8 June 2009
Apple WWDC
As usual Apple unveiled many new items at todays Worldwide Developer Conference Keynote. I enjoyed following the action via Macworld “tweets.” I normally follow along on their website, but this year I wasn’t able to have their site pulled up, so I followed their “tweets” on my iPhone and thought they did a great job.
As expected the iPhone captured many of the headlines, but I was also glad to see that the MacBook Pros and MacBook Air saw some improvements (not to mention a price drop). With a MacBook Air model now sporting a 1.86GHz processor, 2GB RAM, and a 120GB hard drive and a $1,499 price tag, I will have to give it a long look before I purchase my next laptop. Apple also showed off the new Snow Leopard 10.6 OS. The new OS made some changes to Safari, iCal, Expose, iChat and Quicktime among others. Mac OS X Snow Leopard includes built-in support for the latest version of Microsoft Exchange Server.
The other big news all centers around the iPhone. First up iPhone 3.0 software. We already knew many of the new features, but some are worth another mention. Cut, Copy, and Paste, landscape mode for most applications, push notification, MMS, Voice Control and tethering. I am really excited to see what developers do with push notification ( I am eager to see an update to my AIM app for starters). For MobileMe users like me, the new Find My Phone feature was a welcome surprise. Still no Flash support for Safari on the iPhone (guess that just gives us something to look forward to with 4.0). As far as the new iPhone 3G S, there were are a couple of big ticket items. GPS turn-by-turn navigation and the new video camera that supports on-camera editing and delivery both promise to be fan favorites. Video was an obvious omission on previous iPhones. I love my Flip Video Camera, but having that kind of functionality built into my phone would be even better.
For more on todays announcements, I suggest checking out apple.com and macworld.com.
