Steve Jobs’ Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) keynote session was packed with attendees, all of whom undoubtedly had high expectations. It’s impossible that any of them will go away disappointed; everybody gets a copy of the Leopard Beta on DVD. What they won’t get is a software development kit for iPhone, a disappointment that I’ll discuss in detail in another post to my Enterprise Mac blog. On that score, suffice it to say that iPhone is closed to developers except for the Safari Web browser. Jobs’ boast that iPhone runs OS X has a hollow ring given that developers can’t get at any of it. You can tell that I’m frustrated about that, but I won’t dwell on it here. Instead, I’ll wrap up the keynote as a whole and devote other posts to iPhone.[ Special Report: WWDC 2007 ]Apple showed off two substantial wins for its consumer markets. First, Electronic Arts has decided to return to the Mac platform after a long absence. It will release Command & Conquer 3, Battlefield 2142, Need for Speed Carbon and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix as Mac-native games. EA demonstrated Harry Potter, which rendered in gorgeous detail, but in the demo motion was noticeably choppy in those areas that required repainting large portions of the display. EA will now do simultaneous releases of its sports titles, like Tiger Woods Golf, for PCs and Macs. Apple’s second consumer win came from John Carmack from id Software. He previewed an absolutely incredible new 3-D game engine in a non-interactive demo. Carmack praised the Mac as a game development platform, saying that artists have “…unlimited ability to change [texture-mapped] surfaces with no impact on performance…[id] can have six artists working on a world at the same time.” Carmack said that he’ll be demonstrating the new engine at E3 Expo in July and that in August, at id-sponsored Quakecon, he’ll have another Mac-related announcement that he “…can’t talk about now.”Endorsements from a couple of gaming software companies seems a small thing for non-gamers, but the fact that EA and id are betting development resources on the Mac indicates that Intel-based Macs are now considered mainstream platforms, on-track to achieve volume success. These vendors’ engagement also suggest to me that Apple has taken on the task of updating its implementation of OpenGL, which one leading gaming vendor at MacWorld described (on background) as “completely broken.”I found Jobs’ demonstrations of Leopard positively riveting with regard to features not yet demonstrated, or inadequately demonstrated, in public. Core Animation, Apple’s automated pseudo-3-D real-time animation technology, has clearly pervaded Leopard. A new, previously unannounced feature of Leopard, Stacks, creates icons for folders (directories) that are directly accessible from Leopard’s Dock. The Dock is a strip of click-to-launch application icons. Stacks lets users place any directory in the Dock, creating an icon that, when clicked, pops up a transient overlay (not a window) containing rich tumbnail-like previews for all of the files in the folder. Clearly, Stacks relies heavily on Core Animation both for motion effects and layout. Stacks, as well as Apple’s Finder file explorer, make use of a new Leopard facility called Quick Look that lets users preview rich documents, including PDFs, Microsoft Office and full-motion video, without opening an application to view or browse them. Quick Look drills into documents as well. Jobs demonstrated clicking through all of the slides in a presentation (he said “PowerPoint,” perhaps he meant “Keynote”) using Quick Look from within Apple’s Finder. Finder leverages Core Animation and Quick Look to create what Apple calls “Cover Flow,” an effect seen in its iTunes client and Apple TV set-top box user interface that approximates flipping through a collection of CDs. In Finder, Cover Flow uses Quick Look previews of file content in place of CD cover art, creating a fourth view (the others are column, thumbnail and list) for folders and files in Finder.Cover Flow and Stacks are not only visually appealing, but they enable navigation of Mac files and folders using a simple north/south/east/west interface like that on the small Apple Remote included with most Apple notebooks and desktops. It effectively transforms a Mac into a presentation platform. Instead of having to copy content to a PowerPoint or Keynote slide show, a presenter can just use Stacks and Cover Flow to move from document to document. Quick Look supports a full-screen view of any content it supports. I also see these features making life a lot easier for users with limited ability to control or comprehend user interfaces, and those with limited vision who have trouble viewing the small text common to user interfaes. It’s now practical for them to locate documents visually instead of by name.Another as yet unseen Leopard feature is Back to my Mac, which turns Apple’s $99/year .Mac service into a remote file sharing gateway. Instead of troubling to set up secure Internet file sharing on your home computer so that you can access its contents from the road, .Mac brokers a one-click connection back to your Mac system. It’s fully integrated into Apple’s Finder, and Back to my Mac is part of a set of Finder enhancements that ease file sharing with and Spotlight searching of remote systems. Jobs touched on three methods for running “…an occasional Windows app on your Mac.” Apple’s Boot Camp, which supports booting a Mac directly into Vista and Windows XP, is already available as a public beta, and as previously announced, Boot Camp will be integrated into Leopard. Jobs also gave quick mention to Parallels and VMWare, whose Desktop and Fusion products create virtual PC environments on the Mac in which Windows, Linux and other x86 operating systems operate side-by-side with OS X. Both Parallels and VMware have significantly updated their Mac virtualization products to coincide with WWDC.Leopard developer preview DVDs are being distributed to WWDC attendees, and Apple has fixed the price of Leopard, to be released in October, at $129.Departing from Leopard, Jobs dropped the bombshell that its Safari 3.0 Web browser is now available for Windows. According to Jobs, Safari on Windows renders and runs JavaScript twice as fast as Internet Explorer 7, and is typically 1.6 times faster than FireFox. Jobs hopes that Safari’s availability on Windows will push it above its current 5% penetration among popular browsers. It should also shine a brighter light on those sites that are not Safari-friendly. Right now, only Mac users care about that, and a goodly portion of Mac users have resorted to running FireFox to work around the inability to fully navigate popular sites. All told, Steve Jobs’ WWDC presentation was enjoyable, and he succeeded in portraying Intel Macs as a fast-growing, mainstream computing platform, and Leopard as a substantially platform-redefining OS and user and development environment. Leopard will undoubtedly be the most desirable client environment when it ships in October. Run Leopard and Vista side-by-side, which I’ve done, and Vista just plain looks silly. Vista is all about visuals that are meant to give it Mac-like appeal. This has the impact and relevance of a Windows theme, while Leopard’s user interface enhancements are directly exploited by Apple’s core software to boost productivity and usability. In this way, the Leopard OS itself sets the tone for developers’ use of the platform’s new features. Leopard sets an extraordinary example, and unlike Vista or any other platform, Leopard uses absolutely everything that the system hardware has to bring to an application. Leopard doesn’t second-class any Mac hardware platform, be it PowerPC, Core Duo, Core 2 Duo or Xeon-based. Unlike Vista, which scales back its UI functionality on smaller machines, everything that Leopard does is ready for the broad spectrum of Mac users. Considering how rich Leopard has become, the fact that it runs on everything Apple sells is flat remarkable. Software Development