Day 1 at Apple Worldwide Developer Conference – Keynote

Tuesday, June 7th, 2011 Jim Underwood, Chief Architect

Arriving at 7:40 am, “Registration” had opened at 7:00 and the lines inside were meager. The other 5000 attendees (hereafter “the BADGED”) were being herded completely around the building. When Puru and I completed our loop of the block and found our place in line, we could see those, some of whom, I kid you not, had been in line since 2AM. These Applets are tenacious creatures.

Instead we took up residence barely a block away at Mel’s Diner where we ate often and drank a full pot of coffee before we emerged at about 9:50, reasoning that most everyone MUST be inside by now – the keynote was, after all, beginning in just 10 minutes.

Wrong. We finally took our seats inside about 10:15 but they had gone ahead and started the keynote anyway so I can’t tell you anything about the first seven of Lion’s cool new features.

And, the story was all about Lion (the next release of OSX- and ONLY 29.99 at your friendly app store. No more CDs), iOS 5 and, of course, the anxiously awaited iCloud. Lion will be available imminently (an undefined future time before November).

Quite a few new app features in Lion:

• A platform level version management system that has been fully leveraged in all the media creation and document authoring apps – in typical Apple style (It just works – Steve said)
• AirDrop (Peer-to-Peer networking but with consent to send built into the receiver experience) and several very cool new features in Mail (yes mail can be cool), including an incredible thread segmentation and display feature that was actually quite impressive.
• Sorry, those are numbers 8, 9, 10. To get the first seven, I would have either had to come down at 2AM and I draw the line there.

One big bit of news – 2500 new developer APIs – I’m sure there’s a few of interest to most developers.

Statistics on iOS
We got a lot of statistics – almost 10 minutes worth – on iOS:

• There are now more than 200 million iOS devices in the world, 25 million of which are iPads which have consumed 15 billion songs, 130 million books and 14 billion app downloads.
• There are now 425,000 apps on the app store (I’m sure I read an announcement about a week ago about there being more than 500,000 but perhaps they threw 75000 away – and good riddance!).
• Of those 90,000 are iPad apps, there are 225 million iTunes accounts with active PayPal or credit card payment information at the ready for that next tune download.
• Apple, the good guys that they are, have paid developers $2.5 billion. Based on their cut of 30% (is that right?) that means Apple has cleared a cool $1.2 billion – not bad.
• the iOs camera is about to become the most popular camera in the world – just ask Steve

iOS 5 got 1,500 new APIs. A big theme this year is Apple’s commitment to force convergence of all of the core functionality on OS X and iOS with differentiation only at the presentation layers of the architecture, where they are appropriate. In this case, I got all 10 of the coolest new features in iOS 5:

1. Notifications are now full fledged managed objects (that’s #1 ???)
2. Newsstand for magazine subscriptions
3. Twitter is now a full fledged integrated service in iOS complete with its own APIs (go figure),
4. Safari had a very cool new feature called Reader – it dynamically extracts news stories from all the crap sourrounding them (that’s my new word), even from multiple pages, constructing a condensed, easily readable version and even saving to a “Reading List” if if you want for offline perusal – very sweet.
5. Reminders got a kick – you know how boring and annoying they are – now you can set reminders that include a GEOFENCE so they don’t remind you until you exit a geozone. Cool but I have enough reminders as it is.
6. Camera got some major work including new AE/AF touch point lock – very cool
7. Mail got a new integrated dictionary with pop-up definitions and a new control on its keyboard that allows you to convert the keyboard into a split keyboard – convenient for thumb typists.
8. iOS is now PC-free – no more plug-in-to-iTunes junk. No sire, you can activate it right there over what have you. Software updates are now entirely over the air – no return to the mother MAC.
9. Game center – more statistics – 9 months – 50 million subscribers a compared to Xbox Live’s 30 million. Steve is winning.
10. A new feature “iMessage” which fully integrates text, photo, group addressing – everything your little apple core every wanted.

So I almost lost one in the thrall of iOS ecstasy when I found out that the iOS 5 SDK was available on CD immediately and will appear on an iPad 6 in November (model numbering just a wild guess).

Of course, the big thing was the much heralded and anxiously awaited ICLOUD! Steve came out for this. Yes, Steve is taking over responsibility for automatically guaranteeing that much of your app data, documents, iBooks, iApps, photos, calendars, etc. etc. is stored in the cloud and automagically replicated to all of your devices.

Just what I always wanted is Steve proving that I should have gotten the 32GB iPhone. Just kidding – they are doing this quite thoughtfully. Only your last 1000 pictures you take will be replicated to your iPhone or iPad into your new “PhotoStream”. And for your music that you ripped from CDs, Steve is going to be really nice and send his own copies of those songs to the replicants all without charging you for each song – all you have to do is give him $24.99/yr to keep up to 10 devices synched. Not bad. Amazon’s cloud service costs $50 and Google is still deciding. (That last bit was straight from the Steve himself).

Stay tuned for more from Monday

Tags: Apple, iOS, iPad, iPhone