CKOHLER

Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference Keynote was held yesterday and as usual, I eagerly followed along in real time. iPhone Alley offered a real time audio stream from a laptop in the audience. Even though the quality was terribly piss poor, it was still better than simply reading a slew of blog posts. However, I still followed along on MacRumors.com and at NeoGAF to see photos and humorous commentary as they came in.

Note to Apple: Just stream your damn keynote live next time… even if it’s just audio. If you don’t, someone else is going to attempt it so it might as well just be you. That way, you can at least exert some control over the quality of the broadcast.

This year’s keynote focused solely on the iPhone and its supporting services. After the keynote there was a shorter session, not publicly available, detailing Apple’s next version of the Mac OS X operating system dubbed Snow Leopard. Read on for my thoughts of the topics covered in the first keynote.

iPhone SDK
Most of this portion of the keynote was a rehash of what was announced back in March. It included more demos of 3rd party apps currently in development. These new apps all looked very slick and I was especially happy to see Pangea Game’s Cromag Rally was implementing my rotating screen/steering wheel control concept. Apple seems to have convinced most developers that $10 bucks a shot is a good price to charge for commercial iPhone apps. I find this price very reasonable, especially considering the quality of these applications.

Push Notification Service
Probably the most interesting info to come out of this portion of the keynote was Apple’s solution to the “no apps running in the background” mandate. Basically, developers will be able to take advantage of a system by which their servers can send alerts to user’s iPhones using Apple as a proxy. It works like this: if you sign into an IM server on your iPhone then exit the program, the program is no longer running. However, the IM service keeps you logged in and if you get a message, sends an alert to Apple’s servers which gets relayed to your iPhone over either the cellular network or wi-fi using a persistent IP connection Apple maintains. Alerts can include icon badge updates, alert sounds and even dialog boxes with buttons. This solution prevents a slew of background tasks killing battery life and slowing the device down. It also scales well since all applications can uses this service for free and the user’s device maintains only a single IP connection.

As great as it is, this clever solution is another example of Apple’s willingness to only meet the developers half way. Apps still can not talk out when inactive. For IM clients this isn’t an issue but other apps like MobileScrobbler won’t work because it can no longer run in the background automatically collecting data about your listening habits and sending them up to Last.fm’s servers in realtime. Another minor issue is that while the first wave of 3rd party apps will be available in early July, this service will not be available for developers to use until September.

MobileMe
It’s good to see that Apple has finally revamped their aging .Mac service. Retooling it to be “Exchange for the rest of us” is a unique spin and does give it something that other free services don’t quite have, true push data syncing. However, at $99/year I don’t think it’s something I could really justify using considering all of the other free services I have available to me. The only real feature that still intrigues me is the super-slick web photo gallery.

iPhone 3G
The second generation iPhone does a lot of things right. First of all, they’ve lowered the price to just $199 for an 8GB model and $299 for 16GB. It now includes 3G for a “zippy” web browsing experience when not on wi-fi plus it includes a true GPS supporting realtime tracking directly in the Google Maps application. The device is slightly thinner at the edges, has better battery life and better audio. On the down side, Apple still hasn’t included true MMS support, no forward facing camera, no cut & paste and AT&T has increased their data plan by $10. Even with those issues, the new iPhone is a clear winner and even I’m seriously considering an upgrade if only so I can have true GPS capability, better battery life and possible improved reception over my launch day model.