Open)Justin Williams wraps up the WWDC07 Keynote with a summary of all of Steve Jobs' announcements.
One of the rights of passage anyone in the Mac faithful should experience is an Apple keynote presentation given by CEO, Steve Jobs. No other company CEO garners the excitement and press Jobs receives for these speeches and for good reason. Jobs commands the stage like a rock star giving his captive audience a peek behind curtain of what Apple has been working on since his last presentation. A Steve Jobs keynote is masterfully crafted presentation that is put together over a span of several weeks by hundreds of Apple employees.
An example of how much work actually goes into preparing a keynote can be seen just by looking at the presentation book put together for Jobs. Rather than having a stack of note cards or short notes written on a piece of paper, Apple's CEO has a bound book put together that contains not only the notes for the speech, but visual cues such as tabs and icons to give him a visual cue of what he is preparing to speak on. Jobs even has the book professionally wire-bound.
Today, the ultimate group of Mac fanatics, the platform's developers, gathered in San Francisco for Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). WWDC is a week-long training session that is filled with presentations on how to build great software on the Mac. Besides the presentations, WWDC also gives developer's direct access to the people behind the scenes at Apple who are building the developer tools and frameworks in use by millions of users worldwide. As is customary, WWDC always kicks off with a presentation by Steve Jobs where he discusses the growth of Apple and the Mac platform.
More important than reflecting on the past, the WWDC keynote is also used as an avenue to introduce new products and give users a look at what's coming in the future. Going into this year's WWDC keynote, we knew that Apple would be unveiling what was dubbed a feature complete version of Mac OS X Leopard, the next version of the Mac operating system. Jobs officially unveiled Leopard at last year's WWDC, and gave an early preview of what was coming in the future. At that keynote, Jobs told everyone that he was not unveiling everything related to Leopard because he feared the competition, Microsoft and Vista, would steal it.
With speculation at a high, developers filed into Moscone West and took their seats to see what Jobs had to offer.
The Return of Games
The first major announcement coming from Jobs' keynote was that Electronic Arts would be returning to the Mac platform with several of its first and third-party titles. EA announced that Command & Conquer 3, Battlefield 214 and Need For Speed Carbon and Harry Potter & The Order Of The Phoenix would arrive on the Mac this summer. EA chief creative officer, Bing Gordon, also announced that popular sports titles such as Madden 08 and Tiger Woods 08 would make their debut on Mac OS X soon. Having a major game publisher such as EA producing titles on the Mac again is a testament to the growth of the platform. EA is a heavyweight in the gaming industry, and having them rejoin the Mac platform could bring others to the table in the future as well.
Jobs wrapped up the gaming portion of his presentation by having John Carmack of id Software on stage to demo the new rendering engine technology he has been working on. id Software is the producer of popular titles such as Wolfenstein, Doom and the Quake series.
Mac OS X Leopard
The Mac OS X Leopard section of the keynote was a mix of previously announced features and some interesting new additions to Mac OS X Leopard. As has been stated before, Steve Jobs announced that Leopard would be shipping this October. The Leopard presentation was broken up into ten different sections that focused on an individual feature that is new to Mac OS X Leopard.
The New Desktop
Jobs started off his Leopard demo by showing off the biggest changes to the Mac OS X experience we have seen since the initial switch from OS 9 to OS X. The new Leopard desktop features a new semi-transparent menu bar and translucent Dock. These are subtle changes, but if you watch the demos on Apple's Mac OS X page, you can see how elegant it really looks.
Another new feature to the Mac OS X desktop is Stacks. Stacks has been a rumored addition to Mac OS X since before Tiger was previewed, and it's finally here. Stacks let you group files into a grouping that you can quickly access from your dock. The goal of Stacks is to eliminate desktop clutter.
Jobs demoed a new Downloads stack that stores all files you download via Safari or attachments you save from Mail.
As Jonathan "Wolf" Rentzsch said via Twitter: only Steve Jobs can make a downloads folder look sexy.
An All New Finder
One of the main feature requests you will always see from power users is a request for a new Finder. Apple has delivered. Steve Jobs showed off the new Finder and its more refined interface. The Finder sidebar is now slimmer and chock full of information. It closely resembles the Playlist menu for iTunes.
Also like iTunes, the new Finder sports a Cover Flow view that let's you preview your files by browsing them much like you would album art.
As part of the Finder demo, Steve showed off a new feature called Back to my Mac that makes it easy to share files over the Internet with all of your Macs. This is a feature that is only available for .Mac subscribers. Back to my Mac works by watching for your network address to change and then registering that change with .Mac. This eliminates the need to use a third party DNS service such as DynDNS to easily access your remote machines.
No word on whether the Finder is Cocoa. Not that it matters in my opinion.
Quick Look
Quick Look allows you to get a quick preview of a file without having to open the application associated with it. For example, if you are browsing through a folder of PDFs, but don't want to have to open each one in Preview, you can use the new Quick Look feature to see what content is inside of the file.
Jobs also demoed a Keynote presentation using Quick Look. It showed the slides on the left and the selected one prominently on the right: much like you'd see in the Keynote application itself. Quick Look by default supports all the popular file types, and developers will be able to add support into their application.
64-Bit For All
Mac OS X Leopard will be the first consumer operating system to be 64-bit from top to bottom. While Mac OS X Tiger allowed for command-line applications to be built as 64-bit applications, Mac OS X Leopard brings that support to the entire operating system, and third-party Cocoa and Carbon applications. Jobs demoed the power of 64-bit computing by running image filters on a 4GB photo. The 64-bit powered machine wiped the floor with its 32-bit counterpart.
Core Animation
Core Animation, in my opinion, is the game changing feature in Mac OS X Leopard. Core Animation allows developers to easily integrate animation effects into applications. Core Animation uses your Mac's video GPU rather than your actual processor so that performance degredation is at a minimum. Core Animation supports the animation of text, 2D graphics, OpenGL renderings and even video by layering effects on top of each other, much in the same way you would edit a Photoshop file.
Core Animation is going to change the way we see user interfaces in Mac OS X Leopard. I'm looking forward to seeing what developers have to offer.
Boot Camp
By now, you've most likely heard of Boot Camp, Apple's solution for dual booting Windows and Mac OS X on Intel-based Macs. When Boot Camp was announced last year, it was released on Tiger as a public beta, but being touted as a shipping feature of Mac OS X Leopard. As we get closer to that time, not much has changed with Boot Camp. It will support both Windows XP and Vista as before. Job did tip his hat to both VMWare and Parallels for their virtualization products. He sees these tools as an excellent complement to Boot Camp.
Spaces
Spaces is another feature that was demoed last year. It allows you to have multiple virtual desktops on your single physical screen. Jobs demoed having four spaces, with one running a game of World of Warcraft. Jobs explained that if you run a game in a space, if you switch to a different one, the sound on that game will be muted: very slick.
Spaces is nothing new to computing. If you want to have Spaces in Mac OS X Tiger, check out CodeTek VirtualDesktop Pro.
Dashboard
For his Dashboard presentation, Jobs showed off a new Movie Times widget that let's you see the times for showings at your local theaters as well as a synopsis and trailer of the film. You can also use the widget to buy tickets from Fandango.com if your theater supports it.
Jobs also demoed a feature of Safari called Web clippings that allows you to turn any part of a Web page into a Dashboard widget easily. As an example, he demoed creating a widget of the daily Dilbert column.
iChat
Probably the most boring part of the keynote, for myself, was the demonstration of iChat and its new features. Jobs demoed all of the new iChat AV features that allow you to use Photo Booth effects inside a chat. He also demoed sharing a Keynote presentation with another iChat user. While these are all great features, its not anything we haven't known about for the past year.
One humorous moment from this section of the Keynote was Phil Schiller morphing his lips onto a picture of Steve Ballmer and sticking his tongue out. Any gratuitous bashing of Microsoft will always be approved on a site called MacZealots.
Time Machine
Apple demoed Time Machine in much the same way they did last year. Jobs demoed Time Machine by explaining how easy it makes backing up your entire Mac: you just plug in a second hard drive and assign it to Time Machine.
Time Machine works with both your local Mac as well as network servers you may be around. A new feature announced for Time Machine is the ability to hook up a hard drive to your new Airport Extreme base station and have it backup your data via the network.
Jobs wrapped up his Time Machine demo by showing the 2001: Space Odyssey style, history viewer built into Time Machine. Using it, you can browser through different revisions of files and folders on your machine. Time Machine is to regular data backup what software version control systems like Subversion are to the developer community.
More Ice Water In Hell: Safari On Windows
At the D: All Things Digital Conference, Steve Jobs remarked that putting iTunes on the Windows platform, was like giving ice water to people in hell. As his one more thing announcement, Steve Jobs introduced Safari for Windows XP and Windows Vista. Safari for Windows has all the same features as its Mac OS X Leopard counterpart, including built-in Google search, RSS support and draggable tabs.
Jobs claims that Safari on Windows is the faster browser in terms of rendering Web pages and JavaScript. In demos, he claims it is twice as fast as IE, and about 25% faster than Firefox. You can validate these claims yourself by downloading the Safari beta today.
iPhone: Developers! Developers! Developers!
To start, Jobs announced the iPhone would be available at 6PM on June 29th. Start camping.
He then admitted that he has heard the rumblings from the developer community that third-party support for the iPhone is a must. The solution announced by Apple is not one I necessarily understand or like. Rather than developing a full iPhone SDK, Jobs announced that using the iPhone's Safari browser and Ajax technologies, developers can build applications that are custom tailored to the iPhone platform.
These applications will have full access to the phone's services. Third-party applications can make calls, send e-mails and more from within their application. Jobs touted this as a secure solution to the third-party problem because it will run in the same way as a bank transaction or purchasing a book from Amazon: remotely.
While I'm glad to see Apple embrace third-party support, I was hoping for a more traditional SDK such as those offered by Windows Mobile and the Palm platform. Apple's solution does not allow for any sort of offline applications. You must always be connected to either the AT&T network or via WiFi.
Conclusion
WWDC 2007's Keynote offered everything I expected from it. I'm excited about the new Finder, Stacks and the refinements to Mac OS X Leopard since it was last demoed. The new Finder alone is well worth the upgrade price in my opinion.
You can get a more in-depth look at the features discussed in this article by visiting Apple.com, which was just redesigned. The Mac OS X section features more photos as well as videos of the new features in Mac OS X.
What are your thoughts on the new features in Leopard? Are you excited about the direction the iPhone is taking with respect to third-party development?
Tell us in the comments.
Justin Williams is founder and chief author for MacZealots. He switched to the Mac almost five years ago hasn't looked back since. When not blogging or coding, you can find him watching copious amounts of TV. Justin can be reached at
Reader Comments (7)
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#1) On June 11, 2007 5:02 PM
Great Keynote review Justin. I especially like your “More Ice Water In Hell” title - a great riff on Jobs’ D5 comment.
#2) On June 11, 2007 5:12 PM
“Jobs even has the book professionally wire-bound.”
Actually you can purchase a fairly inexpensive device to do that kind of binding. I imagine that he just emails the finished file down to the media & graphics department and they can take care of it in-house.
#3) On June 11, 2007 5:28 PM
“Apple’s solution does not allow for any sort of offline applications. You must always be connected to either the AT&T network or via WiFi.”
Not True! You do not have to be connected to a network or the internet. Safari can open local files…it always could. Please don’t spread misinformation. Thanks.
#4) On June 11, 2007 6:02 PM
I’m not spreading misinformation by stating by having the iPhone development platform as the Web, that you have to connected to the Web.
Unless Apple allows a method to download these applications to your iPhone locally (which wasn’t mentioned at the Keynote), you need Web access to use your third party applications.
#5) On June 11, 2007 6:41 PM
“Unless Apple allows a method to download these applications to your iPhone locally (which was not mentioned at the Keynote), you need Web access to use your third party applications.”
Justin,
I didn’t see anything in the keynote that said the applications could not be stored on the iPhone. I’d imagine you could download them, or perhaps drag them over from a connected computer (like you can do with files on the iPod. You’re right…there was no specific info on how to download apps…but Jobs didn’t say you couldn’t either. I think a lot of people jump to the conclusion that since you need to use a Web Browser (Safari) that you need to be connected to use these “applications”. But Safari can open local files… jpg, pdf, text…and html, css, flash, javascript… So until Apple specifically says these Web “applications” cannot be stored locally, I wouldn’t assume otherwise. We shall see…
#6) On June 11, 2007 8:54 PM
Applications of course will be widgets, (which rarely is more than Web 2.0 Html and CSS, although there are some ties to other code) and there are plenty of widgets that probably can run in the limited memory of an iPhone. But really useful apps, will need the data in the cloud (teh internets, your local network, etc), and probably the cpu number crunching off of a server as well. You dont’ want bloat on your phone, if there is only 8 gigs of local space.
#7) On June 11, 2007 10:30 PM
I have a Mac application called Check Off. I’d love to have my Check Off list syncing with an iPhone. I don’t store the data on a remote Web server, nor would I want to. If I can develop a widget much like I do with Dashboard, I have no problem with that.