Apple launched it’s developers conference at San Francisco.  As always the keynote is a must.

It starts as always with numbers about the conference. It then features a big personal thanks to Intel’s Paul Otellini and then goes off to developer stories. At first we see some great gaming stuff coming form EA and ID with some featured products by EA and a spectacular demo presented by Carmack.

Next we have a presentation of some features in Leopard. The desktop has been revamped, we have a new 3d dock, stacks to keep stuff organized, consistent feel between the apps, a new menu bar and a prominent active window. Finder has some nice features like cover flow view, searching other macs on the network and even over the .Mac internet service, plus a revamped and programmable sidebar (there’s a background crash of WoW during the presentation). Next follows Quick View, an extensible preview system that allows you to quickly preview files without starting the full apps. Leopard will be 64-bit only, Cocoa is fully 64-bit now and it will run 32 and 64-bit apps side by side (but will it run on 32-bit hardware?). A really cool stuff analogue with .Net’s WPF is Core Animation and I think we’ll see great stuff coming really quickly. Boot Camp will be part of Leopard. A virtual desktop support they call Spaces with a great exposè like overview and it seems the possibility to mute other desktops (really sweet touch, attention to details is these guys specialty). The Web Clip instant widget maker got much better with some sweet browser integration and container highlighting, it was a tool that was demoed last year as well but it looks just much more polished. iChat also got some really nice upgrades as well like backdrops, documents sharing, effects etc. Time machine was presented already so I won’t go into details.

The joke on MS on having too many SKU’s really hit the spot.

On an ending note, Steve also announced Safari for the Windows and perhaps more important developing on the iPhone. Basically they advocate use of web applications on the phone. Although that’s good for me as I work in that sector having a counterpart to JavaME and .Net CF is a must. I hope Apple reconsiders the NO SDK decision.

There was no mention of ZFS during the speech. Times are interesting.