I’m sitting on the floor in Moscone West, waiting for the doors to open to the Presidio and hoping to get some seating for the Stevenote. Ho-leee cow, there are a lot of people here. The line to gain admission was around the block when I got here at 7:10 or so. The doors opened at 7.
Everyone is very polite and well-behaved, though, which is a change from most large crowd behavior I’ve ever observed. Had this been Black Friday at a Wal*Mart, we’d be numbering the trampling casualties in the hundreds, methinks.
I’ll update as to whether I actually get into the room or not — there are a lot of people ahead of me.
[UPDATE 9:58am]
Got into Stevenote. Seated in middle back.
[UPDATE 10am]
Keynote leads off with John Hodgman in a “Hi, I’m Steve Jobs” PC vs. Mac ad.
Jobs speaking now.
Steve leads off with numbers in attendance, Apple Developer Connection, number of Apple engineers in attendance.
Talking about Intel transition right now.
Intel CEO Paul Otellini on stage now.
[UPDATE]
Otellini on stage only to receive award from Jobs.
Bing Gordon from Electronic Arts speaking about games coming back to Mac OS in a “big way”.
[UPDATE]
Coming to Mac: Command & Conquer 3, Need For Speed Carbon, Harry Potter & Order of the Phoenix, Battlefield 2142.
EA employee demoing H.P.
[UPDATE]
H.P. looks okay, all ’08 sports releases are due to have simultaneous releases (well, Madden and Tiger Wods).
John Carmack from id coming out to demo.
[UPDATE]
“id Tech 5” looks impressive.
[UPDATE]
Jobs back on stage, 22 million OS X users, 2/3 of which are running Tiger.
“Move beyond Tiger”, “Leopard will set even higher bar.”
6th major release, since he’s counting Intel OS X as a “major release”.
10 features:
1. New desktop – 3d-looking dock. Menu bar “adapts” to your backdrop. “Stacks” to help clean up desktop. Consistent window look. Prominent active window. “Stacks” – simply folders in your Dock, automatic Downloads stack — definitely what clutters my desktop. [UPDATE] Jobs demoing new desktop. Stacks has “fan” and “grid” modes. Using Applications Stack as an app launcher.
2. New Finder. (And there was much applause.) New sidebar. Search other Macs and servers. Shared computers. “Back to My Mac” via .Mac. Cover Flow — for documents, files, etc. Search in sidebar, definable by users. Shared — looks like only Macs to browse and share. Browsable as if they were on your own computer. [UPDATE] Jobs deming new Finder now. Previews of documents now is nice. Coverflow looks keen, although I don’t know how many non-Mac filetypes it supports. Searches are CF-able. Windows machines ARE supported.
3. Quick View. Live file previews in Finder, no need to open applications. Excel, PDF, Keynote presentations, etc. Zoom feature, full screen view.
4. Leopard fully 64 bit, top-to-bottom. UNIX to Cocoa, soup to nuts. One version of Leopard runs 32 bit and 64 bit code side-by-side. Guaranteed that 64 bit apps will run on any copy of Leopard. Jobs runs a shoot-out between 32 and 64 bit versions of a photo-retouching test. 3x-4x improvement, at least in that test.
5. Core Animation. “Automatic animation.”
6. Bootcamp. Built-in. Runs XP and Vista. No more CD burns. Complement to Parallels and VMWare.
7. Spaces. Group apps by spaces, files by spaces, etc. Jobs demoing it now. Virtual desktops. Drag and drop reordering of spaces. Drag & drop apps in spaces.
8. Dashboard. Meh. Webclip, new Apple-supplied movies widget. Dashcode in every copy of Leopard.
9. iChat. Feedback about video conferencing. Better audio, tabbed chats, Photo Booth effects, backdrops, iChat theater. Jobs and Schiller demoing iChat, works with anything supported by Quick Look. Good for teleconferences. Photo Booth effects, etc. are cool. Schiller appears as George Washington, Steve Ballmer’s mouths (think: Conan O’Brien).
10. Time Machine. Search back in time, back up wirelessly, preview old files using Quick Look. Back all Macs to centralized NAS, etc.
Leopard to be $129 in October
“One more thing” is about Safari. Safari 3 for Windows. Wow. Apple wants to raise Safari usage stats.
Safari iBench tests for IE, FF, Safari on Windows — performance is incredible according to Jobs. JavaScript might not suck in Safari 3? “Most innovative browser”, “fastest browser on Windows — 2x faster than IE”, same tech as Safari on Leopard.
Distribution of Safari: Public beta on Windows and Tiger today.
“One last thing” — the iPhone. Developers? Want to allow for 3rd party apps while keeping platform safe and secure. New way to create apps for mobile use. Full Safari engine inside of iPhone. Route is using Web 2.0 + AJAX, integrate with iPhone services. Instant distribution. Easy to update. A sort of iPhone remote API. No SDK required. “Go live” on June 29.
A bit of a hedge/cop-out on Apple’s part, in my opinion. We’ll see how developers, etc. respond to this. Could be big, could be a flop.
