(It's the MacWorld keynote. The Steve glances at the audience. They like what they've seen so far. Will they like the iPhone with the two-way 50" screen though?
Well, that's for later. One last thing. But, first comes first...)
"Ok, so that's just one of the enhancements to Mail.app you'll find in Leopard. It's so simple. At the press of a button, every single email user in the world will get your message. Wow. Outlook can't do this. We can. We have the technology. Now, let's move on to one the best new features we've added to Spotlight. We're really excited about this. It's called Bash. It's going to be in Leopard."
The screen goes black, and the words "Bash", "Do anything. Fast." appear on screen.
"Now, I don't know about you, but I have a disk full of files, and it takes time clicking around the screen. Now, Bash makes it easy. You just need to learn a few simple key sequences, and your entire computer is under your control. Let me show you."
The screen changes to a Mac OS X desktop as Steve walks to the side, sits down in front of an iMac, and swigs from a bottle of water.
"Ok, first, Apple menu... Log out Steve Jobs... ok, now I enter ">console" at the username prompt. You have to enable this, just go into System Preferences and change the login options to "Name and password". Now, I'm prompted again for my username and password. (Tappity-tap on the keyboard) And I'm in. Bash."
Steve takes another sip of water and adjusts his chair.
"We've made it very simple. The screen only shows what you type, and what the results are. There are no confusing windows or menus. Simple."
The audience claps politely.
"Now, let's take a look. I'm in my home directory. I type "ls" and it shows me all the files there. It's that simple. L and S, for "list", and ENTER. Many of the commands are just two letters long. Makes them easy to remember."
The audience claps again.
"Now, I want to make a folder, a new one, and move all of the documents in my Documents folder that start with "iPhone" to the folder. So, I just type "mkdir "Hoax iPhone emails"", and now "mv Documents/iPhone* "Hoax iPhone emails"", and that's it. Took me five seconds. I try doing the same thing on the Finder, and it takes more like 30. Too much clicking around."
Audience claps wildly.
"Now, suppose I want to find all the files in my home area that have anything to do with iPhones, and make copies of them, moving them to a new iPhone directory. That'd be tough in the Finder. You can do it with the Finder and old Spotlight, but there's a lot of typing and clicking involved. Here's how we do it in Bash. Ok, make the directory, mkdir iPhoneStuff ; and now find dot dash-type eff pipe xargs grep dash ell eye iPhone pipe while read i semicolon do mv dollar eye iPhoneStuff/ semicolon done
"That took ten seconds to write. Pretty simple huh? And I hit ENTER, and... it's running, and in a few moments it'll be finished. Ok. Looks like it's done, let's have a look, "ls iPhoneStuff", and there are all the files."
Audience cheers and makes whooping noises.
"Once you're done, just type "exit", and you're back. It's that simple."
Audience is hysterical. Steve stands up, taking another swig of water, and walks back to the front of the stage.
"Ok, so that's Bash. Do Anything. Fast. So, now, let's talk about how you can't run Windows games in Mac OS X..."
Exactly what I was thinking... "CommandLine: the next revolution in user interfaces"
