Live Coverage of Jobs Keynote at Apple's WWDC
I'm heading off to the Moscone Center to attend Steve Jobs's keynote at the Apple World Wide Developers' Conference. Technology permitting, I'll blog about it as it happens, starting shortly after 10am.
9:55am: And here I am, in a surging sea of press people, Apple "VIPs," and developers. Right now, we're listening to canned music and waiting for something to happen on what is, at the moment, an empty stage...
10am: A disembodied voice is telling us that the show starts in two minutes, and that we should shut off our phones and pagers. (Geez, does anyone here actually have a pager?)
10:04am: Music ends, lights dim, the "I'm a PC" guy is onscreen in a video, pretending to be Steve Jobs. In a black turtleneck and jeans, of course. He's telling us that he, Steve Jobs, is resigning and shutting down Apple. "I know this comes as a surprise to some of you..." Vista has sold "tens of dozens" of copies, and the Zune is such asn iPod killer, that "it's time for Apple to "wave the white flag." He's telling the developers to go home.
Here's the "I'm a Mac" guy, telling the PC that nobody will believe he's Jobs. So he's pretending to be Apple exec Phil Schiller.
10:07: Here's the real Steve Jobs, really onstage. This is the biggest WWDC ever. There are 950,000 registered Apple developers, up 200,000 from a year ago. Apple couldn't be happier. There are 159 sessions at the conference, 94 hands-on workshops, and 1200 Apple engineers onsite.
A year ago, Apple was talking about the Intel transition. The transition was challenging, ambitious, and successful. "Everybody did an awesome job," inside and outside of Apple.
He gives Intel CEO Paul Ottelini a special award.
10:11am: Electronic Arts' Bing Gordon is onstage. Four EA titles will be ported to the Mac: Command and Conquer 3, Battlefield 2142, Need For Speed Carbon, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. He compares Harry to Apple's wizard, Jobs.
We're seeing a preview of the Harry Potter game. More Harry-Steve jokes.
Starting in August, EA will release sports games like Tiger Woods and Madden for the Mac, simultaneously with their Windows versions. "Steve, keep up the wizardry."
10:17: More gaming stuff: Here's John Carmack of ID Software, showing a preview of secret next-generation technology that allows artists to build more beautfiful-looking worlds. It runs on the Mac. He makes reference to another Mac-related announcement to come.
10:21am: On to Leopard. The 2/3rds of Mac users are on Tiger, which is "unprecedented."
Leopard has 300 new features. "This morning, I'm going to get to show you ten of them."
Feature #1 is new: "Leopard has a new desktop." Designed for photos as background. New Dock is more 3D and has a new feature called Stacks that has pop-up views of the stuff in your folders. There's now a Downloads stack in the Dock. Window look is more consistent.
Demo of the new desktop, Dock, and Stacks. Very slick animation and 3D effects. He's downloading a PDF from Disneyland Paris to show the Download stack.
Feature #2: New Finder. It has a new sidebar. Spotlight lets you search other Macs and servers. Sharing files is easier. .Mac users can share files over the Internet with all their PCs. Cover Flow is now in the Finder, letting you whip through documents visually like you can do with album covers in iTunes and on the iPhone.
Slides show us the new Sidebar, etc. Steve explains that Macs now tell .Mac what IP address they have, for on-the-fly file sharing in the Finder.
Live demo of Cover flow. You can page through PDFs, listen to music, browse folders, etc. "It's pretty cool." Demo of file sharing over a network, which also works with Windows PCs. Demo of the .Mac file sharing feature, "Back to My Mac." Demo of new Spotlight searching across multiple Macs.
Feature #3: Quick Look, a document-preview feature that works with popular file formats, can be extended, and has a full-screen mode. Live demo with PDF, Keynote presentation, Excel, and Ratatouille trailer.
Feature #4: "Leopard is 64-bit, top to bottom." The first mainstream 64-bit OS. It's one version that runs 32-bit and 64-bit apps simultaneously--developers will be guaranteed their apps will run.
Jobs shows 32-bit and 64-bit versions of a demo app. They're both loading in a 4GB photo of the Library of Congress. The 32-bit version has to swap out to disk and is getting bogged down; the 64-bit version doesn't blink. It does a filter in 28 seconds that takes 84 seconds with the 32-bit version.
Feature #5: Core animation, the super-slick rendering engine. Live demo of an interactive application based on the movie you see when you boot an Apple TV--hundreds of live video windows flying about in real time. They put this together quickly.
Feature #6: Boot Camp built in. Runs XP and Vista at native speed. Drivers are on Leopard CD. He says it's a nice complement to Parallels and VMWare. Boot Camp is most compatible; Parallels and VMWare are "fantastic" for running apps side by side. They're all great. "We LOVE these other things, and we're helping them as best we can."
Feature #7: Spaces, the sort-of-multiple-desktop mode we've seen before. Live demo. Jobs jumps between four spaces, rearranges apps, etc.
Feature #8: Dashboard. Apple will include a movie-listing widget. A new feature called WebClip will let consumers make their own Widgets by grabbing Web content. Live demo of Movies widget, with another trailer.
Live demo (it's 10:45, by the way) of WebClip. Jobs grabs a chunk of the Yahoo home page and turns it into a Widget. Same thing with Rotten Tomatoes movie reviews, Dilbert, Google Trends, and National Geographic photos. Once they're Widgets, they auto-update. Jobs urges developers to keep making more Widgets.
Feature #9: iChat. Families are using videoconferencing to stay in touch, and it's "heartwarming." PhotoBooth effects will be built into iChat. There will be tabbed chat windows. iChat Theater lets people share photos, presentations, etc. live.
Jobs chats live with Phil Schiller. Phil shows him a photo and a presentation. "Very cool." Phil shows Jobs a home movie. It's based on Quick Look and supports all formats that Quick Look does.
Phil shows off Backdrops, a green-screen feature that lets you put yourself in front of video backgrounds. There are now PhotoBooth features built-in--Phil turns into a blue ghost, then superimposes his mouth on George Washington's mouth. Now he's doing the same with Steve Ballmer: "I love my Mac!"
Feature #10: Time Machine, the automated backup program. Backs up everything on the fly to a hard drive, across a Network, or wirelessly. Lets you find stuff by searching back in time with Spotlight. Demo involving a lost presentation. "Boom, there it is...I've found my presentation, I've saved the day." It's so simple and automatic that people will use it.
Steve is recapping the ten new features--it's 11:06am. "We think you're really going to love it." Developers will get a copy today. They plan to ship in October.
Jobs leads people to think there are multiple versions of Leopard at different prices, a la Vista. The Basic, Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions are all the same one. All $129.\
"There is one more thing: Safari. Its market share is growing. 5 percent of Web users run it. "We dream big." Apple would like to see that grow. How will it? There's going to be...a Windows version. It'll run on XP and Vista. They exist today. He's quoting third-party benchmarks that show it's fast. Jobs says it's twice as fast as IE.
He's demoing it in Windows. "This is odd." He's browsing the Web, showing tabbed browsing, etc. You can drag a tab into its own window. He's running the iBench speed test with Safari and IE. Safari is faster. "Safari is the fastest browser on Windows."
Safari will be distributed with iTunes--which a million Windows users download a day. And it's in public beta, starting today.
Steve has...another just one more thing. It involves the iPhone. Which will be available June 29th at, "I think," 6pm. (Joke?) "What about developers?"
"We've come up with a very sweet solution" that will let third-parties write apps for the iPhone, but keep it safe and secure. The full Safari engine is in iPhone. "It gives us tremendous capability." You can write powerful Web 2.0 Ajax apps. Distribution and updating is instant, since it's the Web. They're secure, too. And there's no SDK--if you can write Web apps, you can do it.
Apple employee demoes a proof-of-concept app that lets Apple employees browse the Apple directory. It looks like an iPhone app, supports multi-touch input, and talks to Google Maps. It's all done with Safari. "You can develop fantastic applications for iPhone."
Jobs talks about how there are whole companies building Web apps--Salesforce.com, Google. He tells the developers here they can start building iPhone apps now.
He recaps again. "Enjoy the week...thank you very much. Take care."
We're done. More thoughts on all this shortly. Who knew one of the big pieces of news would involve a Windows app?
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Safari twice as fast as Internet Explorer? I doubt it...