Tag: WWDC

Number 8: iAds.

“We’re doing it to help our developers to make money so they continue to make affordable and free apps.”

(Interesting: positioning it as both a dev bonus and a user bonus. Smart.)

He pitches it to devs as a way to keep the user inside your app instead of “hijacking [user] out of your app.”

(Lists the high-end brands that are advertising in iAds. No ads for shady home-refinancers or “we pay pennies on the dollar for the scrap-metal value of your heirloom gold antiques”tfits. Let’s see what the experience is like in practice. I’m annoyed AS HELL by these sort of fleecey ads on TV. These ads on my iPhone would actually hurt my iPhone/iPad experience.)

Demo: iAd for Nissan Leaf. Very slick, very entertaining. But again I ask: how soon until cartoon leprechauns are farting clouds of dollar signs to get me to sign up for a payday loan at 500% interest?

Brands have bought 60M in iAds for second half of this year.

(Journo to my left shows me a news item: AT&T has already issued a press release to say that Steve’s Internet problems during the keynote weren’t their fault.)

One More Thing…

“Are your WiFI Devices off? I really want them off.”

Stage lights up with spots that ring the entire front of the stage.

“I’d like to call Jony Ive right now…”

“FaceTime,” says the iPhone. Yes, it’s video chat on the iPhone. He seemed to have just placed a call.”

Video freezes for a half a second. Jobs chides audience for not leaving the WiFi devices off.

But it seems to work great. Looks like it’s reduced framerate — maybe 12 FPS? but very clean and clear.

“We call this ‘FaceTime Video calling’.”

iPhone 4 to iPhone 4, anywhere there’s WiFi, no extra charges or setup. Just dial and it works.

(So it doesn’t work via 3G?)

Workd with front or rear camera, portrait and landscape.

“WiFi only in 2010, “we need to work with providers to make it happen over 3G”

Will ship “10’s of millions of FaceTime devices in 2010.”

(Inteersting: “Facetime Devices”? There’s more coming?)

“This month we will sell our 100 millionth iOS device…there is DEFINITELY A MARKET for your applications.”

iOS was #6.

Number 7: iBooks.

“We’re bringing it to the iPhone with iOS 4.” Says it’s the same features, same bookshelf, same PDF support, everything. You can get a PDF in a mail message and it goes into iBooks on the bookshelf; “you can have it, store it, flip through it whenever you like.”

“We’ll have iBooks on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. What can we do with all of these products together? [These are are wireless devices]”

1) Purchase and download a book.

2) Download the same book to all of your devices at no extra charge. iBooks will automatically and wirelessly sync your current place, bookmarks, and notes across all of your devices.

“You’ll be able to buy this [iMovie 4] for $4.99…if we approve it,” Steve says, getting a laugh.

“Our guys have been running around like crazy. We’ve there are 500 WiFi base stations operating in this room. We have two choices. I have more demos to show you. We either turn them off, or I show you the demos. WHich do you want?”

(Applause)

“Please turn off all of your MiFis, turn off your aptops, put them on the floor.”

Wow! Only Steve could make this happen.

Renaming iPhone OS 4 to iOS 4.

“And we’re going to give it some metal,” and the logo transitions to chrome.

1500 new developer APIs.

(I’ve turned off my MiFi and turned off the WiFi radio on my MacBook. Only because I don’t want to be Shamed…plus my battery is now at 35% and I think there’s another half an hour to go.)

100 new user features.

“Software running in the background, that sort of exhausts the battery qwuickly” — Larry Page, May 18.

Added folders, “a whole bunch of other things” that were shown a few months ago.

Demos a few things.

Launches Pandora. Music keeps playing.

“Now I’ll launch a web browser and see if everybody really DID turn off their WiFi devices…”

Annnnd it loads in INSTANTLY. Behold the power of Jobs (and having 570 MiFis in one room (according to Steve and the guys backstage)

Swipes, and the controls for Pandora playback (a standardized audio control) appears.

Unified Inbox, with threading…tap one message and you can read the whole conversation. Lots of applause for this.

Folders. Words as we’ve seen: drag an icon onto another icon, and a new folder is created that contains those items. You can rename it, drag more in, etc. Can even drag folders into the Dock. Very slick little interface. Uses the “slide the current view up a little to reveal a bank of buttons” behavior.

“Multitasking. Folders, Retina display integration (“We’ve enhanced all of your apps for you”). Mail, enhanced camera and photos apps. Deeper enterprise support. New features everywhere.”

Enterprise — Better data protection mobile device managhement, wireless ap distribution, multiple exc accounts, ex server 2010, SSL VPN support.

Bing is now a third option for search…Googler is still the default. “Each takes a unique approach to how they find and present their results.”

“Microsoft has done a great jonb on this; it’s an HTML5 presentation.”

Golden Master Candidate of iOS 4 in developers’ hands today (cheers from crowd). “It will be out [for users] soon.”

Ken Burns effect on photos. Music from iTunes library. Titles. Recording video straigt into the timeline or using clips from the library and timeline.

A theme that even incorporates geolocation. This really feels like a desktop app…very full featured, yet slick and simple.

Export 360p to 720p.

Shows a movie in SF created completely one phone. It really is a WOW presentation, notjh vifdeo qwuality and the quality of these edits, titles and effects. I wonder who shot that video…it seems to have neemn done by someone who really knows how to do a shoot, getting the right shots.

(Wonder if it does image stabilization, too?)

AWESOME demo.

(I’m very excited to see how developers exploit it. It seems like it really proves itself in the app.)

This iPhone has sensors out the wazoo…light sensor, proximity sensor, compass, accelerometer, 3-axis gyro.

Fourth thing: “A whole new camera system.”

“We tend to ask the question ‘How do we make better pictures?'” rather than megapixels. “Its about capturing photons and low-light photography.”

Gone from 3-megapixel to 5 mega.

Added a backside-illuminated sensor (“which is used in many cameras”). “We’ve gone to 5 mp but stayed with 1.75 micron pixels; we haven’t made them smaller.”

Shows off some pictures taken right from iPhone 4 — they all look incredible on this big screen. Possibly a kick-ass feature; I’ve tried two 8 MP phones and none of them took great photos.

Camera also records HD video. 720p at 30 FPS.

5x digital zoom in app, and LED flash. Tap-to-focus now works in video, too. LED flash will illuminate video.

(If these specs hold up in testing, this is going to be one of the best capture phone out there.)

iMovie for iPhone! Applause!

Randy Ubillos, chief architect video appliocations comes up to demo.

“We think it’s maybe the most important single component of the hardware…it’s the best window on the planet.”

Third up: the iPhone 4 is powered by the A4 chip. Same chip as in the iPad.

Take the back off. “First thing you notice is that the iPhone 4 is packed to the gills. “Biggest single component is the battery. We were able to make it a little bigger.”

“We were able to imprive the battery management. 7 hours of 3G talk, 6 hours of 3G browsing, 10 WiFi, 10 hours of videio, 40 hours of music, and 300 hours of standby.”

“Arsenic free, BFR-free, mercury-free, and glass and stainless steel are very recyclable.”

Up to 32 GB of storage, Quad band HSDPA/HSUPA, 7.2 mb down, 5.8 up (“Not everyone supports it now”) Dual-mic noise suppression.

Fourth up: “We’re adding a gyroscope.” (Cheers!)

A three-axis gyrop, pirch roll and yaw, rotation about gravity, Gyro and accelerometer prives 6-axis motion sensing.

New CoreMotion APIs to get precise positioning info.

“It’s perfect fot gaming; one becaue you know it’s built into every iPhone 4.”

“And because this demo does not require the network…I should be OK.”

Demos a Jenga game. Stage rotates in three dimensions. WIth accelerometer. Switches on hyro. and suddenly becomes way more precise as he rotates in place. Gets absorbed in game.

“Scott, you got any suggestions?”

“Switch to Verion!” someons shouts. “Oh, no, you DI-INT!” laughs audience.

“Actually, I’m on WiFi.”

He moves on. Good.

800:1 contrast ratio — 4x better.

Retina Display has 78% of the pixels of an iPad. (Good, but is that just “iPhone screen, higher def” or “more screen real estate”?

iPhone audomatically renders all text and controls at higher rez; developers get that for free.

“But if you do a little more work, and add higher-rez artwork, apps are stunning. So we suggest that you do that.”

Second thing: “Retina Display.”

Four times as many pixels in the same amount of space. Uses fonts as an example of the advantage of this.

(OK, but is “Retina Display” your way of saying “the iPhone 4 has a higher-definition display than the old one”? I was braced for “The front camera does eye tracking.

Display has 326 pixes per inch. WHooooaaaahhhs from audience and applause. (Wow, that’s higher than the original LaserWriter printer…the one that invented desktop publighing.

“This is at the human limit of the eye’s ability to differentiate pixels. 300 is the limit. We’re over it. It’s extraordinary.”

Puts side by side examples of the difference in resolution, which frankly doesn’t really come across.

Makes the point that it’s particularly a big win with Kanji and other picto languages.

Photo side by sides: colors look way more natural on the iPhone 4.

“I have an iPhone 3GS which has a widely-praised display, and an iPhone 4.”

Hmm! Yes, I do see the difference. “We had to get special projectors because the ordinary kinds can’t show you the difference with the pixel display.”

This is nice; not just sharper (I think) but also more subtle color and shading, which really comes across in Springboard. But remember I’m just looking at a projector.

Embarrassing: he loads up NYTimes website, and it’s SLOOWWW loading in.

Says “You could help us out if you turned off your WiFi” (like the Google guys) but I _think_ he was kidding.

Announces that he’s going to switch to a backup.

Embarrassing! 4G says “Could not activate…you are not subscribed to a data network”

“I’m afraid that I have a problem and I can’t show you very much here today.”

Wow, this is unprecedented, practically. Jobs is now showing photos as people kill themselves backstage using awesome Jonny Ive-designed sepuuku knives.

24% thinner than iPhone 3GS. “Thinnest smartphone on the planet.”

Buttons: bol up, vol down, and mute.

Yes, a front-facing camera.

Micro SIM tray (light boos)

Camera and an LED flash.

Bottom: Mic, 30-pin connector and speaker.

Top: Headset, a second mic for noise cancellation and a sleep-wake button.

“Because there’s been a few phoeot around, people have asked “What’s this?””

Points to “lines” at bottom, says “Many people jhave said “This isn’t very Apple.”

There isn’t jsut one, there’s three. The stainless-steel band is part of the structural element of the phone. Those three slits are part of the engineering that uses the band as part of the antenna.

Bluetooth, wifi GPS is the smaller band; larger part is UMTS and GSM. “This has never been done before.”

“Uses stainless steel for strength. Uses glass for optical quality and scratch resistance; integrated antennas; extraordinary build quality.”

Back to Steve.

“We just crossed 5 billion downloads from the App Store. This is my favorite stat from the whole show.”

How much have we paid developers? Here comes an animated graphic: “A few days ago, we’ve crossed a BILLION dollars.”

(Again: carefully curating the message. “The app store is the most vibrant app community on the Internet. It’s a healthy ecosystem not just for users, but for developers.)

“And now, I’d like to talk about the iPhone.”

(Applause!)

“I’d like to give you two pieces of data so you can make upyour own mind about market share:”

Neilsen says US smartphone share of iPhojne is 28%, behind RIM, in Q1 of 2010. Says that iPhone share is 3x Android.

Mobile browser usage in US, iPhone us 58.2%, more than 2x Android at 22.7%, says Jobs quoting Nielsen.

Presents timetable:

2007: iPhone reinvents the phone.

2008: iPhone 3G and the App Store.

2009: iPhone 3GS is twice as fast.

2010 “the biggest leap since the original iPhone.”

WHOOPS and HOLLERS in audience!

Reveal: iPhone 4 (official name).

“This is really hot. There are well over 100 new features. I get to cover 8 of them.”

1) All new design.

“Stop me if you’ve already seen this…”

(applause, laughter, hoots)

“Believe me, you ain’t seen it.

“Glass on the front and the rear and stainless steel all around…its closest kin is a beautiful old Leica camera.”

Cute: on the iPhone edition of Farmville, you can acquire Snow Leopards as farm animals. I wonder how the chickens and the pigs and hell, the farmers are going to feel about that?

“No way!” a media person behind me says, as they demonstrate how the tractor works. Um…really?

Next up: Activision. Guitar Hero! Karthik Bala, Senior VP takes the stage.

“Brand new GH experience for iPhone and iPod touch”

Interesting: GH in a vertical orientation. Tapping mechanics, but also fdelivers a richer guitar mechanics: strumming, with multitouch with stuff like bends and slides.

(Looks interesting. Wonder why they didn’t just replicate the neck. A little hard to get a sense of gameplay.)

Available now in App Store.

Next up: Zynga. Steve starts to explain it, but then says, er, let me allow Mark Puncus, Zynga CEO to handle that. Must have been a prepared line but yeah, a tech company with a made-up name like that typically lasts about three months past its VC angel funding.

(But seriously, folks: yes, it’s the company that does online gaming communities.)

Introduces Farmville for the iPhone. Troubling to me that this got more of a response than Netflix!

Quotes eBay CEO, says eBay app did $500M in its first year and will do 1.5 to 2 billion next year.

Brings up the CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings to talk about Netflix for iPhone.

(This is how you keynote: talk about YOUR strengths, not your competitor’s weaknesses. They’re hammering the point: iPhone and iPad is where the money and the stability and the “heat” is.)

Free Netflix app for the iPhone coming this summer. (Hmm, expected some applause. Glad to see that people are a little calmer at this keynote than at others. Or maybe they’re just too busy blogging.)

Demo of Netflix app. Nice, but I wonder how much fun this will be with AT&T’s 2 gig data cap?

Onward to App Store.

“We support two platforms,” says Steve. Starts talking about HTML 5, descrtibing it as a gfully open uncontrolled platform forged b widelu respected standards bodies.

“It’s fully open. Anybody can write HTML5 apps and put them on the iPad, the iPhone and the Mac.”

Describes the App Store as Apple’s “Curated platform.” Interesting positioning; smart move, I think.

Talks about the approvals process. Wow, no boos!

15,000 apps submitted every week, in up to 30 different languages.

“Guess what? 95% of apps are approved within 7 days. What about the 5% that aren’t?”

Lists three top reasons:

1) App doesn’t function as advertised by the developer.

2) Use of private APIs. “We’re very clear on this…because when we change the OS, the app will break and we’ll have an unhappy customer.”

3) “Because they crash.”

“I was sitting in a cafe with my iPad and it got a girl interested in me. Now that’s what I call a magical device!” — Email to Steve. Man (or woman) probably slightly mortified.

iPad in 10 countries, will be in 19 by the end of July. Video montage of newspeople of the entire world getting all excited about the iPad. Sort of like the end of “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey” when Wyld Stallyns’ music is heard by the entire world and ushers in a new era of peace and prosperity for the entire planet.

8500 native apps in iPad store. 35M downloads.

Whows off Pulse, Walla, WebMD, eBay, Iron Man, Avatar, newspapers and magazines,

“I earned more 0nsales of The ELements for iPad in the first day than from the past 4 years of Google ads on periodictable.com” — Theo Gray, Wolfram Associates. Whee! Let’s see if this turns into a Google catfight (I hope note but it’s fun to watch).

iBookstore. Downloaded 5M books, 2.5 books per iPad. 5 of 6 publishers, they report that iBooks has 22% of all eBook sales.

(Nice, but doesn’t that mean that people have new iPads and want to play with them by buying books? Let’s see how that holds up once the novelty wears off).

New iBooks feature: you can make notes. New control to add a visual bookmark. TOC lists all pages that are bookmarked and all pages that have been highlighted.

(Whoops, we’ve moved on to “new iPad features.”

Now has native viewer for PDFs in iBooks. PDFs have their own separate bookshelf. This gets applause; it’s hard to appreciate just how many people live their info lives around PDFs. Big plus.

Update up later this month.

Cheers from the back of the room. Their giant video screen is getting different things from our giant video screen (the one on the stage.

Lights dim, and here’s The Man.

It’s hard to tell the difference between a standing ovation and just 1000 nerds trying to get their cameras above everybody else’s heads.

“We love you, Steve!” someone shouts.

“Thanks…I think.”

Am seated in Moscone West and listening to Louis Armstrong.

Every big industry keynote makes me grateful that I’m credentialed media. Huge crowds — not lines, crowds — of people on the sidewalks around Moscone. The marshaling area on the second floor was packed with humanity and developers. I worry, before discovering that I can just motor right to the top and take a seat.

I’m a bit late — T minus 45 — so instead of taking a middle seat up front I grab an aisle in the second cluster. I’d love to sit with my pals at Macworld and Ars, but you can’t even have two people liveblogging side by side, let alone seven!

Already a small bit of tsurris. I’m seated next to the forest of video cameras. A producer failed to snag an aisle seat and she truly needs one; she needs to keep running information between her cameraperson and her journo. Well, I need elbow room. After promising me up and down that she’s barely going to be in the seat, I do the courteous thing.

Attendees are wearing athletic-style WWDC 10 letterman jackets. I think there’s a risk that this might create battlefield stress disorder reactions in other attendees. Some nerds see hordes of people in identical team jackets and have flashbacks to pantsing, wedgies, swirlies, and such. I’m bracing for shrieks and freakouts.

One last test before I pack up the MacBook. The new MarsEdit has a little bit of a twist in it. It’s not enough to mess up my scripts but enough that I want to remind myself how everything needs to go.

Let’s also see what happens when the text hasn’t been converted to HTML by MarsEdit 3 before I trigger the script.

Push the button, Frank…

Hello, sensation-seekers!

So let’s give this a shot: one-man liveblogs can fail unexpectedly for any number of technical reasons (up to and including “Oh, ****…I forgot to turn down the screen brightness. Steve’s only just finished talking about the new Apple Store in Kyzyl and my battery’s already at 28%.”

As I write this, I’m still in my hotel room. MarsEdit appears to be working. The liveblogging script I wrote for the Oscars seems to be working. The MiFi seems to be working, and because it has nothing to do with the AT&T network, I’m pretty sure that it’ll <em>keep</em> working.

But who knows what’ll happen at 10 AM.

Just in case this is the first and last post to the liveblog: Steve talked about stuff. He released some new stuff. Apple’s making money. Google sucks, but you had to work out that this was actually the subtext of these three specific announcements. HTML5 good, Flash bad. The engineer who lost the iPhone 4 is still working for Apple, but now has a curiously-fresh stump in place of his right thumb.

Onward.