severe.

In fact, I’m willing to suggest that the newly-minted Mac person will become adept at Mac OS X in fairly good order, because of the clever steps Apple has taken to train them first on the Windows platform.

Now it is fair to say that the reception to the new features in Leopard have been somewhat tepid. Apple’s stock price took a bit of a dive after the WWDC keynote concluded without new hardware announcements. Sure, unifying the look and feel of Leopard might not be a “Wow!” feature, but it is significant nonetheless.

Lest we forget, one of the hallmarks of the great Mac advantage of old was the fact that all applications looked and worked essentially the same. Ongoing development of Mac OS X shattered that model, with brushed metal, light gray and various shades of platinum cluttering the interface. While most of these variants were more decorative than functional, I often complained about the inconsistency of being able to drag one application window from the bottom, but not another, strictly because it adhered to a slightly different interface design. That just didn’t make any sense.

So why did it take Apple so long to get it right?

I don’t pretend to have any hard answers, but it could be that they were testing different styles to gauge public reaction and see which ones were best suited for both Mac users and Windows switchers.

Certainly, Mac users aren’t shy about expressing their disappointment when things don’t work right. As much as you might believe that you’re being ignored by Apple, the collective input does have a strong impact. From time to time, Steve Jobs will remark that Apple indeed hears the complaints from Mac users, and surely they have responded to those complaints in various ways.

So does the new shaded gray motif represent the sum total of all those complaints, a distillation of the work of Apple’s interface designers, or a combination of both?

Actually it probably doesn’t matter in the end. The fact of the matter is that, aside from making Leopard more accessible to Windows migrants, Apple has made significant improvements to address the complexities of getting around the desktop.

Consider Stacks. It looks great to have those icons fan upward from the refined, 3D Dock. But it also has another purpose, which is to help you clean up your desktop clutter and figure out where things are without having to invoke a search request.

One of the main problems up to now has been the location of the files you downloaded. So that becomes a default Stack, where everything is grouped in one place. I know that I often scan my cluttered desktop to find that new version of some totally cool system enhancement I just downloaded before I find it. Why not Spotlight? That’s too simple!

My son has so much stuff on his PowerBook’s desktop that he has reduced icon size to near invisibility to accommodate them all. I can’t wait to spring Leopard on him.

And I’m certain that, when the Leopard desktop appears to the former Windows user for the first time, the iTunes experience will have served as the ultimate learning tool to help them acclimate themselves to the new order really fast.

After all the anticipation and excitement about the secret features of Mac OS 10.5 Leopard and possible hardware announcements, the cup was half filled. Of course, that’s not so bad, considering all the things that Leopard has to offer.

Take the confusing interface of today’s Mac OS X. You have platinum and brushed metal and dark gray, and it’s understandable that Mac users have become nonplussed as to the consistency and the purpose of so many disparate choices.

Well, for Leopard, things will settle down, according to Steve Jobs during his presentation at the highly-anticipated WWDC keynote. From here on, the subdued gray that characterized the iLife applications, including iTunes, will now spread to all applications. When you explore the nooks an crannies of Leopard at Apple’s Web site, you’ll see they’ve already adopted the new look and feel.

But it gets better. You see, Apple’s team of operating system is working to make desktop navigation simpler, courtesy of Stacks. These organizational tools let you group your applications and documents in a revised Dock, which, itself, sports a refined 3D look.

Perhaps the biggest request for Mac OS X since day one has been a better Finder. The interface has been controversial, and despite several enhancements, serious performance bottlenecks persist. The new iteration, courtesy of a feature called “Back to My Mac,” works with .Mac to let you browse the files on other Macs even if they’re not on your network. In addition, Sidebar navigation is simplified by putting items into categories and the Quick Look feature provides enhanced previews. In all, the Leopard Finder has clearly been influenced by iTunes.

Of course, none of this counts for anything if performance isn’t improved, and that, of course remains to be seen. But I expect that Apple isn’t going to refine the Finder’s interface without actually dealing with the underlying performance and reliability bumps in the road. That’s, of course, a matter of faith, but I’ll give Apple its due on this issue.

In all there are supposed to be 300 new features in Leopard, only ten of which were revealed during the keynote. In a fair number of respects, old ground was retreaded, which includes Time Machine, iChat, the Spaces virtual desktops feature, Core Animation and 64-bit support. There will also be improved support for multiprocessor Macs, which may make that eight-core Mac Pro more useful in a greater variety of applications.

Contrary to some predictions, the Boot Camp feature that lets you run Windows on your Intel-based Mac, remains dual-boot. Apple wants you to use the third party alternatives from Parallels and VMWare if you want to go the virtual machine route and run multiple operating systems without a restart.

And, despite those claims from Sun executives last week, Jobs said nothing about switching to the ZFS operating system, or even supporting it. In addition, nothing was said about an impending Mac OS 10.4.10 update, nor were there any major improvements to the aging .Mac feature-set. Maybe next time.

When it appears in October, Leopard will be priced identically to Tiger, which is $129 for the single-user edition. Nothing was said about a special upgrade for recent purchasers of Tiger or brand new Macs. And, despite my hopes, you won’t see iLife ’07 — or is it iLife ’08 now? — bundled with Leopard.

However, I’ve seen enough to convince me to order my upgrade as soon as it’s possible to place that order, and that will probably come a little closer to shipping time.

As to the rest of the keynote, it’s nice to know that Web-savvy applications will be able to run on the iPhone, but I was more than curious about the release of a public of Safari 3 for both Mac and Windows. The Mac version certainly runs faster than the current version, but it has difficulty handling the formatting of my daily commentaries for WordPress, and refused to connect me to my bank for account information. So I’m back to Firefox once again.

Gamers will surely appreciate the announcement by Electronic Arts and id Software about more Mac titles coming to your favorite dealer real soon now. While I’m glad to see Steve Jobs introduce executives from both companies on the keynote stage, it would have been nice to hear more about a concerted effort by Apple to help bring more games to the Mac platform.

As far as the rumor sites are concerned, there are more misses than hits there, although some predicted a new Finder, which doesn’t strike me as much of a stretch. But there is no new iMac, brushed metal case or otherwise, nor a revision to the Mac Pro, and we still don’t know if the Mac mini is dead, on life support, or consigned to the dust bin of discontinued hardware.

But the month is young. We know the iPhone is coming June 29th. But there are additional opportunities left for Apple to amaze us. That’s for sure!

In part, it’s just politics in play, but the eternal rivalry between Mac and PC users sometimes gets just a little too extreme. I mean, in a world where Bill Gates and Steve Jobs can get along, you’d expect that Microsoft and Apple will, at times, play nicely together too. Indeed, Time magazine refers to Gates and Jobs as “frenemies,” a newly-coined term that describes the situation, where the pair seems to have a close personal relationship, yet head companies that are, at times, fierce competitors.

I try not to have a knee-jerk reaction to the Mac versus PC argument. While I have criticized Microsoft quite often for the things I think they do wrong, I actually regard computers as just tools to get the job done. Most times, this means that I’ll use my Mac. But there are times where Windows is surely up to the task, even if it’s only because there’s no Mac version of a specific application. Of course, then there’s always Parallels Desktop to the rescue.

So I’m going to talk about Microsoft in a positive way this time, so let the chips fall where they may.

One of the best things Microsoft has going for it is their line of input devices. I have used my trusty Microsoft Comfort keyboard — kind of a half-way approach between traditional and ergonomic designs — religiously for well over a year now. My aging fingers took to it as a duck to water, and I can type rapidly and long and not feel the strain. Yes, the dark grays used for its exterior seem drab and dull, but I don’t like at my keyboards much anyway, so I don’t concern myself about such matters.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.