Today’s post is a sad post. Today Michael Jackson left us after an heart arrest after being sufering from skin cancer lately. He was one of the biggest names in music of the late 20th century. I remember hearing his music since I was a little kid and the guy really rocked. His music was different from everyone else’s, the videos were amazing and people were always curious about his work and later about his personal life, unforunately, for bad reasons.

Now that he’s gone, I’m sure a lot of people will miss him and many tributes to him will be made. Goodbye, Michael! Rest in peace. You’ll be in our memory.

I know, I know… I’m getting late with these posts. Today I’ll talk about the second part of Apple’s keynote at WWDC’09. This second part is entirely dedicated to the iPhone.

After some statements related to numbers of iphones sold, apps downloaded, you know, the usual, we had a video in which several developers talked about their experience with iPhone software development.

More after the jump!

Then the presentation became a description of the new features of iPhone OS 3.0:

• cut, copy and paste – this functionility works across apps, supports undo (by shaking the device), developer API’s are available for developers to use it on thei own apps with custom data types and Cocoa Touch text controls come with cut, copy and paste built in;

• landscape mode – is now available in Mail, Notes and Messages;

• Messages – now supports MMS wich allows to send and receive photos, contacts, audio files and locations;

• Spotlight Search – now searchs can be made in apps, contacts, calendars, songs, notes and e-mail including search in messages not in the device;

• iTunes – now movies can be bought and rented through the phone, iTunes U is also added to iTunes in the iPhone;

• Parental Control – allows to set content permissions;

• Internet Tethering – allows to share the Internet connection in the iPhone with a Mac or a PC through the USB cable or Bluetooth;

• Safari – improved performance with Javascript, HTTP streaming audio and video support, autofill, HTML 5 support;

• Languages – support to right to left languages, hebrew, arabic, greek, korean and thai.

• Find My iPhone – a service only available to MobileMe customers. Allows to track the iPhone from a MobileMe account. It feature a remote wipe command in case of loss;

Now on the SDK 3.0:

• In App Purchase;

• Peer to Peer connectivity;

• Accessories support;

• Maps can be used on third party apps;

• Turn by turn support through Core Location;

• Push Notification;

• 1000 new APIs.

Some invited developers came to show what they acomplished using the new features of the SDK 3.0: Gameloft, Airstrip Technologies, ScrollMotion, TomTom, ngmoco:), Pasco, Zipcar and Line 6 with Planet Waves. For more info about what they presented see the keynote stream here.

About the availability, it was made available June 17 for free for iPhone users and for $9,95 for iPod Touch users.

After all this came the new iPhone! This year’s model is called iPhone 3GS where S stands for "Speed". So what’s new in this iPhone?

• It runs up to 2X faster overall due to a better and faster processor;

• Support for HSDPA which supports connection speeds up to 7.2Mbps;

• 3MP camera with auto focus, auto white balance, auto exposure and tap to focus;

• Video recording at 30 fps VGA with audio, auto focus, auto white balance, auto exposure, video editing (trim), video sharing through e-mail, MMS, MobileMe and Youtube;

• Voice Control phone and iPod;

• Digital Compass as stand alone app and integrated into Maps;

• Accessibility with voice over and display color inversion;

• Support for Nike+;

• Encryption;

• Improved battery life.

Two models available in two colors: 16GB and 32GB in black or white. The iPhone 3G will still be available at a lower price.

I’m not going to talk about pricing here due to the different price points it can reach depending on the country where the iPhone is going to be sold.

It was released yesterday, June 19, in the US. In Portugal it will be available in July (the day wasn’t yet announced at the time this post is being written).

I think this is a good upgrade to the current model that was by it selt a good device already.

And this it… these were the news of this year’s WWDC. See you next post!

Source of images: Apple

Now that WWDC is over, I’m going to share with you guys what happened there and my thoughts about it. I’m doing this in two posts because this can get really big for just one.

For the ones not knowing what this is all about and quoting Apple’s WWDC FAQ: "The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is the most important annual event for anyone innovating with Apple technologies. Thousands of developers from around the world come to California each year to receive in-depth information and instruction from Apple’s technical architects and engineers."

There were great expectations about how it would be this year. After all the rumors being raised before the event, the news are finally here.
The keynote started with the updates on laptops hardware. Now, all the aluminum enclosure Mac notebooks come with a built in battery like the 17" Macbook Pro, unveiled early this year. The screens also got upgraded with more recent panels having a better color gamut, all models have now a SD card slot, except the 17" which still has the Express Card slot and 13" Aluminum Macbooks are now branded as Macbook Pro, now featuring a Firewire 800 port. The Macbook Air also got upgraded and it’s now more affordable even with the SSD hard disk option.

The only product remaining with the "Macbook" name is the white plastic one and here is where things become odd. It feels, at least to me, that there’s a middle man missing here. In my opinion, the early line was more balanced as far as different models and target users were concerned. It’s true, however, that the aluminum Macbook was very feature and appearance like to the Pro series but that was precisely the strongest point last year when they were released: pro features in a consumer notebook. It is also true that people was wishing for a smaller size Pro notebook since the 12" Powerbook but the 13" aluminum Macbook was all that already, only lacking the Firewire port. Being the "most popular Mac" the 13" Macbook soon will be forgotten and all attention will be towards the Macbook Pro line. Is Apple hiding something else up its sleeve for the Macbook line? I don’t know but, looking at the available hardware, there’s not much that can be done to fit in between the plastic model and the aluminum pro series. I’ll write a post about Apple’s family of notebooks as soon as possible. For now, let’s continue with the keynote.

The second topic on the keynote was Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

In this field, almost every changes are under the hood. The OS is now full 64 bit and many of its apps were rewritten or greatly improved. There aren’t many UI changes despite the rumors about the so called "marble", a new UI design trend for Mac OS X. An example of things looking the same is the Finder: it has been entirely rewritten in Cocoa, as I said the UI remains the same but it has some refinements and improvements which are very welcome and good. The dock now has exposé built in which allows us to see only the open windows of a certain app that we may choose among all the apps we are running on a moment in time. The OS installation itself will be 45% faster and it will require 6GB less disk space than Leopard. Other improvements are the smarter text selection when viewing pdf in Preview and character input using the trackpad for asian character systems. Other new features are navigation in stacks and live preview in Finder.

A usual companion of Mac OS X is the web browser Safari that was released for Tiger, Leopard, Windows Xp and Vista that day. It will be included in Snow Leopard with better performance on the new OS because of its 64 bit architecture. Once again, I’ll write about this on one of my future posts.

There’s also a new version of Quicktime name Quicktime X and its rebuilt using recent libraries and video technologies. Here the UI changes are visible as well as new features like video trimming and video sharing.

All the other improvements are very good but are of technical matter and I’m not going to discuss them here even being a developer myself and understanding what it’s all about. Doing that would be making this post a very large thing and it would be too much painful to reach the end. There’s one, however, that its important to focus: Exchange support across Mail, Address Book and iCal. This really makes OS X a good OS for use within a business environment.

To finish this section about Snow Leopard I’ll talk about pricing and availability. Believe it or not, the upgrade for Leopard users will cost only $29! Yes, this is a great new! The family pack will cost $49. I still don’t know the price in euros but even if they do a direct conversion and make it €29, it will be alright. I really would like to see Microsoft doing something like this with Windows 7 but they aren’t going to do it for sure even after the flop with Vista. Snow Leopard will be available in September (there’s no exact day) and it will be targeted only for Intel Macs. Leopard was the last iteration of an Apple OS running on PPC architecture. With this I can say that I’m looking forward to get it as soon as possible though my expectations were higher as far as UI changes are concerned.

Well this is the end of part one of my WWDC’09 coverage. I’ll see you next post!

Source of images: Apple

This is the second hardware update on the Macbook white since Apple released the unibody laptops. To remind you, upon the launch of the aluminum notebooks, the Macbook white remained Apple’s only plastic cased laptop and set it as the entry model.

By that time, the hardware was kept almost unchanged but some months ago it was updated being the most notorious change  the 9400M chipset from Nvidia. This week the update brings a slightly faster processor (from a 2.0GHz to 2.13GHz), increase in memory speed (from DDR2 667MHz to DDR2 800MHz) and and hard disk with some more GB (from 120 to 160).

Updates are always welcome, unless you bought your machine last week. This makes the white Macbook a good option for switchers with a price below €1000. The hardware makes it ready for the performance enhancements and features to come with the release of Snow Leopard on the third quarter of this year.

Hello my guests! This is the first post of this new blog that I just created. This is not the first time I blog: I have two more blogs, written in portuguese, that I will delete in a month or so. The reason for that deletion is my intention of focusing here the subjects I speak of in each of the other blogs and more. This way, I’ll have only one blog to care about and, as you may notice, I’ll write in english so I can reach an higher number of readers. Portuguese is an amazing language, which I’m proud of speaking every day and much more comfortable for me, but the decision of changing my blog posts to english seems very logic and understandable.

Here you’ll find posts about anything that may occur to me. Mainly, you may expect posts about technology, entertainment, fun and, from time to time, some kind of comment/opinion about a subject. For now, I don’t know how often I’ll be posting. I only write when I have some kind of news and/or ideas that I’d like to share with anyone that may want to come by.

See you next post!