Steve Jobs live from WWDC 2007

Alright, we're here live at WWDC07 for yet another Jobsnote! Looks like things are about to get rolling soon, stay tuned for minute-by-minute updates.

Rocket fuel for your apps? We always thought the optimal fuel mixture was a ton of RAM + way too many MHz + fast drives.

What could it be? Remember, they did this exact same veiled banner last year (it wound up being the Mac Pro).

8:45AM PST - We're just hanging in line, watch our legs cramp up as the media trickles in. This is a 4,000-5,000 person event, so please say a little prayer we aren't trampled by Mac fanboys as they open the gates.

9:03AM - Plenty of media have rolled in -- everybody still looks bleary eyed; we see lots of huge lenses and ready laptops. Seems like every time we come out more and more join us in liveblogging!

Apple ushers -- little, yellow, think different.

Attendees in line for the keynote...

... a looong line for the keynote.

9:35AM - Ok, they're letting people in. Gnarls Barkley's playing on the soundsystem.

9:44AM - Everyone's packing and condensing -- as usual there won't be a free seat in the house. Beck's playing... and there's Feel Good, Inc, by the Gorillaz. We officially can't hear this song anymore without instantly feeling like we're at a Stevenote.

9:54AM - VIPs are chitchatting amongst themselves. Phil Schiller is gabbing with Eric "doesn't have an iPhone" Schmidt.

9:57AM - "Good morning ladies and gentlemen, welcome to WWDC 2007. This morning's presentation will begin in 2 minutes."

10:02AM - Lights are going down. People are shouting "Steve!" It's a Mac / PC ad... John Hodgman comes out. "Hello everyone, I'm Steve Jobs." Laughs. "I've got some big news this year, I want the whole world to hear it. I quit. Yes, that's right, I'm resigning effective immediately, and shutting down all of Apple." Huge laughs.

10:03am - "I didn't have a choice, Vista is performing so well -- it sold tens of dozens of copies. Leopard was going to get lost in all that Wow. And I've got my iPod killer -- a brown Zune. It's time for Apple to wave the white flag. Don't shed tears, just take those big brains out of the Mascarpone center..."

10:04AM - Steve! Huge applause

10:05AM - Oh, he's a happy one today. Look at that big grin on his face. "Welcome, thank you, thanks for coming, we have some great stuff to show you today. Welcome to WWDC07, I'm pleased to report we have over 5k attendees today, the biggest WWDC ever in the history of Apple." Applause. "We have over 950,000 Apple dev connection members. Our developer community is very healthy and growing rapidly. We couldn't be happier. This week we have some great stuff for you -- 159 sessions, 94 labs, 1,200 Apple engineers on site..."

10:06AM - "So WWDC07, before we get into stuff today, I want to go back a year." Is he gonna use Time Machine? "We were talking about Intel. We were very far along in a very ambitious project to move all our computers over to Intel. It was one of the most challenging, ambitious projects ever in our industry. Our teams inside Apple did an incredible job. YOU guys did an incredible job making Universal versions of your apps -- well, most of you anyway." Har!

10:07AM - "There's one group that I think worked extremely hard, that's Intel themselves. From the very day we signed up, these guys have done extraordinary work with us. We have worked so hard with them to do special things, to do things that are a little outside the norm so we could make the best Macs ever, and they have come through every single time for us." He's inviting Intel CEO Paul Otellini up on stage. Applause.

10:08AM - "Paul, I've got something for you... we're not big on awards, so I asked Jony Ive if we could make something for you..." It's a polished stainless steel commemorative disc. "Thank you so much Steve. I didn't know what you were doing, I just wanted to say thanks with you and your team. Working with Apple has been one of the best things that's happened in my career and with Intel... but the best is still to come." "Well, we're working on some great product. Thank you to everyone at Intel... we're very proud of the machines we're delivering."

10:10AM - "Next up, got some great news about games: EA, number one publisher of games, is coming back to Mac in a BIG way." Bing Gordon, CCO and co-founder of EA is on stage. "Thank you Steve! I have two teenage daughters... they live on a MacBook. Our CTO lives on a Mac. We're seeing technologies move to Mac... what do they all want (in addition to a new Cinema display?)" Laughter. "They want to see games... we're going to rectify that." New games for Mac: C&C3, Battlefield 2142, NFS Carbon, and in July, Harry Potter (Phoenix). "He needs a wand, unlike Steve Jobs who just uses his imagination." Demo of Harry Potter on a Mac. Looks pretty good!

10:12AM - "Steve is going to wave his hand and candles will float in this room..." Laughter. Starting in August when the new sports year begins they're launching Madden and Tiger Woods 08. "Steve, keep up the wizardry. Thanks so much."

10:13AM - Steve's back on. "So that's great news from EA. We've also got some intriguing news..." iD software logo comes up. John Carmack is premiering something here!

10:14AM - "So the last couple of years at iD we've been working in secrecy on next-gen tech and a game for it... this is the first time we're showing anything we've done on it publicly." iD Tech 5... "What we've got here is the entire world with unique textures, 20GB of textures covering this track. They can go in and look at the world and, say, change the color of the mountaintop, or carve their name into the rock. They can change as much as they want on surfaces with no impact on the game."

10:16AM - "We're going to be showing on a Mac, PC, PS3, and Xbox at E3, we'll have another Mac announcement at E3." That was it? It was neat, but not really an "announcement."

10:17AM - "Two cool announcements... but now let's move on to the big cats. Mac OS X. Current release: Tiger, the most successful release in Apple history. We have 22 million active OS X users -- they are comprised of 2/3rds running Tiger. This is unprecedented, for two thirds to be running the latest and greatest release of an OS. We have another 23% on Panther, and 10% older than that... unprecedented in our industry, and makes it a lot easier to develop software for.

10:18AM - "So today we're moving beyond Tiger, and giving a final look at Leopard before it ships in October. Leopard is going to set an even higher bar. Our last major release was Tiger on Intel in Jan of 2006. Leopard is the 6th major release of OS X, it's got 300 new features, and this morning I get to show you 10 of them.

"Feature number one -- one we haven't shown. Leopard has a new desktop." Looks the same so far!

10:19AM - "It looks something like this..." Basically the same, but some transparency, doesn't use the blue desktop designs. "We've got a menu-bar that adapts itself to whatever photo you put behind it. It has a new menu-bar, new dock, and something new to help us clean up our desktop... something called Stacks." Applause. "We've been told we've had all these different looks over the years -- we've got a consistent new look. We've also got a new prominent front-window."

10:20AM - "Stacks are simply folders in the dock that allow you rapid access to the dock that come out as a fan or as a grid. The instant way to get contents of your folder. What we're doing is in addition to any folder you put there, we're gonna put a folder there called downloads -- one of the reasons our desktops are so cluttered is because of downloads! We're putting that downloads folder as a Stack in the dock. This is the new desktop for Leopard... what I'd love to do is show it to you." Demo time!

10:22AM - Some nice icon reflections and transparencies... very sexy stuff. "I've got my stacks over here... movies, applications, and if I want to play a movie I just go play a movie." Yes, yes you do, Steve. Play that movie. He's playing the new iPhone commercial. "I assume you've seen that."

10:23AM - Opening PDFs directly from stacks, "It's that easy to keep stuff organized. You can even use this as an app launcher." Shows it in slow-mo -- ha! "All these features use core-animation to make it very, very easy."

10:24AM - Doing a plug on Disney resort in Paris -- "You push this thing right here, it downloads into my download stack, boom, and there it is." Demo over. "Second of ten features: new Finder!" Huge applause.

10:26AM - "We've got a new Finder: a new sidebar, much nicer and more powerful -- now you can search other Macs and servers within Finder. You've always been able to share files -- it's now really easy to brows and share files with computers on your local network. And if you're a subscriber to .Mac, we have a cool feature called Back to my Mac that allows you to browse your other computers and share files over the internet and across differences. And we've added something called Cover Flow -- what thousands of people already know how to use. This is the new Finder..."

10:27AM - "We've added a fourth button for Cover Flow, you can look at things in list view... but now you can look at things in Cover Flow, it turns out to be INCREDIBLY useful." Emphasis Steve's. "New sidebar -- we've got devices, drives, and smart searches -- it's really easy to find stuff, and you can add your own smart folders right there. Now let me open shared, and what we'll see is computers from around the house. I can again I can browse and share files by just clicking on that as if they were right on my own computer. But how does Back to my Mac actually work?

10:28AM - We've got the internet, we've got .Mac, we've got my Mac at my house... I'm on the road and I need a file... when my home Mac gets a new IP address, it always tells .Mac. My mobile tells IT'S IP address to .Mac, so my notebook knows where my desktop is, it's encrypted, and it all works great. Let me show you a few of these things now." Demo time!

10:29AM - New Finder is tres hot, definitely into this. He's cycling through the views -- "And here's Cover Flow." It's unbelievable, it's like thumbnails on crack. "I can cycle through pages! Here's a PDF..." just hits left and right on the "Cover" and it cycles through pages and Keynote presentation slides.

10:30AM - "This is an amazing way to find things, it turns out to be super-useful. Let me go to the sidebar... here are all the things I touched today, and touched yesterday... Now I'm gonna open up what's shared here. Here's even a Windows machine up in the attic..." laughter "I can even go on Windows machines." He's browsing networked Macs, even using Cover Flow there. Hope you've got a decent LAN!

10:32AM - "Now I want to show you the Back to my Mac stuff... I'm gonna go to my .Mac prefs... we have a new tab here... now look what popped up, my Mac Pro at work." It crashed! "This is the stuff on my work computer right now..." browsing through stuff over the internet to his work machine through .Mac. Very compelling stuff if you've ever been on the road before. "I can just drag it to my desktop. Boom."

10:34AM - "So that gives you a feel for the new Finder in Leopard." Applause. "Easily share other computers, Cover Flow built right into the finder, I think you're going to really like it. It's great. Number three: we call it Quick Look, and it's great. It lets you instantly preview files without opening applications. You want to see what's in a file -- you don't want to open an application. It works with all the popular filetypes, and if you've got a doc type that doesn't work, it's a plugin model so you can easily add it." Wow, we dig this too. These features are way better than last WWDC's things... ToDos? Ha.

10:35AM - Demoing Quick Look.

10:37AM - "I can look at Word docs -- anything I want to do. Full-screen previews. I can rapidly examine these things. That is Quick Look. A great companion to the Finder and other apps. Number four: Leopard is 64-bit top to bottom. Not only does it have 64-bit underpinnings in Unix, but we've taken it all the way up through Cocoa. This is the first time 64-bit will be mainstream in the PC world. One version of Leopard will run 32-bit and 64-bit apps side-by-side. We do NOT have two versions of Leopard. And that's why this is going to be the first time 64-bit goes mainstream. It's very very cool." Demo time. "It's a shootout between 32-bit and 64-bit... this app is going to load in a giant photo."

10:39AM - Loading a 4GB LoC image, over a billion pixels. The 64-bit app just jumped right up, the 32-bit app was far slower. Steve zooms waaaay in -- everyone is oohing and aahing. Running white balance -- it's going 2-3x as fast as the 32-bit version.

10:40AM - "Just a simple app that shows the benefit of having 64-bit... there you have it, 81s... we're seeing a real need for 64-bit, we're hearing it a lot more and more from the professional arts. We're hoping this is going to really help all those people. Almost every computer we ship is 64-bit capable, this is going to run great on almost every app we ship. Number five: Core animation." They discussed this last year. "It's automatic animation -- tremendous high production value to your applications."

10:42AM - "Very high production values, very low effort to add it -- it automatically brings in GPU acceleration. For the demo, if you've seen the Apple TV, we took the opening movie and made it live and interactive." This is insane, he's zooming over a grid of hundreds of live-playing videos. "I can search for this since it has tags... I'm gonna look for anything with water." They all swing to the front. Unreal!

10:45AM - "Alright, that's what I wanted to show you with Core Animation!" Big applause. "Number six: Boot Camp. It's pretty amazing, since we put it out a year ago we've had over 2.5m downloads of the beta. With Leopard Boot Camp is built-in. The latest and greatest version is built in... no more CD-burning to install drivers. This is a really great complement to Parallels and VMware. There are three great ways to run Windows on the Mac -- you run Parallels, and that's a really great way."

10:46AM - Showing Parallels running on Coherence mode, as with VMware. "We've got three great solutions if you need to run the occasional Windows app on your Mac. We're thrilled with this. Number seven: we have something new in Leopard called Spaces -- which lets you group apps into separate spaces, and lets you switch between applications in those spaces. you can break things up into spaces of apps -- put 'em in a space..." Demo time. We're really rehashing stuff from last year -- Spaces has been on the Apple site almost a year now!

10:48AM - One Spaces virtual desktop is running WoW -- we hear Steve's really digging the end-game content. "If I want to rearrange my spaces, I can do that too..." showing the drag and drop virtual desktop manager for the Spaces and apps within Spaces. "Very very easy to do, so that is Spaces in Leopard." Meek applause. "So number eight: Dashboard. Of course, it's been a huge hit, we premiered in Tiger and shipped a bunch of widgets, but you guys have written a TON of widgets."

10:49AM - "I don't know about you guys, but I use Dashboard many, many, many times a day. We're adding a new widget to Dashboard, one that looks up movie times. It lets us search by movie and theater, you can buy movies on Fandango..." He's going over Web Clip stuff now, which is, again, something from last WWDC.

10:51AM - Showing the movie widget, "You can even see a trailer here, if you want to." That is way hot. "So this is the movies widget, I hope you like it, I think it will be useful." Showing off web clip again, clipping out stuff from the Yahoo News lead on the front door. (Last year he made a daily-updating Dilbert-coming Web Clip widget.) Ah, Steve loves Rotten Tomatoes a lot, eh?

10:53AM - He's doing the Dilbert Web Clip widget again! Steve, we saw this last year man, c'mon! Now Google Trends... showing frames on the WC widgets, comics style, etc. "These are all live, I can go to entertainment... sports... all these are going to update autmatically." Yep, we know, let's keep moving Steve!

10:55AM - "We want you guys to keep making widgets because your 3k widgets are phenomenal... use Dash Code. Three really cool things happening in widgets. Number nine: iChat. Let's talk about iChat. We've gotten SO MUCH feedback on video conferencing, it's incredibly heartening. We've also shipped an app called Photo Booth, so we're gonna bring some of that fun over to iChat as well. We've got better audio quality with an AAC codec called AAC-low delay, tabbed chats, photo booth effects, iChat theater, and backdrops." Finally!

10:56AM - Demo time. "I don't have a lot of buddies, just Phil." iChat comes up, just Phil Schiller is online -- laughter. "Hey Steve, how's the keynote going?" "Eh, I'll tell you in a half an hour!" They're doing their live keynote chat.

10:57AM - Phil brings up his Keynote presentation over iChat, it's pretty slick. Now demoing dragging a movie into the iChat session, where the movie starts streaming over iChat. Man, this could totally become the new video placeshifter.

10:59AM - It works with all the Quick Look doc types, documents just show right up. "If Quick Look supports it we can do it in iChat Theater." Phil's showing the backdrops from last year -- remember when he rode the rollercoaster? No? Ok, well, it was pretty cheesy.

11:00AM - Showing Photo Booth effects in iChat -- it's got a Princess Leia "Help me Obi Wan Kenobi!" holograph mode... it's also got a photo-mouth effect a la Conan O'Brien. Shows Phil's mouth in Steve Ballmer's head -- huge applause. "I love my Mac!" and sticks his tongue out. High-larious.

11:02AM - "Thank you Phil! We figured that was the only way to get Steve to join us in our keynote... so that's iChat. And number ten: is of course, Time Machine. As we've talked about before, we're using our computers not just store our work docs, but our personal lives. If you lose just one precious photograph, you're gonna be really bummed... we've got very precious stuff on our computers, and yet no one backs up our computer automatically. Almost all of us do not. We're just walking time bombs in terms of having something go wrong. And this is what Time Machine is all about -- we want to solve these problems in such a simple way that people actually use it!"

11:03AM - "You click it on, it automatically backs up everything. It will back up to a local drive or network server, it will even back up wirelessly. You can hang a drive off your Mac, or you can get an Airport Express Base Station... so that handles the backup. What happens if something goes wrong? Time Machine lets you look back in Time for lost files in Spotlight search -- and you can preview in Quick Look. You can restore with one-click, or even restore your entire Mac. So let me show that to you..." Demo.

11:05AM - "I'm searching for my presentation on architecture... and it's not there. Ohmigod, it's not there. And I'm freakin' out right now." Giggles. "So I go back and search through time..." shows the timeline and backups... "there it is, safe and sound, so all I do is push this button and safe-restore. Boom."

11:06AM - "One-click setup -- inexpensive drive, and if you lose something it's really easy to search back in time to find it. We think it's really important, and that's why we're building it into Leopard. And that's ten things new in Leopard we wanted to give you a look at today." Don't go nowhere folks, he's still got 25 minutes... or so we think.

11:08AM - "These are just ten of the over 300 new features in Leopard. You're getting a copy today." Well, devs are anyway, not press. "We've got a basic version that will cost $129, we've got a Premium Version which will cost $129..." laughter and applause. "We've got a business version! $129. Ultimate version! We're throwing everything into it, it's $129." Can't even hear Steve, too much applause. "We think everyone's going to bu the ultimate version."

"But there is one more thing..."

11:09AM - "There is one other thing we wanted to tell you about that we think you might like. Safari... it's been a wonderful success, there are now over 18m Safari users. It's climbed from 0 to 5% across the entire internet. If you look at the world of browsers, IE is about 78%, Ffx 15%, Safari 5%, other 2% -- we would love for Safari's market share to grow substantially. But how are we gonna do that? Safari for Windows!"

11:12AM - "We have a little bit of expertise for doing that because of iTunes... Safari 3 now runs on XP and Vista as well... they exist today. How do they work? We're bringing the innovations over to Windows, but how's the speed?" Showing some charts n' grafs of iBench HTML perf suite... IE is 4.6s, ffx 3.7, Safari 2.2s -- "over twice as fast as IE. What we've got here is the most innovative browser in the world, and the fastest browser on Windows. 1.6x faster than Ffx, twice as fast as IE, Google and Yahoo search built-in..." Demo time.

11:13AM - Launching Safari in Windows. Ok, this is kind of weird. But it's definitely working! "We've got a new tab feature in all versions of Safari 3... I've got tabs here, I can drag tabs around, drag them off into their own window... but I want to show you the iBench shootout."

11:15AM - It's loading a ton of sites: 6.64 vs 13.56s Safari to IE. "But how are we going to distribute this? We don't really talk to these customers, do we? What are we gonna do? Well, it turns out there are 1m downloads of iTunes a day. Turns out there's been over half a billion downloads of iTunes to Windows... so there are three versions of Safari, one that runs on OS X, one that runs on XP, and one that runs on Vista... and we're releasing it today as a public beta to you. It's a free beta, apple.com/safari and who knows, maybe we can grow our Safari share in the future, we can sure try."

"So there you have it, Leopard, Safari on Windows... but I do have one last thing... and that of course is the iPhone..." applause.

11:16AM - "The iPhone ships on June 29th, that is just 18 days from today. I believe it's 6pm in the evening it will go on sale... now, what about developers?" Huge applause.

"We have been trying to come up with a solution to expand the capabilities of the iPhone so developers can write great apps for it, but keep the iPhone secure. And we've come up with a very. Sweet. Solution. Let me tell you about it. An innovative new way to create applications for mobile devices... it's all based on the fact that we have the full Safari engine in the iPhone."

11:18AM - "And so you can write amazing Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone, and these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, check email, look up a location on Gmaps... don't worry about distribution, just put 'em on an internet server. They're easy to update, just update it on your server. They're secure, and they run securely sandboxed on the iPhone. And guess what, there's no SDK you need! You've got everything you need if you can write modern web apps..." Weeeeeaaaak.

11:19AM - Demo time, Scott Forstall, VP of iPhone software on stage... "Your applications can take advantage of the built-in native services." He's in the iPhone -- no new apps up on screen, the same 11 as before -- sorry iPhone fans!

11:21AM - "We built a custom corporate address book app to use our internal LDAP... it actually took less than one person-month to do this. It's under 600 lines of code to do the whole thing." Shows up the vCards as they look in the built-in contact app. Not too shabby!

11:25AM - "We can take advantages of the built in services for iPhone... we can call right from the web app, we can email right from the built-in email application.... I can even tap on his address, it takes me directly to the built in Google Maps app. ... " Ok, that's all sorted. Steve: "There are whole companies building their apps this way -- Salesforce, Google, this is a very modern way of building apps and it's going to be awesome. Begin building your iPhone apps today, get your hands on an iPhone, and have it out in early July. So, we've seen this morning Leopard, Safari for Windows, and an awesome way to write apps for the iPhone."

"So enjoy the week, and I hope you love the kinds of things were working on... thanks very much, take care!"

11:26AM - It's all over, we're out! Thanks again to our hard-working tech team that kept us alive and chuggin' throughout. See everybody next time!