Ah as you can tell – I got a little sidetracked this morning with work so I didn’t get a chance to follow up with WWDC until now. So here’s the lowdown:

Steve Jobs took the stage at WWDC’s keynote and talked about the following major topics. There was:

• Leopard
• Safari
• iPhone

Here’s the lowdown:

Leopard (Apple has already updated their website to focus on Leopard – right on the front homepage):

• 300 new features – Jobs focused on 10. We’ll go over some of the major new ones now that are listed on the website:
• Desktop:

• New Dock
• New menu bar which sits transparently on top of the desktop

• New Stacks – stack anything you want together into a new user interface that lets you quickly find the things you want to find

• There’s a new Finder UI that’s similar to the iTunes
• Sidebar modified to support categories where categories groups things like places, devices, searches etc
• Utilizes Cover Flow – Displays each file as a large preview of the first page of the file
• Search through computers on your network.If you have rights to the system, you can control that computer view Finder
• “Back to my Mac” feature leverages your home Mac, .Mac account, and the Internet to give you access to your home Mac from any Mac on the Internet

• View files before you open them

• Backup system that allows you to make up to date copies of everything on your Mac
• Connect an external drive and time machine will automatically ask you if you want to use the drive as a backup drive
• Remembers how your system looked on any given day
• Browser interface allows you to search for files

• Spaces is basically similar to having logical desktops assigned to different applications. You can have apps go to one desktop space, utilities go to another etc etc
• Organize spaces according to how you work

• Video chats are now transformed using new Photo Booth effects
• Give presentations via iChat
• Record your chats
• AAC-LD audio codec
• Tabbed chats
• multiple logins
• File transfer manager
• Works with AIM

• Create your own dashboard widget from any website
• New movie widget for movies and showtimes
• With .mac account, widgets can follow you from Mac to Mac

• Find inline – highlights matching words while dimming the page below them
• Inline PDF support
• Tabbed browsing
• Version 3 beta now available for Windows platform

• Included with Leopard – all you need is a copy of Windows
• Supports 32 bit versions of XP and Vista
• Comes complete with Windows drivers
• Faster restarts – basically utilizing hibernation in both OS’s to quickly start up and switch between OS’s

Now I briefly mentioned Safari is now available for Windows – that’s right folks. You can now use the Safari browser (version 3.0 beta) for the Windows platform. According to Apple, Safari on Windows is twice as fast as IE7 and up to 1.6 times as fast as Firefox on the iBench tests (rendering web pages). You can download the new Safari for Windows here.

Finally, there’s the iPhone. Ironically enough, Safari plays a big role here too. Safari 3 is actually the key to how third party application developers will create and deploy apps for the Apple iPhone device. Here’s how it will work. Developers will create Web applications using web 2.0 standards which SHOULD work just as well as native applications found on the iPhone. These web applications will run on the iPhone via the Safari engine - basically they will execute within Safari but will have hooks (API’s of some sort) to other applications on the phone such as voice calling, e-mail, and Google Maps. Unfortunately for many developers, this isn’t exactly the full SDK that people were hoping to get their hands on. Utilizing Safari as the core executing engine means Apple maintains a certain level of control of the whole user experience on the phone. I suppose they’re simply afraid that a third party app will install on the iPhone and cause havoc on the rest of the phone.

So that’s it – that’s the main bulk of the news (though there was some OS X server stuff but we don’t really care much about that stuff do we?)

No hardware announcements unfortunately but hey – iPhone is coming out and we’re sure more Apple products will be announced over the next several months.

Oh yes…. btw, iPhone will come out 6pm on June 29th. Not sure if it’s EST or PST though.

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