Berlin was tiring. Even though my flight didn't leave until 10 I was at the airport before 8am to allow for security checks and the like. While this meant I had very little queuing to do it also meant I had an hour and a half to kill carrying my luggage and borrowed laptop. One nice thing about travelling light, the young lady at check-in was able to issue me a boarding pass not just for my original and onward flight, but also for the first leg of my return flight. I got a nice breakfast in the Mezz cafe in the upper level. I went for the full Irish on the basis I probably wouldn't have anything else to eat that day.
We left a quarter of an hour late but got into Amsterdam early. Then followed a two hour layover in Schipol, a pleasant enough airport. I walked to my departure gate only to find there were no snack facilities nearby and I couldn't be bothered walking all the way back to the main concourse, so I just waited. The flight was fairly short and they served a choice of ham or cheese rolls.
Berlin is a pretty small airport, or at least it appeared so. I went straight to the Apple desk only to find I had missed the bus to the hotel and the next one wouldn't leave for about 30 minutes at least. The wait was nearer 60 minutes since we had to wait for some journalists on a delayed flight. The result was we went straight to the Axica centre rather than the hotel.
 The Axica centre is a brand new building beside the Brandenburg Gate in what used to be East Berlin. The interior (pictured) is quite futuristic looking. The keynote broadcast took place under the glass dome in the foreground.
Mingling with the other visitors before the main event, I ran into Mary Branscombe, fellow fan and freelance journalist and had a chance to catch up. I first ran into Mary in a professional context at Apple Expo in Paris and despite the fact I'd met her at conventions before I didn't recognise here, anothe example of Out of context.
 After an introduction by Pascal Cagni, Apple's European VP, the broadcast from San Francisco began. Jobs was in fine form. He began by recapping the company's recent successes such as the iTunes store and the procedeed to demonstrate Panther, the forthcoming version of OS X. The new Finder looks interesting and is based on the iTunes and iPhoto interface. Then Exposé, the new way of temporarily removing desktop clutter. Exposé uses Quartz Extreme so whether or not my iMac DV will be able to use it is another question.
However, just as he was about to launch into the next item to demo the screen went blank. After a few moments, Pascal's voice came on over the loudspeakers to say that the picutre had been lost due to a thunderstorm. After a few more minutes Pascal came on again to say they hoped to re-establish the connection in a few moments. He came back on again after a few more minutes to explain that the high winds had actually blown the satellite truck over and there was no hope of reestablishing the satellite link. However, they were going to try and connect to the QuickTime stream being sent to Apple's offices around the world. This they did, and apart from having to reboot to try and get more bandwidth the result was quite satisfactory. However, we missed quite a bit including the launch of iSight and iChat AV as well as release dates for Panther. (But we caught up the following day at briefings, more of which later).
Of course the keynote climaxed with the launch of the PowerMac G5 which to all intents and purposes means that Macintosh once again holds the title of Fastest Personal Computer in the World.
6:43:02 PM  Google It!
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