More Apple WWDC Live Blogging: More Leopard

Steve Jobs returns to the stage to talk about accessibility in Leopard--VoiceOver enhancements, Braille, closed captioning, better navigation.

He's demoing the VoiceOver text-to-speech feature. First, we hear the original VoiceOver reading some Apple boilerplate. It's a somewhat grating, distinctly robotic female voice. "When that shipped, it was pretty state of the art...but it still sounds pretty geekly."

The current version of VoiceOver is still robotic sounding, but it does sound better. At least a little.

The Leopard version, which in the demo, at least, is a male version, doesn't quite sound like a person--but it does sound really good. "This stuff is really important to a fairly large set of users." Even when put in high-speed mode, it's intellible.

Jobs moves on to the Mail e-mail app. It will have stationery, notes, and to-dos. Stationery is a nice customizable template feature.

Notes, Jobs says, are for people like himself who send e-mails to themselves as reminders. It's a special kind of message to yourself, and they all live together in one place "so you're not going to miss a thing." To-dos are tasks you create in Mail, with priorities and deadlines and alarms. You can turn any message in Mail into a to-do. And there's a systemwide to-do service that any Leopard application can access and use--iCal, for instance, also lets you create to-dos.

Jobs sits down to demo this stuff. He creates a message and browses through some of the stationery Apple supplies. Invitations, get-well messages, photo albums, etc.

He takes a message he's already written, with photos, and applies stationery to it after the fact. Then he uses a photo browser to drop in more photos. "And you can create your own and save it under favorites and access it very easily."

Now he's creating a note to himself: "Make sure Leopard gets done in time...squash all Leopard bugs, and blow away Vista." He saves it, and it shows up in Mail.

"Let me show you to-dos." He's in a note about soccer practice. He makes "bring equipment" and "send reminder to parents" into to-do tasks. "It's a major, major upgrade to Mail...these are just three of the really cool features"

Scott returns to talk Dashboard, the Widget manager. It's one of his favorite features. "All of you have built so many...fantastic widgets." There are 2500 of them so far.

Two new Dashboard features. For developers, a new tool called Dashcode will help with widget creation. It provides templates for typical functions like RSS and podcasts, and helps you edit the CSS and HTML you need for a widget's interface. It provides parts developers might need such as search fields, and lets you edit and debug JavaScript.

Dashboard users get Web Clip, which lets you grab elements from Web pages and turn them into widgets. Demo: You can grab today's Dilbert strip from the Comics.com site and turn it into a widget, with a custom template. Every day, you'll get the current Dilbert.

Another demo, involving grabbing an eBay auction of a guitar and turning it into a widget for easy real-time tracking throughout the day.

Web Clip demo #3: You can grab a list of the top widget downloads and turn it into a widget, then download them directly from the widget. You can grab the New York Times Best Seller list, too. As it's updated, your list is, too.

You can also turn Webcams into widgets. Applause.

"We've just created five live widgets--it is that easy for any end user...."