For today’s Apple keynote address at this year’s WWDC at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, I set up my computer with four browser windows, three in Firefox to watch live blogging from Engadget, The Verge and MacWorld, and one window in Safari to watch TWiT Live’s coverage of the event. Everything worked flawlessly. Just wish Apple would stream the event.
It was an incredibly feature-rich, two-hour presentation that focused mainly on three areas: updated MacBooks, demos of new features in the Mountain Lion operating system coming out next month, and a ton of new features in iOS 6 that runs all of Apple’s mobile devices.
The presentation kicked off with an upbeat and personal address by Apple CEO, Tim Cook. He basically warmed up the audience of developers for lots of cool stuff to be announced.
Phil Schiller followed Tim Cook to talk about the hardware updates to the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro lines. While nice that they were upgraded, it wasn’t very keynote worthy. At least until they surprised everyone with a brand new line of MacBook Pros with specs that would make any computer geek drool: 15 inch retina display, 2 Thunderbolt and 2 USB2/3 ports, Intel quad-core i7 processor, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA graphics processor, 256GB flash storage/no optical drive, HDMI output. That had everyone there digging out their credit cards.
This was followed by sneak peek demos of updates to OS X Mountain Lion coming out in July. These included new features for Notifications, a more robust and intelligent Siri (finally including application launching), a new Safari with better tab management and integrated Twitter, over the air game play with other devices through Airplay and for laptops the new Power Nap which still lets the computer update even while sleeping. 200 new upgrade features, all for less than $20.
Lastly came all the iOS 6 demos which included the more intelligent Siri which can be integrated into a number of vehicle manufacturers’ vehicles, better designed and more intuitive notifications, finally Facebook integration, and a new app called Passbook which keeps all your retail/rewards cards, movie tickets, airline boarding passes or train passes so you don’t need to keep an y of these loose items in a wallet or purse. And they get updated automatically. Plus you can make purchases, such as at Starbucks, directly from inside the app. They also demoed the more robust Guided Access abilities for handicapped people. They showed a video of a blind man listening to walking directions being given by Siri. And finally they introduced the new Maps app, integrated with Siri and which gives turn-by-turn directions as well as a cool new 3D, vector-based flyover view of major cities.
It finished with Tim Cook returning to the stage to again thank all the developers in the audience before closing out the keynote. It was a lot of information to digest in a wildly positive and flawless, two-hour presentation.
