WWDC Keynote Coverage

GOOD MORNING CAMPERS!

Can't you just feel that energy!? All that excitement!?

What wondrous announcements will sprout from the mouth of his Steveness? iNinja? iPod neural interfaces? Tasty cupcakes? Only time will tell.

Stay tuned here for up to the second coverage of the Apple World Wide Developer Conference keynote address. We have men on the ground reporting in live, as well as the amazing human content aggregation skills of yours truly.

Click through for a reverse timeline of all the big announcements as they come in.

(Special thanks to Dan Dickinson from vjarmy.com for on-the-floor coverage)

Note: All time are in MST (I'm using Texpanders "ttime" function to quickly insert timestamps.) Engadget has pics.

12:25 PM: Its over.

12:23 PM: Feature roundup. Additional notes: iCal goes full multi user with caldav standard. Xcode 3.0 announced this afternoon. Developer previes of 10.5 available today. Ships in spring.

11:29 AM: "[Microsoft] spend money on r&d, but all they seem to do is copy Google and Apple." 10.5 preview. 10 major things

#1: 64-bit applications - Tiger had 64-bit UNIX. Leopard will have 64-bit Carbon and Cocoa. 32-bit compatible. Run 32-bit and 64-bit apps side-by-side, no emulation or translation, full 64bit, top to bottom.

#2: Time Machine - "Everyone says 'Back it up', but people don't" Only 26% of people back up their data, and they mostly do it manually. Only 4% back up automatically. All of this changes with Time Machine. Automatically back up your Mac. Backs up EVERYTHING. Restores EVERYTHING. You can buy a new HD and restore on to it. You can restore all data or pick and choose. Back up to local HD or remote server. "Whole new way of backing up and restoring." (Windows has had something like this at least since ME) Steve does a demo. A file is missing from a folder. (Finder looks the same.) Click on Time Machine in the Dock. "Time is a dimension that receeds back into your desktop". Windows in time are stacked behind each other. Looks damn sexy. Fly through time till you see a difference. (I assume he means in what files are there and what arent) Double click files to get previews, click to restore and it re-appears in the present (TRIPPY!) Works with applications other than Finder as well. Demo's with AddressBook. "Search the past." Demo's with iPhoto, but something goes wrong. Steve elegantly force-quits.

#3: The Complete Package - Some apps in beta, some only on new Macs. Everything ships with Leopard. Bootcamp ships with 10.5. Next generation of Front Row. New PhotoBooth works with other cameras.

#4: Spaces - Looks like virtual desktops. Take a few applications of a particular task and give it its own space. Demo time. Ok, it IS virtual desktops, but that doesn't sound as cool as "Spaces". Clicking an icon of an app takes you to its space. Nice expose-ish thing to see all spaces. Drag windows between spaces.

#5: Spotlight - Even better in Leopard. Search other Macs. Search servers. Advanced search. Boolean operators. Can specify things like file-type for each query. Acts as an application launcher. Shows recent items.

#6: CoreAnimation - "Higher production values." Time Machine uses CoreAnimation. Text, images, video, OpenGL. Start, goal, key frames. Automatic animation. Demo. iTunes screensaver. Old: 4k lines of code. New with CoreAnimation: 400. Album art pops, moves independantly in 3D, camera moves. Holy Crap. Steve re-creates the iTunes art cityscape commercial in real-time. Interactive and live. 2000 lines of code for the demo.

#7: Universal Access - VoiceOver advances. Braille support. Closed captioning in QT. Faster and better navigation. VoiceOver demo. Text-to-speech demo. Tiger voice reads the text (sounds as expected). Vista's voice reads it now (sounds a bit better, but glitchy). Leopard voice "Wow" (says DanD). You hear it inhale before each sentence. Sounds fantastic. Even sped up, it sounds good.

#8: Mail - Major enhancements. Stationary, notes. To-Do's. Stationary is a layout-ish thing like Pages, probably for HTML email. Notes demo. Notes are like special emails to yourself. Steve uses the words "boom" and "coagulates" in the same paragraph. There is an RSS icon in the sidebar of Mail. Make any email a To-Do. To-Do service which any app can tie into. iCal is tied in. System wide service. Looks like you can pre-populate text into Stationary, like your own letterhead. Steve apparently really likes stationary, perhaps one of his pet features? Notes just look like windowed Stickies. Notes appear in the Inbox as well as a Notes submailbox.

#9: Dashboard - Two new things;

DashCode. design, develop, debug widgets. pre-canned widget templates such as podcasts, rss, images, etc. graphical tool for HTML and CSS. Javascript source editor and debugger.

Web Clip. take any part of any site and make it a widget. Hit a button in Safari, drag the page to the right size, clicks done. Web Clips are live.

#10: iChat - Multiple logins, invisibility, animated buddy icons, video recording, tabbed chats. Tabs look like Colluquy, PhotoBooth effects in video conferences. iChat theater. Show slideshows and stuff. Backdrops. Live video backdrops. "iChat for Leopard will be a grand slam"

11:25 AM: "What has the computer been doing for the last 5 years?" Bertrand Russel Serlet takes the stage. Shows slides of UI's, all essentially the same, makes jokes. "Underneath it all, it's still Windows" (making fun of Vista). Still has registry, still has DLL problems, still has required activation. Vista is Apples past. Steve back to talk about the future.

11:21 AM: Steve is back, time for OS X. 5 major releases so far, 19M active users. Tiger on Intel was in a way a 6th major release. Transition has gone seamlessly. 86M line of code; 0 hiccups. Over 3000 Universl Binaries. Steve thanks the devs.

11:18 AM: Xserve. Totally new. Quad Xeon. 2.0 / 2.66 / 3.0 GHz. 5x faster. Built in redundant power. 2.25TB internal. SATA and SAS storage.

Standard config: $3k. Quad 2.0, 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD. Comparable dell is $3292. Ships in October.

11:17 AM: 210 days for the entire Intel transition.

11:16 AM: Airport and Bluetooth standard. "5million possible configurations" SHIPS TODAY.

11:15 AM: Phill illustrates how the MacPro's are cheaper than equivilent Dells.

11:13 AM: Cable-less drive carriers snaps in ala. Hot-Swap, but without the hot.

First config: 2x2.66 GHz, 1GB ram, GeForce 7300GT 256MB 16x SuperDrive - $2499. Quad to go fro $3200

11:11 AM: Logic Pro: 1.8x faster. Final Cut: 1.4x faster. Xcode: 1.8x faster. Dual 1.33GHZ FSB. 21GB/s bandwidth. 4Channel 256-bit 667MHz memory. Up to 16GB RAM. 4 HDD bays for up to 2TB. Dual optical drives. USB + FW800 on front. 4 PCI-E slots, double wide graphics slot. Re-designed interior (mm... leather)

11:09 AM: 3x faster than G5. Two Xeons in each machine. Quad Xeon(4 core.)

11:07 AM: First Q, almost all products transitioned, except for one. Power Mac will now fade to history. Phill comes on. MacPro. Intel Xeon. Woodcres core. Core-2 Microarchitecture. All dual-core. Up to 3GHz. 4MB shared cache. 128-bit vector engine, faster than velocity. 64Bit. Very high performance/watt.

11:07 AM: Notebook market share: 6% in Jan, 12% in June.

11:06 AM: Subject of today, the Mac. Best Q ever, 18% growth rate. 75% of Macs shipped are intel.

11:04 AM: Retail update. 17M visitors last Q. 50% new to mac of thos purchasing Macs.

11:03 AM: 1:4 engineers to attendees.

11:03 AM: Largest WWDC ever, 4200 attendees.

11:02 AM: Steve is on.

11:00 AM: Lights down, message on screen: "Take rest of the year off," "If you want, you can help out on vista - we could use some help there," "Widgets - gadgets - completely different."

10:52 AM: Welcome announcement, cell phones off please.

10:46 AM: Ive, Shiller and Jobs are chatting it up just off stage.

10:37 AM: Apple store is down, people are in. Music is playing. (The usual fair of U2, Gorrilaz, and a new addition of Gnarles Barkley)