The Apple Worldwide Developer Conference keynote was held today, this is a summary of the important announcements.
- Safari 3 Public Beta. Safari is now a available on both OSX and Windows with a public beta released today. Apple are promoting quicker loading of pages (2x faster than IE7). The beta is also available for OSX, and will be included within Leopard and as the browser on the iPhone. Download now @ http://www.apple.com/safari/
- Electronics Arts (EA) are going to release games for the Mac.
- Leopard features demo’ed
- New menu bar, new dock, new feature called ‘Stacks’. Stacks helps you keep a clean desktop by stacking the files in the dock and will fan out, or pop up in a grid. Now all of your downloads are viewed this way. Keeps everyone happy with the GTD approach.
- New Finder, improved way to share documents
- 64Bit top to bottom
- Boot camp built in, no more burning drivers CD to install
- ‘Spaces’. Group applications in separate spaces, instantly switch between them. Like desktop managers on Linux.
- 300 new features in Leopard.
- Basic costs $129. Premium edition costs $129 😉
- iPhone will allow developers to write applications! Based on Safari engine, uses Web 2.0 + Ajax, but integrate perfectly with iPhone services so they can make a call, check email, lookup your location all accessed via the web. No SDK required. Ajax on a mobile sounds impressive. Something which is missing on Windows Mobile.
Stacks sounds very useful and cool. Safari browser on Windows – do we really need another browser? However speed improves sound good and it will leave developers with no excuse for not having a Safari compatible site (I guess they are based on the same rendering engine) which is very good. As for iPhone, great that they are allowing applications to link into the services, will be interesting to see their security model/approach, having Ajax support is definitely something which will attract developers.