World of Apple

Yesterday evening at WWDC taking place in San Francisco this week Apple announced the winners of this years Apple Design Awards. Started in 1996 the awards aim to recognise the most innovative software available for the Mac platform and this year Apple added awards for iPhone software as well.

Image Courtesy of TheiLife.com

Here are the 2008 ADA winners:

Best Leopard Student Product Runner Up:
Flow 1.0.1 by Brian Amerige
Best Leopard Student Product Winner:
Squirrel by Axel Peju
Best Mac OS X Leopard Graphics and Media Application Runner Up:
FotoMagico by Boinx Software Ltd.
Best Mac OS X Leopard Graphics and Media Application Winner:
ScreenFlow by Vara Software Limited
Best Mac OS X Leopard User Experience Runner Up:
Checkout by Werk BV
Best Mac OS X Leopard User Experience Winner:
Macnification by Orbicule
Best Mac OS X Leopard Game Runner Up:
Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars by Electronic Arts Inc.
Best Mac OS X Leopard Game Winner:
Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock by Aspyr Media, Inc.
Best Mac OS X Leopard Application Runner Up:
Bee Docs’ Timeline 3D Edition by Bee Documents
Best Mac OS X Leopard Application Winner:
ScreenFlow by Vara Software Limited
Best iPhone Web App Runner Up:
AP Mobile News Network by The Associated Press
Best iPhone Web App Winner:
Remember the Milk by Remember the Milk
Best iPhone Game Winner:
Enigmo by Pangea Software, Inc.
Best iPhone Entertainment Application Winner:
AOL Radio by AOL LLC
Best iPhone Social Networking Application Winner:
Twitterrific by The Iconfactory
Best iPhone Productivity Application Winner:
OmniFocus by The Omni Group
Best iPhone Healthcare & Fitness Application Winner:
MIM by MIMVista, Corp.

When Mac OS X Snow Leopard was just a rumour it surfaced that the operating system could be built just for Intel hardware, and be the first version of Mac OS X to drop support for the ageing PowerPC processors.

The requirements are as follows:

• An Intel Processor
• An internal, external, or shared DVD drive
• At least 512 MB of RAM
• Display connected to an Apple-supplied video card
• 9GB of disk space, or 12GB for developer tools

Snow Leopard is being touted as a performance, stability and security release and is expected to ship “within a year.”

During an interview with New York Times’ John Markoff, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has revealed some more details about Apple’s upcoming operating system “Snow Leopard” and the companies acquisition of PA Semi.

When talking about Mac OS X Snow Leopard Jobs stated that “Apple would focus principally on technology for the next generation of the industry’s increasingly parallel computer processors.”

“We’ve added over a thousand features to Mac OS X in the last five years,” he said Monday in an interview after his presentation. “We’re going to hit the pause button on new features.”

Apple, he claimed, has made a parallel-programming breakthrough.

Snow Leopard will also tap into the power of powerful GPUs that sit idle most of the time in many modern computers, “Jobs described a new processing standard that Apple is proposing called OpenCL (Open Compute Library) which is intended to refocus graphics processors on standard computing functions.”

“Basically it lets you use graphics processors to do computation,” he said. “It’s way beyond what Nvidia or anyone else has, and it’s really simple.”

Apple and Steve Jobs are currently touting Snow Leopard has featureless but a quick look at the preview pages for both the client and server reveals that this isn’t the whole truth.

The client version of Snow Leopard lists full Microsoft Exchange Support while the server version boasts read and write support for ZFS. Both considerably sought after features that are being added to Snow Leopard.

During the interview Steve Jobs also briefly mentioned PA Semi which Apple acquired back in April, at the time much speculation was thrown around.

“PA Semi is going to do system-on-chips for iPhones and iPods,” he said.

Apple has released the seventh beta of the iPhone SDK to registered developers. The iPhone Software Development Kit remains under NDA and is labelled build 9M2199, the total download size is 1.19GB.

Registered iPhone Developers can download the latest beta from the iPhone Dev centre.

Apple today announced that its online service .Mac will be replaced with MobileMe.

Apple has posted an article aimed at .Mac users to help them understand the transition.

This article helps current .Mac members better understand what to expect from the upcoming MobileMe upgrade. When MobileMe becomes available, this article will be updated with more details to help upgraded members get started with the new service. You may want to bookmark this article and refer back to it when MobileMe goes live.

In short the article outlines that your .Mac account will work as it did before, but you’ll have a choice of using either username@mac.com or username@me.com. If you have aliases setup at .Mac they will continue to work as well. All your .Mac websites will continue to work at both mac.com and me.com.

During the Keynote Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall discussed iPhone software development, MobileMe and introduced iPhone 3G.

[Update] Keynote is now available to download via the Apple Keynote Podcast.

[Update 2] Also available in HD.

The FCC has lifted any limitations on displaying iPhone 3G documentation to the public.

Today Apple announced a myriad of products at WWDC including the announcement of iPhone 3G, the replacement of .Mac with MobileMe and further clarified features in iPhone OS 2.0 and iPhone SDK.

Here are some notes of interest garnered from today’s announcements:

• iPhone no longer includes Dock.
• iPhone includes USB Power Adapter
• iPhone supports HSPA (High speed packet access), technically 3.5G technology
• iPhone not available through US Online Apple Store
• iPhone not sold by Apple in UK, O2 and Carphone Warehouse only
• iPhone 3G requires iTunes 7.7 (not yet released)
• iPhone continues to feature 2.0MP camera

During today’s WWDC keynote Apple mentioned that it would preview Mac OS X 10.6 to developers attending WWDC.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which builds on the incredible success of OS X Leopard and is the next major version of the world’s most advanced operating system. Rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X, set a new standard for quality and lay the foundation for future OS X innovation. Snow Leopard is optimized for multi-core processors, taps into the vast computing power of graphic processing units (GPUs), enables breakthrough amounts of RAM and features a new, modern media platform with QuickTime X. Snow Leopard includes out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 and is scheduled to ship in about a year.

“We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system.”

Snow Leopard delivers unrivaled support for multi-core processors with a new technology code-named “Grand Central,” making it easy for developers to create programs that take full advantage of the power of multi-core Macs. Snow Leopard further extends support for modern hardware with Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which lets any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications. OpenCL is based on the C programming language and has been proposed as an open standard. Furthering OS X’s lead in 64-bit technology, Snow Leopard raises the software limit on system memory up to a theoretical 16TB of RAM.

Using media technology pioneered in OS X iPhone, Snow Leopard introduces QuickTime X, which optimizes support for modern audio and video formats resulting in extremely efficient media playback. Snow Leopard also includes Safari with the fastest implementation of JavaScript ever, increasing performance by 53 percent, making Web 2.0 applications feel more responsive.

For the first time, OS X includes native support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 in OS X applications Mail, iCal and Address Book, making it even easier to integrate Macs into organizations of any size.

[Update] Apple has also posted a dedicated Snow Leopard page.

Apple today announced that iPhone SDK downloads have topped more than 250,000 since its launch on March 6. The iPhone SDK provides developers with the same rich set of Application Programming Interfaces and tools that Apple uses to create its native applications for iPhone. Apple today also announced that its amazing new App Store will be available in 62 countries bringing a breakthrough way for developers to wirelessly deliver their applications directly to iPhone and iPod touch users around the world. Users can download applications wirelessly and start using them immediately.

“Developer reaction to the features, power and simplicity of the iPhone SDK has been incredible,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “We are seeing some truly amazing native apps from our developers and think users are going to love the breadth and depth of the applications available from the App Store.”

Leading developers such as AOL, Cisco, eBay, Electronic Arts, Epocrates, TypePad, Salesforce.com and Sega have demonstrated impressive native applications developed using the iPhone SDK.

“The SDK allowed us to build a groundbreaking new AIM client in record time,” said Kevin Conroy, executive vice president, AOL. “The platform’s elegance and ease of use has inspired our developers to create innovative new web and SDK based experiences for iPhone and iPod touch.”

“The iPhone SDK has given us an excellent set of tools and APIs to create mobile extensions for FIM’s entire portfolio of web brands including MySpace, IGN and Photobucket in the near term, and other properties such as FOXSports.com down the road,” said John Smelzer, senior vice president of Mobile for Fox Interactive Media. “The popularity of the iPhone, along with the high demand for applications, gives us an amazing opportunity to create groundbreaking mobile experiences.”

“Cocoa-touch is a compact and robust application framework that handles all the heavy lifting for developers so they can concentrate on building their applications in record time with the legendary Apple finesse we’ve come to expect,” said David Krantz, president of YELLOWPAGES.COM.“ iPhone has been a game changer since it launched, and the availability of our YELLOWPAGES.COM application on the App Store is going to make a great device even better.”

“As mobile developers with primarily J2ME and BREW experience, we were up and running with the iPhone within two weeks,” said Jonathan Backer, manager of Mobile Engineering, The Walt Disney Company. “The hardware is stable and full-featured, while the software development tools are intuitive and represent a level of polish rarely seen in the mobile arena.”

“Since the launch of the iPhone we have seen a steady rise in traffic to the MLB.com mobile site so it made perfect sense to develop a rich client application for the App Store,” said Adam Ritter, vice president, Wireless Major League Baseball, Advanced Media. “Our development staff was excited to work on an iPhone application and reported that the SDK was robust and straight forward and contained helpful development tools. All combined we were able to expedite our development and deliver an application we know baseball fans will enjoy.”