In addition to the live transcription [1] of the keynote we provided yesterday on MacScoop [2], here is a recap of today's MacWorld keynote with all the important announcements and new product releases :

Tiger:
Steve Jobs showed us some great new features and improvements of Tiger since the latest beta releases. We can note that Dashboard was much improved as shows a new video posted on Apple's site while iChat now supports audio conferencing with up to 10 people (instead of 8). The exact release date of Tiger still remains a big questio though, as Steve Jobs didn't say more than "first half of 2005". There were speculations that Steve Jobs would not only demo Tiger but would also announce a date release.

HD Video:
Steve said 2005 was "the year of HD video" as he announced that Apple was releasing Final Cut Express HD, which gets some features of Final Cut Pro and HD video support. QuickTime 7 has also been demonstrated by Steve Jobs, he showed the capabilities of the new H.264 codec, which is QuickTime's main new feature, also used in iChat for high qiality video-conferencing.

iLife:
The expected release of iLife '05 brings some great exciting new features to all of its applications, except for iTunes which receives a very minor update to version 4.7.1. First, iPhoto 5, brings better navigation (including folders support), much improved photo and photobook editing, RAW format and MPEG-4 video support. HD and full MPEG-4 support are the main new feature of iMovie 5, which also has some new effects/transitions, a calendar view and a feature called Magic iMovie, allowing you to create a movie, very quickly and easily. The DVD authoring application, iDVD sees four main improvements: support for DVD+R burning, animated drop zones, one step DVD creation and 15 new themes. As for GarageBand 2, the new version has a lot of new features like vocal transformer, pitch timing fixing, ability to create your own loops and up to 8 tracks support. Apple has also released a new Jam Pack "Orchestra Instruments". The whole suite has seen speed improvements, especially iPhoto and iMovie. A couple of new features like hierarchical folders support on some of iLife's applications and new effects were anticipated by MacosXrumors on two reports, posted on October [3] and November [4].

iWork:
The much anticipated iWork is the official successor of AppleWorks from Apple. It includes a new version of Keynote 2 which adds new transitions and animaton effects and many other features as presenter display (clock, notes), interactive slideshows, kiosk slideshows, 40 apple design temlates, flash export, animated charts and iLife integration. Pages is the second application of Apple's new productivity suite, it is actually a text processing application while remains compatible with AppleWorks and Word has many great features like columns, footnotes, advanced typography, tables of contents, tables, PDF export and document templates. Phil Schiller performed the demo of Pages and underlined the ability of Pages to put styles very easily in your documents. We can also notice both Keynote 2 and Pages are very well integrated with iLife. The successor of AppleWorks was subject one of the earliest rumors MacosXrumors had published [5], while it had been predicted [6] by our sources that Keynote 2 would come during MacWorld Expo. ThinkSecret had also recently revealed [7] Apple would release a productivity suite called iWork that would include Keynote 2 and Pages.

Mac mini:
Here it is, it's the Mac mini! An entry level Mac in a very compact and stylish box. Its main characteristics are a combo drive, 256Mb of RAM, one FireWire port, two USB ports, 10/100 Ethernet, and ATI Radeon 9200 based graphics with DVI/VGA video output. Two configurations ara available: the basic one is based on the PowerPC G4 processor running at 1.25Ghz and offers 40Gb of storage while the second configuration uses a G4 processor running at 1.44Ghz and offers 80Gb of storage. Both Macs can be upgraded with up to 1Gb of RAM, a DVD burner and are Airport/Bluetooth ready.

iPod shuffle:
That was Steve Jobs' "one more thing" of the year, the long rumoured flash based iPod. It is called iPod shuffle, it holds either 120 songs for the 512Mb version or 240 songs for the 1gb version. It is white, it has the form of an USB key, by the way, it has a USB connector on its bottom, and is controlled by 5 buttons arranged in a circular way. The main feature of this product is the fact it can play randomly, it doesn't have any screen though. The 512Mb costs $99 while the 1Gb one costs $149, which, we believe, are quite fair prices. Steve Jobs has also mentioned some new accessories as well as integration with cars. Car makers like Mercedes, Ferrari, Nissan and Alfa Romeo are working on iPod integration in their cars. The flash based iPod was also subject of rumours during the last weeks before MacWorld, sources had reported us [8] about a flash-based iPod but the rumour had started with this article [9].

Sales numbers:
Steve Jobs has also made some minor announcements. He gave some numbers on Apple sales : more than 4.5 million iPods were sold this quarter while 10 million were sold since its introduction. The iTunes Music Store has reached 230 million songs sold since its beginning, on a rate of 1.25 million songs a day. Steve Jobs has also mentioned the success of the new iMac, which, he says, is the most popular Mac of this quarter.

Where are the new Powerbooks?
Most rumor sites, including us, had predicted and even affirmed that Apple was planing to release new PowerBooks today. We still believe their release is imminent and will occur before the end of this month. We can guess that either Apple was not able to produce enough units for expected demand or they chose to not release them at the same time as all the other products that were released today, for marketing reasons.

This keynote was probably the most rich in product releases since a while. The most important announcements are of course both the Mac mini and the iPod shuffle, which represent a new direction on Apple's strategy.