Apple WWDC06: Steve Jobs' Keynote Speech LIVE coverage
Welcome to Tech Digest’s live coverage of Steve Jobs’ Keynote Speech at the Apple World Wide Developers’ Conference 2006. (Pre-speech content here)
Updates appear below in reverse chronological order, London time (San Francisco is -8 hours)
Tuesday: OS X Leopard preview, Mac Pro info
7.25pm: Steve closes Keynote speech. Summary, analysis, pictures and more coming very soon to Tech Digest.
7.23pm: Leopard coming in Spring 2007.
Developers will get hands on Mac Pro sessions and preview of Leopard. Lucky peeps.
7.21pm: Recap of just 10 features of Leopard:
- Full 64 bit top to bottom
- Core animation
- Ichat
- Photobooth
- Front row
- Boot camp
- Parental controls
- Universal access
- tiger tech next level – spotlight, d/board, webclip, developer tools with dashcode.
- xcode 3.0 released ( devs toolkit ) – giant leap
- Spaces
- Time machine
(ok well we lost count – there’s so much cool here!)
7.19pm: Backdrops – ‘being somewhere other than where you are’
Overlaying people on pictures and video. "life at apple is a
rollercoaster" (Steve) – presumably showing vid of steve in front of a
r/c!
7.19pm: Shows ‘virus’ Mac vs PC commercial.
7.16pm: demoing iChat features – integrating with other s/ware eg Keynote (Apple’s Powerpoint equiv).
7.14pm: iChat updated significant enhancement.
Multi-login, visibility, animated icons, video recording, tabbed chats.
7.10pm: Cool for bloggers and surfers I imagine – you can capture
bits of webpages that update and put them in a widget. For example, top
10 list on a webpage. Probably works for news sites (hey, even Tech
Digest!)
Demo’ing New York Times web widget.
Just created 5 widgets on stage in as many minutes – if that – v. cool v. fast v. apple.
7.08pm: Users can turn any part of a web page into a widget – WOW
that sounds amazing! – using WebClip. OK I guess it’s a Safari variant
in the Dashboard – but it all sounds really cool nonetheless. More
innovation to let users work the way they want to.
7.07pm: Currently over 2500 Tiger widgets in Dashboard.
Dev’s will get help: Dashcode – help design, dev and debug widgets. template to modify to get the widget you want.
7.06pm: Dashboard
7.06pm: There’s more in Mail – I guess we’ll wait and see (as will Redmond!)
7.05pm: To-dos demo
7.03pm: Notes demo
7.03pm: Demo’ing mail templates etc. – easy to send ‘rich mail’ -= photo browser
7pm: Take any incoming mail turn it into to-do list (Novell
Groupwise can do this, but sure Mail will do it more elegantly) Update:
yes mail does do it better – take any text for to-do , not the message
, and make it sys-wide. Cool.
system-wide to-do tracker – ical tied into it (sensible)
6.57pm: Mail -major enhancement – woo-hoo!
staionery, notes, to-dos, industry standard html
6.54pm: Crowd are impressed.
6.53pm: Accessibility – important (and increasingly legal) issue.
Want everyone to be able to access / experience OS X Leopard.
Rails support (not sure on this)
Closed captioning for Quicktime movies.
Better navigation options.
Voiceover text to speech – presumably enhanced from current
offerings. – apparently sounds like real person speaking – wonder what
tech. they’re using on this – have heard some other impressive demos
online.
6.52pm: Gone into developer mode, not surprisingly – stuff about how
easy it is to develop anims. etc. – sounds like good news for
developers and that’s good news for us end users.
6.50pm: Core Animations – ‘increase production value of
applications’. time machine was built on core animations. these aren’t
just pretty things they enhance apps – what’s the betting they only
work really well on the Intel-based Macs – good reason to upgrade?
anyway…
6.48pm: Spotlight: Prepopulated with recent files – makes a great app launcher.
6.46pm: Spotlight – built into Leopard (of course)
advanced search based on feedback from devs. search all macs on
network, and workgroup servers, etc. this is cool and something I
wished Tiger’s spotlight would do.
better searching – more features.
6.44pm: Virtual Desktops
create different spaces for different clusters of applications to work together. sounds very cool – want to see a demo!
can drag info from 1 desktop to another.
6.44pm: Next-gen front row and photo booth in leopard (meaning that we can all have it now not just macbook and mini users)
6.43pm: Now onto Front Row – access to all media
6.42pm: Boot camp reaction has been good. It will be in Leopard as standard (no great surprise)
6.41pm: Best way to back up everything you have, and find the things you’ve deleted that you didn’t realise you still needed!
6.40pm: Demos of finding an entire ‘roll’ of photos from the past.
6.39pm: Works with Finder and 3rd pty apps. Works in iPhoto. Desktop ‘warps’ back to place in time.
6.38pm: Sounds like developers are impressed. You can go back or
forward in time as much as you need to. Guess some of this is gonna
need much bigger storage – interesting to find out how this is being
implemented.
6.37pm: Get files back based on date and time. Finder windows move through timeline.
6.35pm: Days of overwriting the wrong file and losing it are over.
6.34pm: Only 4% backup using dedicated software. Time to change that.
Auto back up Mac – change file — auto back up. everything saved – can backup to hd or server
This is sounding like spotlight technology going into backup territory.
It’s a whole new way of backing up files. Restore everything or just one file.
6.33pm: Only 26% users do files backup. Introducing ‘Time Machine’.
This sounds pertinent given all the talk of security and backing up at
present.
6.33pm: Can run 32-bit and 64-bit apps side-by-side. no emulation, no translation, full support.
6.32pm: 64 bit apps now at all levels -not just Unix – but still
completely 32-bit compatible. User Interface now fully built-in for
64-bit apps. This thing is gonna go FAST on a Mac Pro!
6.30pm: Jobs back to start showing Leopard…
can’t show some things – don’t want the p’copiers started too early!
support for 64 bit apps.
6.29pm: Crowd having lots of fun.
6.27pm: Lots of poking fun – ahh look at all the ‘innovations’ in
Vista that have been in Tiger for a few years. Wow. Redone the logo to
have an aqua feel. Phew!
"If you can’t innovate, impersonate [shows pic of Elvis impersonator]
6.26pm: "Redmond start your photocopiers" Sounds like there’ll be a lot of Vista jabs this week – starting now.
Shows screenshots of Tiger (yes Tiger) vs Vista. (we’ll try to get hold of these)
Betrand on stage now
6.24pm: Steve back on stage to talk about OS X and where we are.
History lesson. All began spring ’01. most successful product ever.
6th major release was tiger on intel. over 3000 ‘universal’ apps now
ruin on both powerpc and intel chips (remember this is a dev conference
primarily – these guys have been writing the s/ware)
6.22pm: Time fopr some Dell bashing:
$3293 for a comparable Dell
$2999 for standard config of xServe
6.21pm: All these machines can be custom configured. Mac Pro up to
5million configs – xserve up to 1m configs – thanks to being able to
switch chips mix ‘n’ match. More on this soon when we get our heads
round it. Amazing.
6.20pm: Xserve – built on Xeons – still 1U footprint – similar specs to Mac Pro.
Up to 5Tb storage. more power / features. power supply redundancy.
6.18pm: Crowd goes wild. These specs just keep rolling.
Other specs: Quad up to 3Ghz, 16Gb memory, 2Tb storage, graphics up
to radeon x1900 or fx4500, wireless, bluetooth, airport of course
SHIPS FROM TODAY (more on this in a feature article later)
Now everything over to intel. no one else could pull this off. record beating time again. performance and value.
Now onto xserve (apple’s mac server)
6.15pm: I reckon designers etc. gonna be wetting themselves! Graphics
card slot double wide for large g/cards. insert drives without tools
just snap in. processors fit in compact space – lots of room for other
stuff. 2.6GHz dual, 256Mb ram, Superdrive, $2499
"Usually more expensive" – great product busts the myth.
6.12pm: [This is Schiller talking] "it’s a great chip"
less cooling in box 4 x hard drives, 25GB/sec bandwidth, 4 channel,
256 bit wide mem access, 2x bus of G5, real-world application
performance as tested – twice speed. 1.6 – 2.1x speed of the G5 (top of
range G5?)
Case design staying the same. That’s that rumour squished.
6.09pm: Initial specs sound good: Core 2 duo woodcrest processors, 2x
optical drives, up to 3GHz, 4MB shared L2 cache, 128 bit vector engine,
64 bit, up to 3x speed of a Xeon. We’re talking effectively a quad
machine here.
6.08pm: Looks like it’s time to say goodbye to the PowerMac. Here comes the Mac Pro.
6.05pm: The figures are coming out:
17m visitors to stores (just US or w/wide not sure) – 50% of new
purchases were ‘switchers’ to Mac – $0.5bn 3rd party products sold.
3/4 Macs shipped Intel based [that’s impressive. good switchover Ed]
6.02pm: Apparently largest WWDC ever – 4200 registered devs. 48 countries. 1000 engineers on site [not that Apple’s go wrong. Ed.]
6pm: Steve on stage to rapturous applause.
5.59pm: Music playing. No appearance from the boss yet.
