WWDC Day 1 -- From the Keynote

Ok, so I finally made my way inside the Moscone center at just before 10:30 PDT. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it into the main hall for the Keynote, so I went to an overflow room at Russian Hill. At 10:30, Bertrand Serlet spoke about the major new applications features of Mac OS X, including Safari 4, which by the way has a pretty cool full history search feature. There are also some new features for Quicktime, including an export feature for YouTube, and iTunes, etc.

Snow Leopard will ship with built in Exchange support integrated into Mail, iCal, and Address Book. The new OS supports auto-discover for Exchange servers. I’m not sure it it’s using ActiveSync or the Exchange Web Services protocol. The new capability is only supported for Exchange 2007. Snow Leopard is available in September as an upgrade for $29.

Ok, so now onto the reason I came all the way to San Francisco.

iPhone

Scott Forstall, went on stage at 10:48 PDT and gave some statistics concerning the success of iPhone 3G and AppStore, including: 1,000,000 downloads of the iPhone SDK; 50,000 apps on the AppStore; 40,000,000 iPhones and iPod Touches sold. 1 Billion apps downloaded from the AppStore in the last 9 months.

He then showed a marketing video. It featured discussions with app developers of games, healthcare (mentioned healthcare apps integrated with notifications API, gave example of a doctor receiving a notification of important patient event), and media (MLB app) apps.

Following is a quick rundown of some of the 100 new features in iPhone OS 3.0.

• Cut, copy, paste
• Works across apps
• Undo support
• Developer APIs
• Landscape
• Across all key applications
• MMS (if your service provider allows it)
• Photos
• Contacts
• Videos
• Location
• iTunes
• Rent and purchase movies from the phone.
• Also, music, videos, audiobooks
• iTunes U support (?)
• Additional (finer grain) parental controls
• Tethering (if your service provider allows it)
• Internet connection sharing with Mac or PC
• USB or Bluetooth
• Seamless experience, just turn on tethering on your phone
• Safari
• Performance improvements, 3x faster JavaScript than iPhone 2.x
• HTTP streaming audio and video
• Auto-fill
• HTML 5 support including audio and video tags
• Languages
• More languages, including right to left such as Hebrew and Arabic
• Find My Phone
• Funny video of Tina Fey (30 Rock Lost Phone)
• Service available via Mobile Me (only) – log in and see your phone on a map. This is a very useful feature.
• Can send a message to the phone that will send an audible alert whether or not the phone is in silent mode.
• Remote wipe from Mobile Me.
• Is there and API for this on the phone????
• Is there a way to integrate with Mobile Me (web-service?)
• SDK
• 1000 new APIs
• In app purchase, magazine subscriptions, game developers – adding levels, for paid apps only, not free apps
• Peer to Peer connectivity
• Over Bluetooth, no pairing needed (what are the security implications of this?)
• Accessories
• Allows hardware makers to build software that can talk to hardware connected to the phone. (J&J blood glucose monitor)
• Maps
• Embed Google maps service
• Push notifications
• Text alerts
• Numerical badges
• Custom alert sounds
• Media player access, can access iPod features via the SDK
• Airstrip Technologies (featured developer)
• ISV for medical apps
• Implements push notifications
• Demo showed lots of patient identifiable information
• Real-time data such as EKG
• Lots of focus on mobilizing Doctors (anywhere, anytime access to patient data)
• Tom Tom (featured developer)
• Turn by turn navigation
• Tom Tom car kit (windshield, suction)
• Voice guided
• Charges the phone
• iPhone OS 3.0 GA on June 17
• Developers can go an download the GM seed today, June 8, 2009

Forstall left, and turned it over to Philip Schiller at around 11:43

A brand new iPhone was introduced -- the iPhone 3G S

• Apparently the “S” is for speed.
• Schiller rattled off a list of examples where the new phone is more performant:
• Messages
• Games
• Excel
• Load NY Times (web)
• 15 on JavaScript spider benchmark (3G 3.0 is 43)
• 7.2 Mbps HSPDA
• New camera – 3 megapixel, autofocus, tap-to-focus (pretty cool), better low-light sensitivity, automacro for very close up pictures
• Video recording
• Video capture 30fps VGA w/audio
• Video editing
• Share via email, MMS, Mobile Me, YouTube (cool)
• Voice control
• Voice dial (contacts or number)
• iPod, play songs or playlists, supports a query such as “what’s playing now” and the phone will tell you. Integrated with Genius playlist
• Digital compass, built in compass app, integrated w/map, Developer API
• Accessibility (for sight, hearing)
• Built in support for Nike+ (??)
• Encryption in hardware!!! (I will go into a lot more detail on this in a subsequent post)
• Instantaneous remote wipe
• Encrypted iTunes backups
• Priced at $199 for 16GB, $299 for 32GB
• New price for iPhone 3G $99
• Available June 19