The keynote speech featured all the staples of a Jobs event: crowds racing in once the doors opened, lots of demos, and, of course, Jobs' trademark black mock turtleneck and jeans. But the speech was clearly aimed at developers, with talk of Unix protocols and programming tools. Instead of oohing and aahing over new Macs, the developer crowd cheered when senior vice president Phil Schiller talked of improved compatibility with Internet standards. "Where else do you see applause for IPsec?" Schiller said. "I love you guys." The work developers do is seen as critical for Apple's effort to convince Windows users to switch to the Mac and get a larger percentage of the 25 million active Mac users onto OS X. Apple estimates that only about 1.5 million to two million Mac owners are using OS X today even though three million Macs have sold with the operating system. Avie Tevanian, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said that VPN support will remove a critical barrier that has prevented people who use Windows-based PCs at work from buying a Mac at home. "One thing they want to do is get into their email system," Tevanian said in an interview. "Now we're going to break into that." In contrast to last year, when Apple was focused on getting developers to bring their programs to the already released Mac OS X, the company is talking much more about the future -- so much so that Apple reminded conference-goers that nearly the whole conference is considered confidential information covered by the company's nondisclosure agreement. Developers were also given several CDs with developer versions of Jaguar, although Jobs implored developers to keep those confidential as well. Past developer versions of OS X have made their way onto the Internet. Ian Fried reported from San Jose.
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