9:42 PT – Dan Moren: Good morning and welcome (virtually) to Moscone West as we cover Apple’s WWDC keynote event. I’m Macworld Associate Editor Dan Moren alongside Macworld Editorial Director Jason Snell and we’ll be with you throughout the next couple hours as Phil Schiller and a coterie of Apple executives show off the latest developments in the world of Apple.
9:44 PT – DM: The crowd is still assembling, and the only hint we have so far is a giant Apple logo on the main screen. I know. Exciting, right?
9:46 PT – Jason Snell: Here’s your musical interlude for the day. They’re playing Radiohead. “15 Step.”
9:56 PT – DM: Mr. Voiceover is welcoming us to the conference. And now they’re going to ask us to turn off our phones and pagers (I would hate to be the one dude in the crowd with a pager—I’m looking at you, Doogie Howser).
9:56 PT – JS: Can you feel the electricity building? We can. They ought to rename Moscone West “the Electricity Building.”
9:58 PT – DM: Current musical selection: “You, Me & The Bourgeoisie” by The Submarines which you may recognize from one of Apple’s commercials.
10:00 PT – DM: The lights are coming down. Let’s get ready to rock with a side of roll.
10:01 PT – DM: And here’s PC (John Hodgman) on the screen, welcoming us to the WWDC conference. Now he’s doing a second take, welcoming us *again* to the WWDC. “A week with some innovation, but not too much, please.” Don’t you think 1 billion apps is enough? Maybe you could float a few ideas my way? “Cancelled, get out.” And here’s Mac. “What PC’s trying to say is ‘Have a great conference.'”
10:02 PT – DM: And here’s Phil Schiller. Blue collared shirt (untucked! bold, Phil). “We have an amazing week planned for you. It’s incredible.” Over 5200 developers from 54 countries here. Best level of excitement for the conference yet. Here’s a chart of OS X active users in the first five full years of OS X, 2002-2007. Actual active users, up to 25 million. But over the last two years, there’s been a huge spike, approaching 75 million. Tripled the number of active users and installed base of customers. “No wonder everybody’s trying to race behind us and follow in our footsteps.”
10:04 PT – JS: Interesting, because they’re rolling iPhone numbers into the “OS X” installed base. Because it runs “OS X.”
10:04 PT – DM: Bertrand Serlet, SVP of OS X and Scott Forstall, SVP iPhone software will come out to talk as well. We’re going to start out talking about the Mac. Majority of new customers choose notebooks when they buy a new Mac. Starting with MacBook Air, notebooks use the unibody construction. Sturdier, made of beautiful materials, packed with features, insanely thin and light. Then the 13-inch, 15-inch, and 17-inch MacBooks to follow. All have done extremely well. Even though Apple has a huge lead, they don’t want to stop, and they want to extend that lead.
10:06 PT – DM: Brand new version of the 15-inch MacBook Pro. Built on the unibody architecture. Revolutionary built-in battery (à la the 17-inch’s non-replaceable). Up to 7 hours of battery life. 2 hours longer than before; 40% greater battery life. And it’s more environmentally friendly. Most batteries get 300 recharge cycles; new lithium polymer batteries get over 1,000 recharge cycles. Typical notebook user gets 5 years of life before seeing diminished battery life. Most customers won’t need to change the battery in their notebook. With competitors, users go through a lot more batteries. New model is just as thin, just as light.
10:08 PT – DM: 15-inch has the “nicest display we’ve ever put in an notebook.” 60% better color gamut. In place of Express Card slot there’s a SD card slot. Why an SD card slot? Most customers have digital cameras, and you can plug it in with a USB cable, but customers like popping out SD card. Pop it right into the MacBook Pro, and you’re good. And more.
10:07 PT – JS: Interesting – of course Apple knows it will hear criticism of having no swappable battery, but the upside is longer life. Apple must feel like most people just don’t swap batteries. It would be nice if there was more third-party support for external backup power, though.
10:09 PT – DM: Fastest notebook we’ve ever made. Up to 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 6MB L2 cache, up to 8GB of 1066MHz DDR3. Up to 500 GB 7200rpm hard drive or up to 256GB SSD. And it costs just $1699—$300 less. Standard starts at 2.53GHz, 4GB of RAM, 250GB HD, 9400M Nvidia graphics, SD Card slot for $1699. At $1999, 2.66Ghz, 320GB hard drive, both 9400M+9600M GT graphics, and the highest end is $2299 ($200 less expensive than before). 2.8GHz, 500GB HD. New configurations of 15-inch MacBook Pro.
10:11 PT – DM: The 17-inch configuration gets updated. 2.8GHz, 500GB hard drive, and the 17-inch retains the ExpressCard slot for pros. And it’s just $2499. All of these are shipping today.
10:11 PT – JS: Finally, Apple puts an SD slot on the agenda. Interesting that they’re ditching the ExpressCard slot on all but the 17-inch model.
10:11 PT – DM: And then there’s the 13-inch unibody design. Updated, with the same built-in battery. It gets up to 7 hours of battery life. 2 hours longer than before, 40% more battery life, same dimensions. It has the new 60% greater color gamut display. And it has the SD card slot as well. Challenge to fit (looks like there may be no audio input?). At what point isn’t this a MacBook Pro? What can we add to make it a MacBook Pro?
10:13 PT – DM: 13-inch can also take up to 8GB; up to 500GB of storage, or 256GB SSD. The built-in backlit LED keyboard is standard as well. And it’s got FireWire 800 port. MacBook Pro deserves it. So the 13-inch is bumped up to “MacBook Pro” and it starts at just $1199. Less expensive than the 13-inch aluminum MacBook it replaces.
10:14 PT – DM: Standard configs: $1199 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of memory, 9400M graphics, 160GB hard drive, SD card slot; $1499, 2.53GHz, 4GB memory, 250GB hard drive. And it’s available today. And that completes the MacBook Pro family. Most affordable lineup ever.
10:15 PT – DM: Just a week or so ago, updated white MacBook. So to complete the picture, also bumping up the MacBook Air. $1499 gets you 1.86GHz, 2GB memory, 120GB; and a 2.13GHz with 128GB, that’s $1799 and that’s $700 less expensive than previous configuration.
10:15 PT – JS: Very cool to see the Air come down in price, since it’s an appealing light laptop but its price was just out of whack with the rest of the laptop line. It’s closer in whack now.
10:16 PT – DM: Also very environmentally friendly. Every MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air meets the EPEAT Gold standard and Energy Star version 5 coming out this summer. World’s greenest lineup of notebooks.
10:16 PT – DM: Great hardware deserves great software. So to hear about Mac OS X, here comes Bertrand Serlet. Also wearing a blue collared shirt, but he’s got it tucked in.
10:17 PT – DM: Leopard is the most successful software product Apple has ever had, like Cover Flow, Quick Look, Time Machine. What a sharp contrast with Windows Vista. Showing quotes from PC Mag, InfoWeek talking about Vista. Microsoft has dug a good hole for itself with Windows Vista; Windows 7 is built on the same technologies: registry, DLLs, the User Account Control, defragging hard drive. And in Windows 7, even more complexity for users. Windows 7 is just another version of Vista.
10:19 PT – DM: Proud of Leopard, so when it became time to think about the next big cat, they decided to call it Snow Leopard to build on Leopard. Build a better Leopard. What does that mean? First, lots of refinements across board. Second, powerful new technologies and third, Exchange support.
10:19 PT – DM: First, refinements. Mac OS X is made up of a lot of projects, so for Snow Leopard, they’ve decided to refine over 90% of those projects. The Finder, for example. Didn’t change the UI of it, and rewrote it using Cocoa and from that rewrite, lots of little benefits. A lot of things are faster for example.
10:20 PT – DM: In Leopard, beautiful 3D dock. But sometimes too much clutter, so they’ve built Expose into the dock. Click and hold on an app icon and it shows you all the windows for that app.
10:21 PT – DM: Install is now up to 45% faster, and after you install, you recover 6GB of disk space, over half the footprint of the OS, thanks to tech like file system compression.
10:22 PT – JS: As advertised previously, Apple is selling Snow Leopard as an incremental improvement on Leopard, with small nice touches plus improved speed and better use of resources.
10:22 PT – DM: Preview has gotten faster, 2x faster for opening a JPEG. Text selection in PDF, doesn’t always get logical. Use a little bit of AI to infer structure of text selection. Yes, text selection gets a round of applause.
10:22 PT – DM: Chinese input method. Why not use the trackpad? You can draw characters with your finger (looks a lot like the iPhone’s Chinese input method).
10:23 PT – DM: Mail is even faster. 2.3x faster for moving messages, faster for search too.
10:23 PT – DM: Safari 4. Today, shipping Safari 4 for Leopard, Tiger, and Windows (XP and Vista). Unsurpassed sped; they claim it’s faster than IE 8, Firefox 3, and even Chrome 2. Multiples of IE8 speed—Safari 4 is over 7x faster. And it passes the Acid3 test, 100%. IE8 passes only 21%. Safari 4 will be included in Snow Leopard. Couple extra features in Snow Leopard: crash resistance. Number one cause of crashes in OS X is browser plug ins (read: Flash); but when it crashes, you just see that part of your page broken, not a whole crash.
10:25 PT – JS: That’s a little bit of a dig at Flash, yes, but there’s also the Chrome issue. Google’s big selling point with Chrome is that it’s more stable and walls off separate pages into separate processes. Seems like Apple’s making similar claims here for Safari under Snow Leopard.
10:25 PT – DM: Even more speed too. 64-bit JavaScript performance is 50% faster.
10:26 PT – DM: QuickTime has a fancy new icon, shiny and purple. All new QuickTime X in Snow Leopard. Modern foundation, hardware acceleration, ColorSync, and new technology for streaming, HTTP streaming. Works with any webserver, like an Apache server. Also change the User Interface. Looks a lot like QuickLook window, and even the title bar goes away when it’s inactive.
10:27 PT – DM: We’re going to take a look at some of the features and little touches. Craig Federighi, VP of Mac OS Engineering is going to come talk about the refinements. Three areas to cover.
10:27 PT – DM: Dock and the Finder. First up, Stacks. In Snow Leopard, Stacks handles large contents better than ever, you can now scroll through a large Stack, and you can drill into sub-folders. In Icon view in the Finder, there’s now a magnificiation slider, and the icons are live previews, so you can play movies, page through PDFs, etc.
10:28 PT – DM: Dock Expose. Lots of windows open by the end of the day. Usually know which app has the window looking for. If you click and hold on the app icon in the dock, and you get a look at all the images. (It also looks smoother, and they’ve relocated the title). You can zoom in on a window without leaving Expose. And moving content across windows is easier. Dock Expose into Finder, find the image, and drag it to Mail to get Mail Expose, get the correct window and drop it in.
10:30 PT – DM: And now onto Safari 4. The fastest browser on every platform. Speed extends to JavaScript sites as well. Google Maps loads quickly, and all of its features work fast fast fast. Demoing Top Sites. Full history search with Cover Flow view. (Daring Fireball’s John Gruber points out that we’re not seeing tabs on any of the windows so far, so there’s a question of whether they kept the tab structure shown off in the Safari 4 beta?). Full Spotlight search of all the content in the history. Type “Maui” and you get all the pages that reference “Maui” in their content.
10:31 PT – JS: Apple spending some of its demo focusing on user productivity in Snow Leopard. You know, it might not make big waves at a press event, but it’s the sort of thing that makes people feel they’re enjoying their Mac computing experience more, which can lead to more satisfied customers. Interesting that they’re bringing it up here.
10:32 PT – DM: QuickTime X. Playback controls superimposed on video, and then everything fades away when you take the mouse off. Fade in when you mouseover. Ability to trim and share. Get a visual timeline of the video, can drag the endpoints with seamless scrubbing, click trim, and you get the edited clip. Can share to YouTube, MobileMe, or iTunes (for export to playback on iPhone).
10:34 PT – JS: The new QuickTime interface looks nice. So what happens when you open an audio file instead of a video file?
10:34 PT – DM: Just a few of the many touches to Snow Leopard. Bertrand’s back.
10:34 PT – DM: Powerful new technologies as well. All these new resources: gigabytes of RAM; powerful processor at a frequency in GHz, multicore, 64-bit capable; and the GPU with enormous raw processing power. But to take advantage of it, you need the right software.
10:35 PT – DM: First 64-bit. Primary reason is to address a lot of memory. 32-bit software taps out at 4GB; 64-bit has a limit of 16 billion gigabytes. Certain processes run up to twice as fast under 64-bit. Snow Leopard now running all the major system apps in 64-bit mode.
10:36 PT – DM: Next, multicore. Used to just increase frequency for the chips, but now we have more and more cores. The challenge of multicores is how to take advantage of them. Answer is threads. New technology called Grand Central Dispatch. Built in support for multicore across all of Snow Leopard. Integration with all system APIs, tools to tune programs. Just to give a taste of using GCD, looking at Threads in Leopard Mail.
10:37 PT – JS: Oooh, my favorite subject! The problem of multiprocessing. Snow Leopard’s Grand Central Dispatch is meant to make it easier for programmers to chop their programs’ work up into little pieces so that they can be fed to all of those processor cores inside your computer. The result: faster programs that can take advantage of all the processing power they’ve packed into your Mac.
10:37 PT – DM: When Mail is busy, it has a certain number of threads; when idle, it has the same number of threads. But in Snow Leopard, it uses more threads when busy, fewer when idle.
10:38 PT – DM: Next, talking graphics. Using OpenGL, but want to use power for all kinds of things. So there’s a technology called OpenCL (“c” stands for “computing”). Based on C, hardware abstracted, automatic optimization, and numerical accuracy, so you can use it for scientific computation. And it’s an open standard, with lots of companies participating (EA, AMD, Nvidia, Intel, Broadcom, etc.). That’s OpenCL
10:40 PT – DM: Those are just three of the technologies that we have in Snow Leopard. This power is power for Apple to innovate in the OS and power for third-party applications.
10:40 PT – DM: Third area to cover is Exchange. People want to take their Mac to work. Works great, for most part, thanks to thinks like Boot Camp and virtualiation, file & print, Microsoft Office, more. Have decided to build Exchange support into main three apps: Mail, iCal, and Address Book. Just fill in email address and password, and you’re setup in all three apps.
10:41 PT – DM: Demo of Exchange support. Personal mail accounts already set up, but want to add Exchange. Add an account, type in email address and password, and it auto-discovers the server and sets everything up. Exchange emails, folders, To Dos, Notes, etc. Instant searching of Exchange data. Can use all OS X features, for example data detectors spot addresses for contacts and mapping. Meeting invitations show up in Inbox, can accept in Mail or open it in iCal.
10:43 PT – DM: iCal has an integrated view of both Exchange calendars and personal calendars. Address Book shows an integrated view of Exchange contacts and local contacts. If you want to set up meeting with people in Exchange, drag contact folder out of Address Book and just drop it into iCal. Plus you can schedule meeting rooms by searching location field. iCal can look for next available time in a meeting room and reschedule meeting automatically.
10:45 PT – DM: Exchange support requires MS Exchange Server 2007. With Exchange support built into Snow Leopard, it has no extra charge for Mac OS while Windows users usually have to pay extra. So Snow Leopard: lots of refinements, powerful new technologies, and Exchange support. That’s Snow Leopard.
10:46 PT – DM: Snow Leopard will be available for all Intel Macs, past and present (sorry, PowerPC folks). How shall we price it? Leopard is $129. We want all users to upgrade to Snow Leopard, because Snow Leopard is a better Leopard. So it’s priced at $29—for Leopard users. Family pack at $49. Available in September. Near final Developer Preview available today. That concludes the info on the Mac, and now we’re going to hear from Scott Forstall on iPhone.
10:47 PT – DM: Scott’s wearing that same black jumper that he usually seems to be wearing. Incredible year for the iPhone; less than a year ago, released 2.0 and the native SDK. Allowed developers to go beyond Web development and build native apps. Response has been staggering. Free SDK has been downloaded more than 1 million times. Developers have been prolific in posting apps to the App Store; now more than 50,000 apps on the App Store.
10:47 PT – JS: Good price. As near to free as you’re going to get due to Sarbanes-Oxley. Great news for Leopard users. And for people who’ve been holding out, I guess it will soon be time to go Leopard as well. As for the PowerPC era… I guess it’s over.
10:48 PT – DM: Apps from the App Store run on all iPhones and iPod touches; have already sold over 40 million iPhones and iPod touches. Customers love downloading and running apps. On April 23rd, they crossed 1 billion apps downloaded from the App Store. In just 9 months. Scott would like to say thank you to customers, and especially thank you to the developers. Heard some amazing story from developers, so here’s a little video.
10:50 PT – DM: Lots of different developers from game developers, medical app developers, and MLB’s app developer.
10:55 PT – DM: That gets a nice round of applause from the developers, as you might expect. Good, they deserve it.
10:55 PT – DM: Let’s talk about iPhone OS 3.0. Major update, bringing 100 new features, let’s talk about a few. Cut, Copy and Paste. Nice, simple, touch-based interface for Cut, Copy, and Paste. Works across apps from Apple and from third parties, and undo support with shake, as well as Developer APIs to expand what types of data you can cut, copy and paste.
10:56 PT – DM: Landscape. Have had it in Safari since iPhone 1.0. In 3.0, landscape comes to all key apps: Mail, Notes, and Messages. Speaking of Messages. MMS has been added. Allows you to send and receive photos, locations, contact info, and voice recording. All of that support in the same app that supports text messages. One app to rule them all: Messages. MMS requires carrier support. 29 of carrier partners in 76 countries will support MMS at launch of iPhone OS 3.0. In the United States, AT&T will be ready to support MMS later this summer (that got an “oooh” from the crowd).
10:57 PT – DM: Search goes beyond contacts. Calendar, music, notes, and email. Search not only the messages downloaded to phone, but also potentially thousands of messages on your server.
10:58 PT – DM: In addition, adding Spotlight. Single location on Home screen that allows you to search across phone, even searching apps. If you, like Scott, have over 100 apps on your phone, you can search and launch right from Spotlight.
10:58 PT – JS: Wow, some boos in the audience for AT&T. Apple definitely making its displeasure known by suggesting that AT&T is dragging its feet when it comes to supporting MMS on the iPhone.
10:59 PT – DM: iTunes now lets you rent and purchase movies right from your phone. Great if you’re at an airport. Also TV shows, music videos, and audiobooks. And support for iTunes U right on the phone as well, since they care about education.
10:59 PT – DM: Parental Controls. In addition to the existing ones, for things like Safari or YouTube, they’ve added other controls. Movies, TV shows, and apps. Parent can limit to their child to only view G or PG movies. Likewise can limit child to only running apps that are age appropriate (though that means they have to rate stuff, doesn’t it?)
11:00 PT – DM: Tethering, which allows you to share iPhone Internet connection with computer. If you’ve got no Wi-Fi, you can share the Internet conncetion that your phone already has with your computer. Works with Macs and PCs, works over USB or over Bluetooth. Seamless experience. Once you’ver turned on tethering, you don’t have to run any app on your computer. Requires carrier support, 22 carriers in 44 countries. “More on that later.” Ummm. Way to leave us hanging, Scott.
11:02 PT – DM: Safari. On iPhone 2.2.1, iPhone 3G, Safari runs SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark at 126 seconds; most phones can’t even run the benchmark. JavaScript almost 3x faster on 3.0, only 43 seconds. Web pages load and render really fast.
11:02 PT – JS: Wow, Apple’s giving AT&T the stick today. All unsaid, of course, but the list of carriers that support tethering on iPhone 3.0 is huge, and yet… AT&T isn’t in there. Are we seeing Apple negotiating its next carrier deal in public?
11:02 PT – DM: Suport for HTTP streaming audio and video. This protocol picks the right bit rate and data quality for your current connection: EDGE, 3G, or Wi-Fi. HTTP, so it can go through firewalls.
11:03 PT – DM: Autofill, can optionally remember usernames and passwords for websites (thank the lord). Contact information on your phone can help you fill out web forms. So: great performance, HTTP streaming, auto-fill, and HTML5 support in Safari on the iPhone. Adding support for emerging standards like audio and video tags.
11:04 PT – DM: Languages: ship a single OS around the world, localized into every language supported. Multilingual customer running in English can switch to a different language on their keyboard. Support for even more languages in iPhone OS 3.0. Hebrew and Arabic (yay). Greek, Korean, and Thai. Now support more than 30 languages in iPhone OS 3.0. Every one of the languages has both portrait and landscape keyboards.
11:05 PT – DM: Find My iPhone. If you’ve ever misplaced or lost your phone, it can be somewhat traumatic. 30 Rock clip where Tina Fey lost her phone to a cabbie. Hopefully you haven’t had a 30 Rock experience, says Scott. So Find My iPhone is a service available only to MobileMe customers. If you lose or misplace your phone and you can log in to MobileMe and it will show you where you left your phone. You can send a message to your phone from the home, and it plays an alert (whether or not you left it in silent mode). And the sound alert means that you lost it at your house, the sound still plays so you can walk around to find it.
11:07 PT – DM: If phone really is lost or stolen, you can also send it a remote wipe command to delete all of your data. Erase contacts, mail, and everything. And if you find it again, you can plug it in and it will restore from backup. Alright, I’ll grant you, pretty cool.
11:08 PT – JS: Okay, Apple, that’s how you make MobileMe more valuable.
11:09 PT – Dan Frakes: This will sell many MobileMe subscriptions all by itself.
11:08 PT – DM: 1,000 new developer APIs. Starting with in-app purchase. Allows developers to make financial purchases from within the app, enabling things like magazine subscriptions and additional game packs. Business terms are the same as apps on the store. Free apps remain free, so you can’t give away a free app and then charge for additional content.
11:09 PT – DM: Suport for Peer to Peer networking. Peer to Peer support automatically finds other client over Bluetooth, no pairing necessary. Great for any application that wants to form peer to peer connection between two devices.
11:10 PT – DM: Accessories. Opening up ability for hardware developers to build software apps for their accessories. LifeScan said it would build a companion iPhone app for its OneTouch glucose scanner. Will calculate how much insulin you need to take for your next meal.
11:11 PT – DM: Companion apps can talk to accessories via dock connector or over Bluetooth. Use standard protocol or create custom procotols to talk to your own custom hardware.
11:11 PT – DM: Cocoa Touch control to embed Google Maps, including satellite and hybrid views, directly into your applications. This control is heart of the Maps application, and you get everything you expect, like pan and zoom, custom annotations, current location, geocoding. Developers can build turn-by-turn direction applications using Core Location.
11:12 PT – DM: Push Notifications are *in* iPhone OS 3.0. Generic push notification service for developers. Allows developers to push things like scoring alerts, as well as instant messages. Three types of notfications: text alerts, badges, and custom alert sounds. A few of the more than 1000 new APIs that make up SDK for iPhone OS 3.0.
11:13 PT – DM: Ever since we announced 3.0, have seeded developers with betas. Many have been taking advantage of features with 3.0, and so we’re going to hear from some developers who are using the 3.0 features.
11:13 PT – DM: Mark Hickey from Gameloft. Announcing Asphalt 5 racing game. Let’s take the Audi R8 through a spin in the mountains. Media player access lets your car stereo access your iPod music. Peer to peer multiplayer over Bluetooth, worldwide multiplayer over Wi-Fi including voice chat, and additional content like additional cars and tracks for $0.99.
11:16 PT – DM: Next up, Airstrip Technologies. Medical software that allows healthcare providers to monitor patient information on their devices. Dr. Cameron Powell coming out to speak. AirStrip Critical Care. Push notification. Pre-select clinical parameters per patient, for example lab results. Can jump to information. With AirStrip CC can virtually look into patients room by providing real-time vital signs. This is pretty cool. It kind of makes me wish I’d finished going to med school. Or started going to med school.
11:20 PT – DM: Josh Koppel of ScrollMotion. Built around bringing great content to iPhone. New in-app bookstore, powered by in-app purchase. Over 500 best-selling books in the app store. 50 major magazines, over 170 daily newspapers, over 1 million books to the App Store. You can pinch to zoom the view, swipe to the next page. Citations made possible with copy and paste, and you go write into an email form inside the app. Partnered with several textbook publishers liek Hougton-Mifflin, Wiley, McGraw-Hill. Coming soon to an iPhone near you.
11:22 PT – DM: TomTom. Man, we have been waiting to hear from these guys for year. Both application and accessory integration. Peter-Frans Pauwels. Using new features in iPhone 3.0 to deliver real TomTom navigation as a true iPhone experience. Plan a route from Moscone West to Sausalito. Best route at the best time of day. And it has the voice cues. Demo looks a little jerky. Create an optional accessory that’s like a little cradle that suctions into the window. Not just a holder, it securely docks iPhone, and you can flip it into landscape. Thanks to accessory framework, they can enhance GPS, also give you hands free calling, power, and a loudspeaker. Both will be available this summer, with a range of maps.
11:26 PT – DM: Neil Young from ngmoco. Star Defense (like Tower Defense but, you know, in space). Expansions is the word of the day here. Major new content and feature packs. Just a few dollars more for extra content. Push to play challenges allows you to play online. Launching today, but 3.0 features will come when iPhone 3.0 launches (uh, hey guys, let us know when that will be, huh?).
11:29 PT – DM: Pasco to teach science to kids in K-12. Wayne Grant of Pasco to show off their science-teaching app. Ballon bursting sensors. Scott Forstall comes out in lab coat, goggles, and ear protectors. He’s going to blow up a balloon until it pops. “The rapid increase in pressure is right here.” says the founder as the balloon fails to inflate. Awww, fail. So we’ll walk it through as though it had happened. “That flat line actually zooms quite well.” Poor guy, but he’s rolling with the punches.
11:30 PT – JS: Good to see turn-by-turn navigation actually demoed on the iPhone. That’s going to sell a lot of iPhones and it’s going to make life a lot harder for GPS makers.
11:33 PT – DM: “Last time I’m dressing up for an experiment,” says Scott. Zipcar is next.
11:33 PT – DM: Zipcar’s Luke Schneider. New Zipcar iPhone app. Maps show you all zip car locations all around the city. Green pins indicate available cars. Tap on a pin, up pops name and number of cars. Instantly see Zipcars in any lcoation. Gives him a list of the cars, and you can set cars as favorites. Tap Reserve, pick a time, and duration. And you can tap the horn icon on the iPhone to have it beep the horn for your car, so it’s easy to find and you can unlock the car from the iPhone. That’s Zipcar on the iPhone.
11:37 PT – DM: Final demo from Line 6 and Planet Waves. Together, they let you control your guitar and your amp at your next gig. Marcus Ryle. Using accessory framework you can connect iPhone to connect amp and guitar. Can choose the amp style. “This doesn’t run on compressed air, but it could still have some technical issues.” Can also adjust treble and bass. Can also change what kind of guitars, change into acoustic. “That’s not acoustic.” Whoooopsie. You can design your own guitar. You’ll all have to go to Line6.com to hear what it actually sounds like. Change the tuning of the guitar without using a tuning peg. You can move the frets around—apparently it sounds impressive when it works.
11:41 PT – JS: Okay, so that didn’t go well. They’re not going to say iPhone 3.0 is shipping today, are they? Because with crashes like these, maybe there’s some more debugging to be done, either in the apps or the OS.
11:41 PT – DM: “The chance of something going wrong is directly related to the number of people watching,” says Scott. He says it worked great in demos.
11:42 PT – DM: That’s iPhone 3.0. It will be free for all iPhone customers, both of original iPhone and iPhone 3G. Cost $9.95 for iPod touch customers, both of 1G and 2G models. And it will be available worldwide June 17th. Next Wednesday, folks. All paid developers will have golden master seed of iPhone OS 3.0 today. Can go and download it today. Number one, you need to go to iTunes Connect and assign a rating for your applications, and number two, test your apps against 3.0. If not, quickly submit an update.
11:43 PT – JS: iPhone 3.0 drops a week from Wednesday. But developers get it today, so they’ve got time to make sure their stuff works!
11:43 PT – JS: Adding parental control age ratings to iPhone apps is huge. Even if you don’t have kids. Why? Because all of these ridiculous app rejections will cease once Apple can approve “questionable content” that’s rated for mature audiences only.
11:44 PT – DM: And Phil’s back. “To call iPhone 3G a hit would be the understatement of the year.” Wasn’t that long ago that we were frustrated with these “crappy” devices. Two thirds of all mobile browsing is done an iPhone OS device.
11:45 PT – DM: Comparing the iPhone App Store: over 50,000 apps. Android is almost 5,000. Nokia Ovi Store, took a lot of phones and added them together 1,088. “And somebody else. I can’t read it, it’s small.” The last in reference to Palm’s 18 apps. Zing, Phil. Zing.
11:46 PT – DM: And an entirely new version. The iPhone 3GS—the “S” stands for “speed.” Same great design of iPhone 3G, but what’s inside is entirely new. Launching messages app, twice as fast. Loading a game, 2.4x faster. Viewing attachments, 3.6x faster. Load NY Times, 2.9x faster. Speed against iPhone 3G running iPhone 3.0 software. Even faster with the 3GS, from 126 to 43 on iPhone 3.0, on iPhone 3GS, it’s just 15 seconds.
11:48 PT – DM: Up to 2x faster on average. Great performance technology, OpenGL|ES 2.0. 3GS is ready for 7.2 Mbps HSDPA. Also has amazing features. Brand new built-in camera. Looking at Flickr daily number of users loading pictures from cellphone: iPhone is 3.5x more than any other cellphone. Brand new 3 megapixel autofocus camera. Beautiful pic of the Golden Gate. In addition to Autofocus, also tap to focus. Tap the subject of whatever you want to focus on, and it’ll focus and auto compensate. Improve low-light sensitivity lets you take better pictures. Auto focus also has auto-macro. As close as 10cm away. API lets developers take advantage of camera and get features for free.
11:51 PT – DM: Oh, and it also captures video. Just go into Camera app and there’s a switch for still or movie, flick to what you want to take, and it takes 30fps VGA with audio, and it’s auto focus, auto white balance, auto exposure.
11:52 PT – DM: Videos are right alongside your pictures. You can scrub through a timeline and edit with a tap of your finger, picking an in-point and end-point and hit “trim.” And you can tap the share button to email, over MMS (“if my carrier supports it”), MobileMe gallery, and YouTube. Expect iPhone 3GS to become most popular cell phone for video. Just like still camera, there’s an API for adding video capture to your applications.
11:53 PT – DM: Voice Control! Heck yeah. In any application, hold down the Home button and the Voice Control UI pops up. Commands you can give scroll by. “Call Scott Forstall.” You can play music or playlists. Can ask iPhone what’s playing now and iPhone will speak back to you and tell you title and artist. Can even trigger Genius by saying “play songs like this.” That’s Voice Control.
11:55 PT – DM: There’s also a built-in digital compass. (One guy whooped it up on that, and Phil commented about a crazy compass guy). Gives you Longitude and Latitude, can jump into maps. Tap a second time and it’ll even flip the map to orient the way you’re facing. Developer API for this as well.
11:55 PT – JS: The voice control feature is great, and long overdue. It’s a shame that it appears to only be supported on the iPhone 3GS.
11:55 PT – DM: Accessibility. VoiceOver support can read to people. Zoom in the display to have larger icons. Invert colors. Even can pipe mono audio through and speak auto-text corrections.
11:56 PT – DM: Built in support for Nike+. Can talk to the sensors, play your power song.
11:57 PT – DM: Enterprise-requested feature: hardware encryption. If you use Exchange service or Find Your iPhone, remote wipe is instantaneous, and backups are encrypted.
11:57 PT – DM: And they’ve improved the battery life too. Put up the battery specs for the iPhone 3G running iPhone 3.0. But 3GS is even better. 9hrs of Internet on Wi-Fi, 10 hours of video, 30 hours of audio, 12 hours of 2G talk time and 5 hours of 3G talk time.
11:58 PT – DM: Also, most environmentally-friendly iPhone yet. Arsenic-free glass, BFR-free, mercury-free LCD, PVC-free system, 23% smaller packaging. Smaller packaging means can ship millions around the world in less space.
11:58 PT – DM: iPhone 3GS will ship with iPhone 3.0 features. Rate of applications on App Store still accelerating. iPhone 3GS will be just $199 for 16GB version. $299 for 32GB iPhone. AT&T prices in the U.S. for new and qualified customers. And both come in black and white.
12:00 PT – DM: Want to reach more customers, so they’ll keep the iPhone 3G on the market at just $99 for 8GB. That pricing starts today.
12:01 PT – DM: Here’s the lineup: iPhone 3G at $99 for 8GB; iPhone 3GS 16GB for $199, 32GB for $299.
12:01 PT – DM: iPhone 3GS available on June 19th. In U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and U.K.. Week later to six more, and in July to more countries, and into August to even more. Very quickly will take it to all over 80 countries iPhone is already in.
12:02 PT – DM: We’re so excited, we created a new ad. Cute ad.
12:03 PT – DM: Recap time. Whole new line of MacBook Pros. Snow Leopard. iPhone OS 3.0.
12:03 PT – DM: Just the start of the show this week. 129 sessions, 147 hands-on labs, 1000 Apple engineers. Want to thank all the amazing people at Apple.
12:05 PT – DM: And that’s it folks! Hope you enjoyed our liveblog and are looking forward to all the new exciting stuff Apple has to offer. Of course, we’ll have full coverage of all these devices, software updates, and more at Macworld.com. Thanks for dropping in.
12:05 PT – JS: Okay, that does it. Thanks as always to Dan Moren for putting his fingers on the line to handle the play-by-play.