Tag Archives: WWDC

WWDC 2008 Keynote Main Points

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The keynote is over, and I’m on the 2nd floor of the Moscone Center sipping a coffee and thinking about all the stuff that Steve and his team just presented:

  • The new iPhone 3G with GPS will go live on July 11th in several countries, including Switzerland! And best of all, the price of the 8 GB model drops to 199 USD, and the 16 GB model (in two different colors) will cost 299 USD. And even more important, is that the price will be 199 or 299 USD no matter what country you’re in! Given the low cost of the dollar these days, for me this simply means that Apple will grab a good slice of the market within a few months. This makes the platform all the more interesting!
  • The App Store will not be the only means of distribution for native applications using the SDK; enterprises will be able to distribute them to their own devices, and even common mortals will be able to enable up to 100 devices, and apps distributed this way will be able to be activated from e-mail, websites or whatever means you need. More ways to get your code through the door!
  • The iPhone becomes a serious enterprise platform; not only will enterprises be able to use their own distribution platforms, the integration with Exchange is complete, and the support for MS Office documents is there too. As well as native support for iWork apps!
  • .mac is replaced by mobileme; with a price tag of 99 per year, users get 20 GB of storage “on the cloud”, for storing images, e-mail, calendars or contacts, together with extremely advanced Web 2.0 applications, and integration with iPhone, Mac and PCs. “Exchange for the rest of us”, as they presented it! Instant sync from any device, anytime, anywhere.
  • There will be a notification service for apps, which will allow them to show status information for users, without resorting to background threads; this will apparently work with a central server (at Apple’s own premises?) with a single IP connection. In any case, they’ve listened to the concern of many developers; this feature is (in my opinion) the last bit that the platform lacked to be considered seriously.

This is for the main bits. Of course there was a lot more shown, but you’ll be able to watch it in its entirety in a few hours, since the keynote will be available on Apple’s site.

Incredible stuff. Stay tuned for more info!

Waiting for the Keynote

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Twitter’s down, but not my blog! I’m in the main Moscone conference room waiting for the start fo the keynote; there are thousands of people here! “Roll over Beethoven” is sounding all over the place…

The air is filled with electricity. This won’t last long. Just a few minutes more, and we’ll know what’s in the box.

Sunny WWDC

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Comparing Lausanne to San Francisco is a straightforward experiment:

By the way, I’m in SF. On Monday I’ll attend WWDC. But tomorrow Claudia and I are biking through the Golden Gate ;)

WWDC Schedules in iCal format

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For those attending WWDC, and wanting to have the module complete schedule in iCal (as suggested by TUAW), I’ve created a small script (using Prototype) that will transform the JSON data of the official WWDC schedule into calendar files, which you can save and load into iCal.

This script was featured in another TUAW entry! Thanks to Mat for the link!

Enjoy! I hope this will be useful to you. By the way, if you’re attending WWDC, just leave a comment below.

Update, 2008-05-26: Thanks to Jeff LaMarche for posting a link to the calendars from the cocoadev mailing list, and to Second Gear for using the calendars with their own products! :)