Post-keynote depression

With the dust just beginning to settle after last week’s SDK keynote, a mood of despondency pervades the Apple rumour community. When will the next clue emerge for us to obsess over? Are we entering a dry spell? A harsh lent? With the Stevenote feast now over, must we now wait until WWDC for more? Hadn’t we all gotten so used to those weekly Tuesday announcements. Now we’re left with nothing but a Beta SDK and creative block. If we could just come up with the one mobile app to rule them all…

Desperation has risen to such a point that we must make a meal out of a story like this – but it’s thin gruel. Thin gruel.

SDK Announcement Summary

Available now:

• Beta iPhone SDK
  
• iPhone Developer Program
  
• iPhone Enterprise Beta Program
  

Available in "late June":

• iPhone 2.0 firmware update (free)
  
• iPod Touch 2.0 firmware update (price TBC)
  
• iTunes App Store
  
• Games, including Sega’s Super Monkey Ball and Electronic Art’s Spore
  

Apple has delivered exactly what they promised, albeit a week later than scheduled. The iPhone SDK is available today for free download from Apple.com (albeit their servers are currently struggling to cope with demand). Nonetheless, some iPhone fans will be disappointed that nothing new has been delivered for the end user today.

So let’s take a look at what today’s announcements reveal about the future of iPhone from the end user’s perspective. Firstly, we now know that that 2.0 firmware will be released in late June – whilst that doesn’t preclude any further incremental updates before June, it certainly makes them less likely.

Here’s what we know we can expect from June’s 2.0 update:

• iTunes App Store – enabling users to wirelessly download and install iPhone apps, which will then presumably be backed up on next sync. It will also be possible to purchase apps via iTunes on a Mac or PC
  
• New icon for iTunes WiFi Store - a small detail, but hey!
  
• PowerPoint attachment support – this is revealed in today’s press release
  
• Mass move and delete messages in Mail – also in today’s press release
  
• VPN support – could come in handy for techies and corporates alike
  
• Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync support – only interesting to companies that have Exchange servers
  

Presumably there will be more to the 2.0 update than that – we’re guessing that Apple is holding back some of the cool stuff for another Stevenote closer to the time. Strange though that during the SDK announcement, when Scott Forstall listed the features of the new “Cocoa Touch” application framework, he made no mention of a “File Picker” (i.e. Finder-style file browser) to go along with the “People Picker” and “Image Picker”. Hopefully this is a top-secret feature that’s been deliberately left out of the SDK beta just to tease us. Hopefully.

“Touch OS X” - Branding Apple’s Handheld OS [Picture]

With the launch of Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch SDK this week (albeit probably still in Beta), it’s surely time for the company to sort out the branding of its mobile OS. Currently, Apple refers to the system that iPhone and iPod Touch share as “OS X”, (sometimes mistakenly referred to by journalists as “Mac OS X”). And as anyone writing about Apple knows, it’s a real mouthful to keep referring to “iPhone and iPod Touch”. The problem will presumably only get worse as Apple releases even more products running their handheld OS – “iPhone, iPhone Nano, iPod Touch and iTablet” will hardly trip off the tongue. And software developers will need a snappy name to describe what their apps run on – not just a list of devices.

It therefore seems inescapable that Apple will need to review its mobile branding strategy, and our money is on “Touch OS X”. It seems like there’s no better time to make the switch than at this week’s forthcoming SDK Keynote. As usual, the mockups on this page are just for fun, and MacPredictions has no inside sources.

SDK = Strangely Dull Keynote

It’s ironic that whilst Apple normally uses its invitation teasers to build excitement and speculation in the run up to a Stevenote, today’s SDK invitation is designed to do the opposite. First, it makes clear that the focus will be on enterprise software – which means corporate messaging, VPNs and so on. Hardly exciting fodder for most iPhone fans. Second, the roadmap clearly shows an SDK announcement followed by a software update. Indeed, the whole use of the term roadmap seems to be in the special “peace process” sense, meaning don’t get your hopes up that anything will happen anytime soon.

So it seems likely that all we’ll get next week is a demo of forthcoming enterprise technology (e.g. Blackberry/Notes/Exchange/VPN support), and a kit for developers with a promise of 3rd party software sales via iTunes this summer. Ho-hum. Nothing to see here, move along!

Steve Jobs' February 2008 SDK Keynote [Part 2]

Time is running out for Apple to organize a February keynote - but since they haven't announced a delay in the SDK, we're assuming invitations will go out on Monday for an event on Thursday or Friday next week. We can but hope! In the meantime - enjoy this fantasy transcript, a continuation from the previous post.

Of course, Apple has got a lot of experience with office productivity software. Our iWork package has been hugely popular on the Mac. So it’s simple, right? We just port iWork to the iPhone… Wrong! Because it turns out that word processing on a mobile device is an entirely different kind of application to word processing on a desktop. And you can’t make a business presentation on a mobile phone screen – even a beautiful high-density widescreen like the one we put in the iPhone.

So what do people want to do with documents, spreadsheets and presentations on their phone? Well the main thing is that they want to view their documents – and you already can do that on an iPhone because we’ve got this great feature built right into our Mail application that let’s you do just that. It’s built on the same rock-solid technology we use for QuickLook in Leopard. And for many users, that’s all they need. Which is great.

But then, what if I want to do more than read the document? Maybe I’ve got ten minutes to spare on my way to a meeting, and so I take the opportunity to read through a document. But I have changes that I want to share with my colleagues, and I want to track those changes. It’s amazing, but as far as we know, there is no mobile software out there right now that let’s you track changes on Word documents. Now we couldn’t believe that, so we spent a lot of time looking, but we really couldn’t find any.

The next thing I might want to do is to make some comments on that document. Again, there isn’t much mobile software out there that allows you to do this, and there’s certainly no mobile software out there that makes it easy. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. We started from scratch to build a whole new kind of application – a mobile word processor that makes it really easy to read through documents, to track changes and to make comments. And I’d like to show it to you now. [Demo]

…so that’s Pages. But what about presentations?

We looked at the mobile presentation software out there, and a lot of it seems to be focused on letting you edit presentations. But we don’t think that’s what people want to do. Working with graphics isn’t easy on a handheld device. We just don’t think that people want to design this stuff on their phones. So what do people want to do with presentations on their phones? Simple – they want to present them. And there’s no slicker way of making a presentation than with Keynote.

So, we launched our Keynote application back in 2003, and the reaction has been huge. You see Keynote does the same thing as other presentation packages out there [show’s icon of PowerPoint on screen]. The difference is that Keynote does it a whole lot better. It really takes advantage of the amazing graphics capabilities in Mac OS X to deliver incredibly slick and impactful presentations. Well, the great news is that the same graphics technologies that Mac OS X ships with are also built right into iPhone. So we can deliver almost all of the amazing visual impact of Keynote from something as small and compact as an iPhone. It’s truly amazing. Of course, you’re not limited to viewing your presentations on the iPhone’s built in screen. You can plug in our Apple Component AV cable, and hook it right up to your TV. And today, we’re introducing a new iPhone compatible VGA cable, so that you can hook up your iPhone to any VGA display – it means you can leave you Mac behind, and still take your Keynote presentations with you on the road. And the great thing is that your iPhone turns into this wonderful remote. You see, we’ve made our VGA cable really thin and flexible, so that it doesn’t get in the way when you’re presenting. On your iPhone screen you have a big back and next button… you have speaker notes… you can even check out the next or previous slides. I don’t know any other presentation remote that lets you do all that.

So Keynote on iPhone really is a great new way to take presentations with you on the road, and you can even use it with PowerPoint presentations – you’ll just have to do without Keynote’s amazing graphics.

Then, of course, there’s Numbers. Now, not everybody loves number crunching – I guess only an accountant can really love a spreadsheet. But of course there are numbers that we all like to keep track of [shows chart tracking iTunes sales on an iPhone screen, to laughs from the audience]. Anyone in business has numbers that they need to have at their fingertips, and iWork Touch does exactly that. It literally puts your numbers at your fingers. You see it turns out that our MultiTouch interface is really great for working with spreadsheets. Scrolling across big spreadsheets is a breeze – and if you double tap on a cell, you can adjust numeric values with this neat slider, without even having to use the keyboard. Plus of course, there are all these great 3D graphs and charts. So that’s Numbers on iPhone.

So we have these three great applications. What do they all have in common? Well they’re all redesigned from the ground up as mobile applications – providing you with the stuff you need to carry on doing your job when you’re on the road. They all take advantage of our amazing MultiTouch user interface. They all work with our hugely popular iWork suite for Mac, and of course, Microsoft Office as well, including Office 2007 & 2008 for Mac.

So as you can see – with our new iWork Touch suite – Pages, Keynote and Numbers, we’ve re-invented mobile business software. And after today, I don’t think anyone will want to settle for anything less. But there are a couple more thing that all these applications need. [Copy & Paste appears in words on screen to another round of applause]. In fact it’s not just for iWork – as we’re getting more 3rd party apps, we’re going to need copy and paste system-wide. But how?

Well we already have this great magnifying glass that helps you to position your insertion point. Well now we’ve made it so that if you hold down one finger as you move the magnifying glass, it let’s you highlight text. They you can simply tap the highlighted text to bring up a context menu that gives you some options – you can choose cut; copy; make note; send as e-mail or send as text. Then when you want to paste, you just use the magnifying glass again to position the insertion point, and then tap the insertion point to paste the text. It’s that simple. Let me show you [Demo].

So that’s how we’ve done copy and paste. And we know a lot of users have been wanting this for a while now. Well it’s so simple to use, we think you’re going to find it was worth the wait.

But there is one more thing that we’re going to need for all these amazing new apps. On the Mac, we call if the “Finder” [Finder icon appears on screen]. It’s what we use to browse documents. And in Leopard, we introduced CoverFlow, so you can browser through these gorgeous large thumbnails of your documents. We’ll we thought – wouldn’t it be great to have that on your iPhone too, so that you can browse through documents using CoverFlow, just like you browse through your music. It’s amazing. This is a real, desktop class file browser, right here on your iPhone. And it couldn’t be simpler to use. Here’s how it works. We’ve got this new icon in iTunes, called “Documents” – it appears under your iPhone icon. You can either drag your documents straight to it, or you can set up a folder on your Mac or Windows PC to sync right onto your iPhone. But that’s not the only way you can send and receive files. You can…

• Sync with a folder on your Mac or PC via iTunes
• Save attachments from e-mail on iPhone
• Send and Receive files via Bluetooth from any compatible device
• .Mac integration, so you can access you iDisk directly from your iPhone via WiFi

Of course, you’ve got plenty of storage – whether you have the 8GB iPhone, or the new 16GB model that we launched last month. This is way more built-in storage than most smart phones come with, so there’s no need to fiddle around with tiny removable media – everything fits neatly into your iPhone.

So as we promised at the end of last year, today we’re launching our SDK. Although we’re admittedly pushing it a little for “February” – fortunately this year is a leap year! [Laughs from audience]. But it’s actually a whole lot more than just an SDK that we’re introducing today:

• iPhone Games
• Buy Software from iTunes Store
• Finder for iPhone with CoverFlow
• Bluetooth File Exchange
• Copy and Paste
• New iPhone VGA Cable support

We already had the world’s most advanced mobile wireless platform – now we’re taking the next leap – we’re calling it “iPhone 2.0 Software Update”. It’s available today. It’s free of charge to our iPhone customers, and it’s also free to all our iPod Touch customers who have purchased the January Software Update. [More applause]. Plus, once you've installed the update, you can buy iWork Touch from the iTunes store for $79.

Well, that’s all we have for you today – we’ve been working really hard on this over the past twelve months. The entire team have been putting in a monumental effort to make this update something truly special, and I think you’ll agree, they’ve done a fantastic job. Thank you.

apple

Steve Jobs' February 2008 SDK Keynote

The following is just creative writing for fun - it is entirely speculation based upon publicly available information.

So we have this fantastic new SDK for our touch platform. It means we can build more great apps. But what apps should we build? After all, the iPhone and iPod Touch already do so much.

Well the first question we asked was “do people really want to buy more apps?” It seems like most smart phone users decide to just stick with the software their phone comes with. And that’s no surprise when you see what’s involved in buying and installing software on most smart phones. I don’t want to name any names, but you know what I mean. It’s not a great experience today.

But then in January, we released a software update for our iPod Touch customers, and it turns out that the response has been huge. We were absolutely staggered by the numbers on this – in the first week after it was released, over XX% of iPod Touch owners had bought the upgrade. That’s an amazing number.

So what does this tell us? It tells us that people will buy software for their mobile devices, as long as we get three things right:

• Make it easy – buying mobile software right now is just too hard
• Make it good – let’s be honest, the downloadable mobile software on the market today just isn’t great
• Make it affordable – people don’t want to pay desktop prices for mobile software

So if people want to buy mobile software, what kind of software do they want to buy? Well let’s take a look at what kinds of software you get on a desktop Mac or PC:

• Multimedia already have the iPod built in
• Calendars already have a great calendar
• Communication already have world’s best mobile phone and desktop class e-mail
• Creative Professionals people don’t want to design or make music on their mobile
• Utilities don’t need utilities, iPhone works beautifully just as it is
• Education phones are not really for the classroom
• Games
• Business Productivity

That just leaves two areas – games and business. Well we’ve been selling games on our classic iPods for years now, and it turns out they’re really popular. But not with hard-core gamers. You know, we don’t have people playing World of Warcraft on their iPods. No. These games are different – they’re for mere mortals, and they’re fun. And one of our biggest games on the 5th generation iPod is from a company called PopCap, and it’s called Zuma. Well we gave PopCap an advanced copy of our SDK, and they’ve been busily working on developing some great games of our MultiTouch devices, including Zuma. These games are not simple ports – PopCap have really got into the whole touch interface thing, and it turns out that Zuma is even better with a MultiTouch display. And at this point, I’m delighted to introduce PopCap’s CEO, David Roberts who’s here to tell us all about it…

…Thanks David, that really was something special. So that’s games, and we think you’re really going to have a lot of fun with them. But what about Business? Do business users want to use an iPhone? Isn’t it really for fun stuff like music? Well in fact, ever since we launched the iPhone, AT&T, O2, T-Mobile and Orange have been inundated by requests for special business plans. Turns out most business users were no more impressed with the competitors’ offerings that we were. That’s why in January both AT&T in the US, and O2 in the UK announced new business plans. Because business users also want the full internet experience and desktop class e-mail on their mobile. But what else do business users want? Well what they really want is this… [shows graphic of spreadsheet, document and presentation icons moving onto an iPhone display, to a round of applause] That’s why today I’m delighted to announce a brand new Apple product, and the first piece of iPhone software that we’re going to make available on the iTunes store. iWork Touch. Because we felt this was a piece of software that was so important to the iPhone, that we wanted to do it ourselves, to make sure that we get it right.

Of course, Apple has got a lot of experience with office productivity software. Our iWork package has been hugely popular on the Mac. So it’s simple, right? We just port iWork to the iPhone… Wrong! Because Word processing on a mobile device is an entirely different kind of application to word processing on a desktop…

To be continued – Part Two this weekend.

Apple to get the SDK ball rolling with “iWork Touch”? [Updated]

Here’s what we know:

• iPhone SDK launches some time this month (this is official)
• Installing 3rd party apps will require digital signatures (Engadget)
• Firmware is likely to be an incremental update to 1.1.4, so expect evolution, not revolution (Macrumors)
• 3rd Party Software will be distributed via iTunes (Macrumors)
• The recently released update 1.1.3 provides a means for 3rd party applications to appear alongside the default apps on the start screen
• Apple has recently extended its trademark registration to cover games (Trademork)

On this basis, we make the following four predictions (just guesswork - no insider info!)

1. iWork Touch
To get the ball rolling with selling applications on the iTunes Store, Mac Predictions anticipates that Apple will launch a mobile version of it’s iWork productivity app, enabling users to view and (to a limited extent) edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations (in iWork or Office format) on their phones. This will be paid-for software, and Apple may add extra features for tight integration with the desktop version of iWork.

2. “Documents” File browser
Since many 3rd party apps will require user access to part of the file system to work with documents, a file browser for iPhone is a likely addition as part of the 1.1.4 update. Whilst Mac Predictions has previously guessed that this app would be called “Finder,” with a Mac-style blue face icon, we’re now suspecting that it will make more sense to call it “Documents” since it’s functionality will be much more limited than the Mac’s Finder app.

3. Document syncing
This would probably involve adding a “Documents” menu to iTunes - users would probably have two options - to drag documents directly into the iTunes window, or to select a folder on your Mac or PC for syncing. iTunes would warn if any file extensions are not supported by installed applications

4. Copy & paste
This feature would be required for many 3rd party apps, and so will probably have to make its debut with the SDK

Update:

It appears that the MacRumors story referenced in this article may be a fake. This makes it less certain that the next update will be 1.1.4 - maybe 2.0 after all?