WWDC 2008 Keynote video

I was watching the WWDC2008 text feeds yesterday (like the one from Engadget), and today the WWDC2008 video is online. It’s always better to watch this than to read an interpreted twitter feed. Today it was a bit of a challenge to view it because a lot of people are probably with me. I always set Quicktime to use the HTTP protocol over port 80, because that forces all the network packets to arrive in the correct order, and does not allow dropped packets.

On the left, you can see how I’ve configured to be able to see the keynote without too much problems.

In the middle of all the nerdy “look we’ve ported a game” presentations, there was actually a very cool one. Mark Terry, a software developer for an English insurance company, has created an incredible piece of music software for the iPhone, called “MooCow Music Band”. At about 40 minutes into the WWDC2008 Keynote video, you’ll find his really nice demo, with cheers from the crowd.

There’s also a nice discussion on background processes and how they influence performance and battery life. It shows how, on a Samsung with Windows mobile, the user has to figure out which process to end. This then all leads to a discussion on the new Push Notification architecture in the iPhone 2.0 software which prevents software from having to poll servers. It also keeps your phonebill low, because there are no bits going back and forth to the phone every 10 seconds to see if the world has changed.

Chinese character recognition was also a nice feature, it solves the problem with the Chinese language characters (of which there are a lot).

Finally, after a lot of complaints about .Mac not being up to par, Apple introduces Mobile Me, which replaces .Mac. Mobile Me finally looks like it expect to be looking for a proper Apple solution. It synchronizes with Apple and Windows platform, aswel as your iPod touch and iPhone. It has push notification, so that everything is synched immediately. The web interface is almost identical to Apple’s Mail, contacts is looking like Address Book, etc. etc. Everything looks and feels like a desktop application. Lot’s of AJAX-like functionality in there, which allows drag and drop, and on the fly contacts filtering, photo-skimming, image resizing and rotating…

What’s also nice is the ability to take a picture with the iPhone (however bad the quality 😉 ) and immediately put it online in your really cool online Apple gallery. Really cool stuff and with the 20GB storage space finally worth considering the subscription. Let’s hope they don’t get into trouble with the other mobileme‘s out there.

At the end of the keynote, the new iPhone is introduced. 3G (UMTS) and built in GPS, better battery life, enterprise integration, and at a lower price. It’s been on the news, and you probably have heard about the new iPhone already by now. Good news for me is that it’s finally comming to the Netherlands. I only hope that I can buy it unlocked, because I’m not sure I want to switch to T-Mobile.

At 1 hour and 28 minutes into the keynote, there’s a funny situation where Steve waits for a large website to load on the (old) EDGE iPhone. The 3G iPhone is about 2 to 3 times as fast as the EDGE phone, and approaches wifi speeds over 3g (UMTS) networks. Steve demonstrates the speed increase of the new iPhone, and the slow competition with the funny layouts.

Features which seem to be little but are quite important to people: It has a flush headphone connector so you can use any headphone you’d like, and it’s available in white (only if you buy the 16GB model for $299).

I wonder when it will be available in Russia… 🙂