Blog

The iPhone will debut a week from tomorrow, and everyone is getting crazy about it. According to a AT&T document, Apple and AT&T stores will close at 4:30 pm and then reopen at 6:00 p.m. to "set the store up for iPhone sales and prepare your staff for a successful sales event". The document also refers to "Crowd Controls Devices" that should be in place a week earlier.

Meanwhile, Engadget got access to some pictures of the possible iPhone dock, as of the new Apple bluetooth headset. Will people be able to buy this tomorrow? Nobody really knows, but everybody is expecting really hard.

The stock market is also going crazy. On one side, it seems highly sceptical about the iPhone launch, with Apple shares dropping almost 3% in the last two trading sessions. On the other side, rumours refer to a "40% premium on the Apple share price", and the past days saw the birth of a new rumour: could Google buy Apple?

In the mean time, Opera launched is new Opera mini, the next generation browser for cellphones. For the launch, they mimic the Apple worldwide known "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" campaign, with a comparison between the Opera mini and the iPhone. Come on guys, you can not compare software with hardware, the comparison is truly unfair. Could this mess be a result of the growing Opera Software internal problems?

As stated by the San Jose Mercury News, " There's hype, then there's iPhone hype".

After the WWDC 2007 people where complaining about the fact Safari being the de facto SDK for iPhone. I personally think it’s a genius move. Here are the facts: 9 days before the iPhone launch there are already 22 applications in the iPhone Application List.

I'm in a mood for future prediction movies. Love the punch line, "experience will be the new reality".

RSS readers should click here to watch the movie.

Another vision of the future, this time from NTT DoCoMo:

RSS readers should click here to watch the film.

Here is the summary of WWDC 2007. It was a great keynote (again!), and great times wait for us. Leopard will kick ass, and Safari as a new development platform is totally disruptive.

On games

EA is coming back to Mac. Need for Speed Carbon, Battlefield 2142, Command & Conquer 3, Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix, Madden 08, Tiger Woods 08, all to be released in July

ID Games unveiled the new next generation technologies for gaming. They will demo it in E3.

On Leopard

First, some numbers: 22 million active OS X numbers. 67% using Tiger, 23% using Panther and 10% using older versions. 21 months between Tiger & Leopard, 300 new features in Leopard. Steve presents 10:

• New Desktop: transparencies, new 3D look, stacks;
• New Finder: improved sharing, integration with .Mac, Cover Flow;
• Quick look: live file previewing;
• Full 64-bit architecture: huge gains of efficiency;
• Core animation: simple to use, easy to add to applications;
• Boot Camp: use as a complement to Parallels and VMWare;
• Spaces: multi desktops;
• Dashboard: web clip, using Safari to make widgets;
• iChat: share slide shows, presentations and movies through iChat;
• Time machine: one click backup, wireless to a Airport base station;

Leopard shipping in October:

• Basic version, $129;
• Premium version, $129;
• Business version, $129;
• Enterprise version $129;
• Ultimate version, $129;

One more thing

Safari 3 now runs on Windows XP/Vista. Safari is twice as fast.

One last thing

Apple will allow developers to write web 2.0 applications that work exactly like iPhone apps - can access all the iPhone services (make calls, send emails, access the address book). All the development is made based on the Safari engine, which is the same for Leopard, XP/Vista and iPhone. The demo, a corporate address database using ldap toke less than a men/month to develop, so you also can go live on Jun 29.

Update: Apple has killed the brushed metal, the site changed for the new look after the keynote. There are some films about Leopard already available.