World of Apple

Apple’s media event where it will unveil brand new MacBook and MacBook Pro models is set to start imminently, World of Apple will update this post periodically with key information.

For live coverage see this post.

• Members of media getting seated, event starting soon!
• Steve Jobs intros Tim Cook who’s talking sales, Apple sold 2.5 million Macs last quarter
• Cook: Apple has “better computers” and “better software”, says “Leopard is far ahead of Vista”
• Jonathan Ive on stage talking about the new manufacturing process for notebooks. One piece of aluminium to build a lighter stronger enclosure.
• NVIDIA came to Apple to show off a new product, now the 9400M is in the new notebooks. Chipset and GPU on one die, 70% is GPU, 16 parallel graphics cores, 54 gigaflops.
• New trackpad in notebooks made of glass for “silky smooth” travel
• 39% larger tracking area, multi-touch gestures, entire trackpad is one button, multi-buttons via software
• Four finger gestures for app switching and Expose
• Introducing brand new MacBook Pro
• New MacBook Pro, LED-backlit, multi-touch glass trackpad, mini Display Port connector, backlit keyboard, magnetic latch
• Both the integrated NVIDIA 9400M in the MacBook as well as the GeForce 9600M GT
• Five hours of battery life on 9400M, four on the 9600M.
• Sot load optical drive, MagSafe, Ethernet, FireWire 800, two USBs, mini DisplayPort, ExpressCard 34, battery indicator on side.
• Mini DisplayPort going into all new products, slimmed down version of the fill-DVI connection, can still drive 30-inch display
• Hard drive easily replaceable
• SSD option available
• $1999, 15.4-inch LED backlit, 2.4GHz, 3MB L2 cache, 2GB DDR3 memory, two GPUs, 250GB HDD, SuperDrive
• $2499, 15.4-inch LED backlit, 2.53GHz, 6MB L2 cache, 4GB DDR3 memory, two GPUs, 320GB HDD, SuperDrive
• MacBook Air also getting revamp, mini Display Port, NVIDIA 9400M, 120GB HDD, 128GB SSD option
• MacBook Pros shipping today, MacBook Airs shipping in November
• Brand new 24-inch LED Cinema Display
• One cable with MagSafe to charge laptop, Display Port and USB.
• 24-inch display is $899, max resolution of 1920 x 1200, stereo speakers. Available in November.
• New MacBook, just like Pro yet smaller.
• Has NVIDIA 9400M integrated graphics, five hours of battery life
• $1299 13.3-inch MacBook, 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, SuperDrive
• Optional 128GB SSD also available for MacBook
• $1599 13.3-inch MacBook, 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD, SuperDrive
• MacBooks shipping now, in stores tomorrow
• Holding Q&A session; Steve’s blood pressure is 110/70, saying no more on Jobs’ health

This years WWDC kicks off in just a few hours and World of Apple plans the usual array of up-to-date news and rumours.

Join World of Apple for live coverage via our AJAX text system at the following time:

• 7:00AM - Hawaii
• 10:00AM - Pacific
• 11:00AM - Mountain
• 12:00PM - Central
• 1:00PM - Eastern
• 5:00PM - GMT
• 6:00PM - London
• 7:00PM - Paris
• 2:00AM - Tokyo (June 10th)
• 3:00AM - Sydney (June 10th)

Bookmark http://www.worldofapplelive.com now!

World of Apple will be providing live updates on today’s iPhone SDK Roadmap event which will kick off 10.00AM Pacific time (6.00PM GMT).

[Update] BBC’s iPlayer website has recently displayed a link to a Beta version for the iPhone.

Updates will appears on this page as the event begins. (Most recent update at bottom)

• 9.45 PST - Taking seats, some Disney staff up front
• “Good morning ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this Apple special event.”
• Steve Jobs on stage
• Apple has been working really hard, some cool stuff to announce
• iPhone gained 28 percent market share in 8 months
• 71 percent of the US mobile usage on iPhone
• Talking about iPhone enterprise, hands over the Phil Schiller
• “The iPhone is a watershed event in mobile computing for corporations”
• Hundreds of iPhones at Stanford, user acceptance is great
• Customers requesting Push email as well as push calendars
• Consumers also want Push contacts, global address lists, Cisco IPSec, VPN, Certs and Idents, WPA2, 802.1x
• Also want remote wipe the event of being lost or stolen
• All this in next iPhone firmware update
• Microsoft Exchange support on iPhone, Apple licensing from Microsoft to build exchange into servers
• Will use ActiveSync to work directly with server
• Exchange will be built right into the current email app, as well as calendar and contact list
• Demo
• In Settting Exchange is listed at the top of the Mail config screen
• On/Off sliders for Push mail, contacts, calendars
• Demoing contacts, calendar events, remote wipe
• Been working hard on Exchange for iPhone, tested at companies like Nike
• Scott Forstall now on stage to talk about and demo SDK
• “I’m here to tell you how devs can build great apps for the iPhone”
• Over 1000 web apps “incredibly successful”
• Going over some web apps, Facebook etc.
• “Already the iPhone is the most popular mobile device with Bank of America — it accounts for 20% of ALL mobile banking with them. But today what I really want to tell you about is the native iPhone SDK.”
• Today Apple is opening up the same APIs and tools that they use internally to build iPhone apps
• Third-party developers can build apps using the same SDK that Apple uses
• Mac OS X is powerful, consisting of Cocoa, Media, Core Services and CoreOS
• All of the above used in iPhone OS except Cocoa due to being based on mouse and keyboard input
• Took everything they knew about Cocoa and the touch API and created Cocoa Touch
• Core OS has the OS X Kernel, Lib System, BSD TCP/IP, Sockets, Security, Power Mgmt, Keychain, Certificates, File System, Bonjour
• As well as SQLite and Core Location
• iPhone OS has all the audio/video capabilities of OS X: Core Audio, OpenAL, Audio Mixing, Audio Recording, Video Playback, JPG/PNG/TIFF, PDF, Quartz (2D) Core Animation, OpenGL ES
• OpenGL ES is embedded version of OpenGL
• Everything is hardware accelerated
• Cocoa Touch: Multi-Touch events/controls, Accelerometer, View Hierarchy, Localization, Alerts, Web View, People Picker, Image Picker, Camera
• This is the architecture of the iPhone OS
• Xcode is the environment used to develop for OS X
• Has been enhanced to build apps for the iPhone as well
• Xcode will now code-complete for the APIs in the SDK
• Also has project management, integrated source control
• Integrated documentation
• “Shipping a lot of great documentation with the SDK, and you can access it within the software”
• Remote debugger - run it on the iphone but debug from a Mac
• Interface builder - Building interfaces as simple as drag and drop
• All controls from Cocoa touch are built into Interface Builder
• Code connections with Interface builder
• “Comprehensive suite of performance analysis tools”
• Connect to iPhone and see live the performance of the app
• Run your iPhone app in the iPhone simulator on a Mac, works great with Xcode
• Demo
• Demoing iPhone simulator
• Clicking and swiping around sends the same events like double taps, swipe events etc.
• Building a sample Hello World app
• Thrown app together, “It’s just as easy to build and run it live on an iPhone!”
• Created a photo editing app that morphs a picture, but you shake the phone to undo the changes, took just two days to make!
• “Next we decided, what can we do in two weeks? So we wrote a game… Touch Fighter.”
• Touch fighter is space shooter game, all you have to do is move the phone around to move the plane which shoots at things
• Using remote performance tools, measurements can be recorded and saved
• Touch fighter got up to 30fps!!!
• Sent the tools out to a bunch of companies to see what they could do in two weeks, most hadn’t developed on a Mac before
• Travis Boatman from Electronic Arts talking now about iPhone SDK
• Spore for iPhone has “evolution editor” that allows users to add all sorts of things to personalise Spore
• Takes advantage of touchscreen fun
• All 18 levels of Spore up and running on iPhone
• “That was just two weeks of work!”
• Chuck Dietrich from Salesforce.com talking about iPhone SDK
• “We are so excited to take software as a service to the iPhone!”
• Sales reps would love to use the iPhone to get a graphical view of monthly sales goals
• “Wish we could use the accelerometer to shake them into the green on sales deals!”
• SDK allows data to be repurposed from Salesforce on the iPhone
• New data can be sent to the device wirelessly
• Next up, Rizwan Sattar from AOL
• Talking about AIM “biggest instant messaging service in US”
• Showing AIM for iPhone
• “I’ve never written on a Mac before, never written in Obj C, just had a spec sheet for how to connect to AIM!”
• AIM for iPhone allows multiple conversations, switch between chats with a swipe
• Status updates on the “Me” panel, but not only away messages but buddy icon changes as well, pick a photo from the photo picker
• “We’re really excited that we were able to do this in just 2 weeks on the SDK”
• Next up, Epocrates “provider of clinical handheld applications”, Glenn Keighley
• “I can tell you that developing software for iPhone is like developing for no other mobile platform… almost desktop environment”
• Showing drug monographs, SQLite database used for the medication database, reactions, etc
• Over to Ethan Einhorn, Sega
• SuperMonkeyBall for iPhone
• “natural choice” for iPhone, “I thought 2 weeks was impossible!”
• Tilt the device to move the monkey around
• “gonna be really hard to go back to a traditional game controller”
• “This is NOT a cellphone game. It’s a console game, if anything, we underestimated what the iPhone was able to do from the start, we had to fly in another artist to scale up the art to match what the iPhone could actually output.”
• Scott Forstall back on stage, hands over to Steve to explain how to get all these great apps on the iPhone
• “Your dream is to get your app in front of every iPhone user. You can’t do that today, but we’re gonna solve that”
• AppStore, will be on every single iPhone, coming with next firmware release
• Categories for games, business, finance, health, lifestyle, music, etc.
• AppStore can be installed on both iPhone and Mac
• AppStore will automatically update apps over the air when an update is available
• AppStore is going to be the exclusive way to distribute iPhone applications
• “This is great, but what’s the deal? What’s the business deal?”
• Devs pick the price
• Dev gets 70% of revenues, credit card fees dealt with by Apple
• No hosting fees, no marketing fees
• 70% of revenues paid monthly
• Developers can choose to distribute app for free
• iPhone 2.0 software update will contain SDK stuff and enterprise stuff
• Beta release going out to devs and companies TODAY!
• Ship to every iPhone customer in June
• Not just iPhone but also iPod touch, nominal fee due to account differences
• How to become and iPhone developer?
• Download SDK for free in about an hour from Apple.com
• To test app on iPhone or touch you need to join development program which costs $99
• “The premiere VC firm in the world, KPCD, and it’s my great pleasure the most well known partner, John Doerr.”
• “We’re all here today because we LOVE Apple products, and I’m here because I really love Apple entrepreneurs. They do more than anyone thinks possible with less than anyone thinks possible — the risk takers, the rebels. So it’s particularly touching to be here today with the supreme commander of the rebels, Steve Jobs.”
• KCPD believes that the second-best way to invent is to fund it
• Introducing iFund
• iFund is $100,000,000 ($100 million)
• “That should be enough to start about a dozen Amazons, or even four Googles!”
• That’s it folks, Jobs has asked press to stay a few more minutes…

IDG World Expo announced via Macworld that Apple CEO, Steve Jobs will deliver the opening keynote at Macworld Conference and Expo 2008. The keynote will be held at the Moscone West building in San Francisco and will kick off at 9.00am on Tuesday January 15th.

“We’re looking forward to a great show and are thrilled that Steve will once again be kicking it off,” said Mary Dolaher, IDG World Expo CEO.

World of Apple is currently planning to offer a live video stream of the Macworld 2008 keynote, those interested in advertising, sponsorship or just letting us know you’re interested should let us know over at our dedicated page.

This article contains forward looking comments and future plans which are subject to change

As of this very minute Christmas and New Year are quickly approaching and to any Mac zealot that can only mean Macworld is on the horizon. The forthcoming Macworld will run one week later than usual; 14th to 18th January 2008.

It appears that 2008 will be a fantastic year for Macworld it has been confirmed by show organisers that Macworld 2008 should bring back a little bit of the “Mac.”

400 exhibitors will also be present at the show, which is far more than any year, the growth in exhibitors has forced the organisers to stop using the medium sized North hall and instead has moved to Moscone West as well as still occupying the huge South hall.

Early registration has begun for Macworld Conference & Expo 2008 with package prices ranging from $1695 for a Platinum Pass down to $25 allowing access to only the Exhibit Hall.

If you want to get into the Keynote, the cheapest method to do so is to buy the well priced $295 Users Conference pass.

World of Apple’s Macworld Plan

Some of you with keen eyes may have noticed a that the poll to the left includes an obscure option; “I’ve love World of Apple to provide a video feed of the Keynote,” to most of you that probably seems obvious but lets break it down.

World of Apple has teamed up with fantastic guys over at BitGravity to offer a live video feed of Macworld’s opening Keynote and other multimedia content to the highest of standards.

The plan is to fund the record breaking feat via sponsorship and advertising, but the team here at World of Apple may well need assistance from those willing to help. Look out in the coming days and weeks for further information.

For those just willing to watch the action at home with their feet up will be able to register their interest and receive update to their inboxes in the coming days.