TUAW Meta-Liveblog of WWDC 08 Keynote
Happy Stevemas! (Peace on earth, OS X to all.) Welcome to TUAW's Live metaliveblog of today's WWDC keynote.
11:50. Thanks for reading along with our LiveBlog. TUAW loves you. And big kudos to Michael Johnston of iPhone Alley who rocked out the audio live feed on uStream.
11:50. July 11, 22 countries -- and that's just the start. Thank you. See you this week. And that's a wrap.
11:50. Round of applause for iPhone team. No word yet on NDA.
11:45. Playing Ads now. The ad shows security guards carrying a safe that is unlocked to unveil the iPhone 3G.
11:45. 2 models plus special edition white version.
11:45. Same iPhone, half the price.
11:45. Rolling it out, same price all over the world. July 11th!
11:45. Price: Was $599. Now $399. Will sell for ... The Crowd Explodes $199 for 8GB. 16 GB $299.
11:45. Scott: "Now Steve will explain what geographic boundaries mean". Lisa Hoover: "I'm going to strangle myself w/ my keyboard cord." Was that the Russians? Big, big cheers. 70 Countries in the next few months. Even in Malta. Deals are Signed, Sealed, Delivered -- I'm yours. That is 70 countries -- This Year.
11:40. 6 Countries today. 12 countries for 3G. 25 Countries over the next several months. How do we do this? Let me show you. (BIG applause.) Cue audio: It's a small world theme from Disney.
11:40. Cory: "That GPS icon is lickable." This is the price of being a Disney board member. As each country appears, the crowd is going crazy.
11:40. BUILT IN GPS. And betcha it does google maps live. YES! Tracking. Demo recorded on twisty Lombard Street from San Francisco. That's brilliant. Scott: "Built in GPS: OMG OMG -- just like other phones."
11:40. 5 HOURS of 3G talk time (normally 3 hours for other phones). 300 hours standby. Browsing 5-6 hours. Video 7 hours. Audio: 24 hours.
11:35. More EDGE vs HSDPA. Way to kill the market in used iPhones. Heh. Scott: "Were they lying to me to sell me an iPhone?!" Mike: "Scott, don't try to fight the RDF" Deep breaths everyone.
11:35. Jobs mocks the browsers on non-iPhone mobile units.
11:35. And we're still waiting on EDGE. 59 seconds. 3G is 2.8 times faster. 3G speeds are "amazingly zippy", approaching WiFi. Assuming you're not sharing that bandwidth with too many other iPhone users.
11:30. EDGE versus 3G comparison. And they're off. Clearly 3G is going to win. Because EDGE kinda sucks. 21 seconds on 3G and the EDGE is still going.
11:30. Today introducing a new 3G iPhone. All plastic shiny back. Really pretty. Solid metal buttons. same 3.5" screen. Camera. FLUSH headphone jack! Dramatically improved audio. And *kof* *kof* "Feels better in your hand." (Back off, that's a direct quote!)
11:30. What are the next mountains to climb? 3G network! Enterprise Support. 3rd Party Apps. Sell iPhones in more countries. Officially in 6 countries -- but really in all countries all over the world. Last but not least. PRICE!
11:30. Phil hands back to Steve. First iPhone shipped on 29 June last year. Tremendous critical acclaim. Widely believed to restore youthful vigor and create world peace. It's the phone that changed small business forever. 90% user satisfaction. 80% of users using 10 or more features -- imagine that on a normal iPhone. 6 million iPhones sold to date. We ran out.
11:25. Apple-type Exchange for the rest of us. Mac, PC, Web, iPhone. $99/year includes 20GB online storage. 60 day free pretrial. Early July. Mobile Me replaces dotMac. All dotMac people get to keep your addresses but will be automatically to Mobile Me service.
11:20. What makes this sheer genius is that no one is going to be dropping their data plans with this ubiquitous semi-permanent connections. Persistent internet is apparently the future. Can AT&T handle the demand? Over the Air FTW.
11:20. The demo continues. Showing some of the over-the-air interaction from the iPhone to the mobile me service. Updates on the iPhone go live to the web site. The logo is cute, too.
11:20. It looks a lot like Yahoo's email/calendar but without ads and presumably subscription. No word yet on price.
11:20. Drag and drop, just like desktop apps!
11:20. Photos over the air too! Put right into your albums. And I can show it to you right now. (It's eerie how much Mike R. nails Schiller in his impressions.) Web-based mail reading.
11:20. me.com not live yet. mobileme.com either.
11:20. Cory is *so* the man. You are, Cory!
11:20. Phil!!!!!! And MOBILE ME! "Exchange for the rest of us". Not all of us have exchange servers, but we want the goodies. We can all get push email, contacts, and calendar. Wherever you are, no mattter if it's Mac, iPhone or Windows. Push info up and down -- keep everything up to date all the time. New email gets pushed to *ALL* devices and *FROM* all devices. And again, OVER THE AIR!
11:15. Ad Hoc apps -- you can certify and register up to 100 iPhones and mail around your apps. Kewl! Great for beta testing or use in classroom situations.
11:10. Enterprise can set up private storefronts. They can authorize iPhone IDs that only run on those phones, and distribute on their own intranet.
11:10. 10MB or less, can use cellular networks. Otherwise WiFi and iTunes only.
11:10. AppStore. You can automatically download updates. Developers keep 70% of revenues. Verify apps for security. Free apps have no charge. 62 countries -- almost anywhere in the world.
11:10. 2.0 firmware available in EARLY JULY. $9.99 for iPod touch owners.
11:05. Available now in iPhone SDK update. Now new iPhone SDK features. Contact search. Support for iWork documents including Numbers and keynotes and full Word, Excel, and PPT support. Also added ability to save images to your library and scientific calculator. Parental controls. ("No YouTube for YOU!") Many many more language support: two forms of Japanese entry and two forms for Chinese, including finger-drawn recognition. Crowd goes WILD
11:05. PUSH! PUSH NOTIFICATION SERVICE FOR ALL DEVELOPERS. Yes, yes, yes! iPhone maintains persistent IP connection with push notifications: Badges (alert user for how many waiting), Custom Alert sounds (custom to app and as many as you want), and Text Alerts (like SMS alerts onscreen). User taps on it, and your app launches and sucks down data. It's unified and it's scaleable. It's all live over the air.
11:00. One feature request that developers have asked for. Notification when user isn't running app. Houston, we have PUSH. Wrong solution is background processes. This is bad for a number of reasons -- especially battery use. (Push! Push! Push! Push!) Background app sucks up CPU cycles. Other platforms have this issue.
11:00. We have: Incredible SDK and fun platform and lots of developer innovation. Thank you developers.
11:00. Final developer. Another game. 4 days to build game. Touch screen moves the character. It's a fighting game. Dynamic graphic creation. AppStore is only market place you can find this -- in September this year.
10:55. Imagine a doctor sharing patient data wirelessly over the iPhone. Imagine legal HIPAA complaints.
10:55. Robert: "Anatomic data on your iPhone. And ladies, he's single!" Earlier TUAW coverage of Band.
10:55. Another Doctor. This time medical imaging instead of flash cards. This time, he's trying to promote the idea that your radiologist should be looking at a teeeeeeny tiny screen to do diagnoses. Er, right.
10:55. Nearly one hour into the keynote. And NO announcements.
10:55. "Dr. Williams I learned 5 new brain terms while waiting on line today".
10:50. 2 more medical apps. Dr. Doctor D. Doctor (or whatever his name is.) He begins to drone. Blah blah human body blah blah gold standard blah blah iPhone SDK. newsflash: "The iPhone is better than flashcards!" Stop the presses! "Imagine doing this on any other mobile device." The audience kofs nervously and tries to be kind.
10:50. Live audio and video from MLB games. No pricing but in AppStore. 50 minutes in and no announcements. Back to Steve.
10:50. "Who's on base?" "That's right!" "No, who?" "Yeah, Who's on base!" "I don't know." "The catcher!"
10:45. 45 minutes in. Still no Apple announcements. MLB.com -- major league baseball. "Really nice iPhone app" Yeah, everytime I look at my iPhone I think, 'I really love this thing... but only if it had more baseball in it..'
10:45. Solo developer in British Insurance Industry. Mark Terry. Oh KEWL: It's virtual instruments on the iPhone. He does a riff to John Lennon's Imagine. Really really neat stuff. Cory: "Wow." Two octave piano, cheering crowds, and a funky drummer to let you mix drum beats. All in his freaking spare time. SW is called "Band" and it's pretty amazing. The audience is going wild.
10:45. Porting was easy -- only took about 3 days to get them up and running and playable. iPhone is the steering wheel. Wheeeeeee--thud. Cave man go bam! $9.99 each game.
10:40. Pangaea game software: not one but TWO games! Games ported from OS X -- and they're now better on a small hand-held device. Sweet. Touch-based game, touch for dragging, rotating, and solving world peace. 50 levels, physics-based. (cue cool CPU-intense demo). Cro Mag Rally: 3D Caveman Racing game. Heh!
10:40. Stay up to date -- even when you're out of network like on a plane. And you can watch AP video on your iPhone. Free download.
10:40. AP News. The guys who aren't Reuters. Taking things to the next level with a native iPhone SDK app. Combined sources from thousands of news organizations. The Mobile News Network. MNN.
10:40. Demo. "TUAW TypePad client now being demoed for iPhone. For those times when you need to blog about the creepy guy/girl who just found you via Loopt." App is free. Mike is on FIRE.
10:35. Typepad: Photoblogging is one of Typepad's most popular features. Now with geolocation goodness!
10:35. Mike: "I liked this product's original branding, 'iStalkU'". loopt.com. Mike adds: "'If she is free, I can get directions to her in one click.' iPhone: the Apple answer to the traditional booty call".
10:35. eBay app is (suprise surprise) Free! Next: ?Loopt? It's about people on the go: what they're doing and what's around them. Robert: "Loopt: a service to find your friends and where they are via their mobile devices"
10:30. Robert adds "MacWorld is sadly behind with their comedy: 10:29 PT - JS: I always thought Curious George was one of the classic monkeys. And Mickey Dolenz." Heh.
10:30. Next up: eBay. Adding stuff to zzzzzzzz um watchlist and um....zzzzz. Right. eBay stuff. The home page refreshes -- which is not what we can say about this demo.
10:30. Developers invited to the stage. Sega! Super monkey ball, baby! With all the classic monkeys and lots of levels. Mahalo page. $9.99!!!!! at AppStore launch.
10:30. No really, all the quotes are glowing.
10:25. Massively loud applause. What do developers think? "Unbelievably positive reactions for a broken alpha-level release"
10:25. Live stream at Yahoo. More SDK/Interface Builder review. Building it for the iPhone rather than the simulator. Scott: "This guy should marry IB if he loves it so much"
10:20. More demo: All the IB stuff we've been using since 1988.
10:20. Quick demo. Creating a "nearby friends" app. Using addy book API and location. Filters between showing all contacts and those within 10 miles of current location. He waves his hand -- 300 lines of code you don't see. Listropolis: 33 ways to watch WWDC
10:20. Power tools on top. Xcode, etc. etc. Basically we're hearing a recap of the March keynote if you haven't picked up on that yet. "iPhone Simulator that allows you to run and debug your apps on the Mac and crash it a lot".
10:15. iPhone uses OS X kernel, sharing line for line same source code and bugs as Mac OS X. Same API and Core Location -- easily build location into your apps. Rich media layer. Positional audio (openAL), super-fast OpenGLES. And Cocoa Touch. We're Cuckoo for Cocoa Touch!
10:15. iPhone uses same native SDKs as Apple uses internally. Apparently Apple uses buggy annoying software internally!
10:15. SDK. Where are we? Why, some really exciting stuff. Scott?
10:15. Higher ed participated too. Bottom line: iPhone works with big enterprise stuff. Genentech and other folk. Hint: WE WANT NEW TOYS. Please get past the enterprise dudes. Secret Service/Homeland Security. Soldier lives depend on iPhone.
10:10. Video of Enterprise customers. Presumably some of them will be wearing neck ties and business suits. Disney IT and Law Firm Dude. "We've been testing the Beta Release -- and it's a Beta Release!"
10:10. 25,000 applied to dev program. 4,000 admitted. 35% of the Fortune 500 has participated in the program. Working with Cisco for secure VPN. Push email, push contacts, push calendar, autodiscovery, global address lookup, remote wipe. iPhone 2.0 software is enterprise support, SDK, and new features
10:10. 250 K people downloaded the SDK.
10:10.Today, I'm going to talk about the iPhone. We have a giant step forward today with the developer program. This afternoon, after lunch, Bertrand Serlet will be giving us a peek at the new OS X Lolcat Snow Leopard.
10:10.We have some great stuff that we can't wait to share with you. What do you think of when you hear Apple? You think first, Mac, second iPod and iPhone.
10:05. The lights dim. And the Steve is on the stage. Houston, we have lift-off! "We have great stuff to share today"
10:05. Fortune writes "Air thick with anticipation and reality distortion. Almost constant flashes, like a ballpark before a record is about to be broken, as people take pictures of the empty stage."
10:00. It's about time! Ready or not, here we go! People are turning off cellphones, iPhones, PDAs, beat boxes, sound blasters and other personal electronic devices. Mattmay at twitter adds "Now seated in main #wwdc hall. Now, let's hear the word. Praise Steve. Gloria in excelsis Steve-o."
09:55. Ready to play Bingo? Boom! Audio stream Auf Deutsch.
10:55. Mac World likes the music. Bo Diddley apparently. Mac Rumors team is seated and ready to go. TUAW waves hi to Ars, who are in and waiting for things to start.
09:55. Jam packed. Everyone is getting ready to roll.
09:55. Engadget has spotted AL GORE!!!!!! Hi Al. We love your cinema displays.
09:55. From Hellbox at twitter: "Can anybody else picture a mid-century-style musical based on #WWDC? With dancing nerds holding MacBook Pros like signs and tap dancing?" All of us TUAWians are rockin' down. Groove to the Dub dub baby!
09:50. Merry Stevemas and Happy Keynote-ukah to all. Fortune says (hilariously) " A lot of preening and displays of feathers among the tech press. They have a whole hour with nothing to do but talk to each other. This is probably not a good thing." Geeks of all stripes are pouring into the hall.
09:45. Heading up the escalators. Engadget is in! Ars is in! Ars: "We're headed into the hall."
09:35. The line is moving. People are moving up to upper levels, with 25 minutes before the keynote begins.
09:30. All the bloggers were checking their notes with care, in hopes that Steve would shortly be there. When out from Moscone there arose such a clatter that we had to liveblog to see what was the matter. When, what to our wondering eyes should appear but a miniature iPhone and eight tiny mac airs.
For those of you who haven't been tuned in, today marks the start of this year's World Wide Developer Conference. As with most other years, Steve Jobs will be there to deliver his keynote to inaugurate this year's proceedings. And TUAW will be there live -- or as live as we can be when none of us are actually physically present. We'll be liveblogging the liveblogs -- or, as we like to call it, metaliveblogging the event. So spend some time with us, as we deliver our own special blend of tech know-how and snarkalicious fun as we blog the blogs, LIVE! For all TUAW coverage of WWDC, check our feature page.
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