People, let's get a grip on reality and look at the facts.

Sure, some of the 10 new features of Leopard weren't new; there wasn't any hardware at the show. And to that, the stock market reacted unfavorably.

How fast people forgot we just received new LED-powered Macbook Pros less than a week before, and a little something called an iPhone is still on track for June 29th, 6pm. This is more than enough new hardware and innovation to support the WWDC Boom quotient.

So I find myself asking, would it have killed Apple to wait six days to announce those laptops at the keynote instead of synced with the educational discount? And couldn't they have started preorders for the iPhone that day, too? You know, for the sake of Boom.

I think they could have. So why are they taking the less exciting approach? Maybe Apple is trying to control the hype, which some have reported, is getting tall even by Jobsian standards. (NYTimes). Maybe they're trying to push hardware in a more granular pattern, to stay current.

What do you think? –Brian Lam and Matt Buchanan

But if you read into it and consider InfoWeek's note, "upon further questioning, Croll would only confirm that Apple had never said ZFS would be a part of Leopard," in conjunction with the fact that it was Sun's CEO making the slip, not some random peon, it seems fairly likely that something Sunny was cooking in the Apple kitchen. It's not like they're down and out in any case—Apple's probably already kicking around stuff for 10.6 – Matt Buchanan

Apple Says No Sun File System For Leopard [InformationWeek]

[Updated]

"ZFS is not the default file system for Leopard. We are exploring it as a file system option for high-end storage systems with really large storage. As a result, we have included ZFS — a read-only copy of ZFS — in Leopard."

Well, pretty much just as you would expect. Less booms were a result of less jaw- dropping announcements. And less announcements means stock price no-go-up'y. In fact at end-of-day their closing price was down $4.45 from their daily high of $126.15.

Steve, I guess that means either you have got to pump up the boom-count or make sure that on keynotes like today each boom really counts.– Ben Longo

Complete Transcript of Steve Jobs, Macworld Conference and Expo, January 9, 2007 [MYiTablet]

Editor's note: There were technically nine booms today by my count, with the last boom uttered by iPhone Software VP Scott Forstall. Too bad only Jobs booms count. Also, I think Steve was toying with us in the middle there when he went boom...boom boom boom boom five times in a row. – JC

It's definitely snappy, and subjectively it does seem to beat Firefox rendering the 10 or so pages I visit daily outside of my RSS feeds. However, on my 1920x1200 widescreen monitor, pages in Safari seem a bit "fuzzier" than they do in Firefox. And yeah, while it's cliché to say at this point, I do like the interface for the most part—it beats the pants off of the ugly-stick-beaten IE 7, in any case.

In-line finding, while slightly slower than Firefox's find-as-you-type, is also more detailed with instance numbers plus a fairly schmancy highlighting effect. Also nice is SnapBack, which brings you back to your original search results or main page of site with a little icon in the search bar.

Now for some complaints: One niggling annoyance is that the keyboard shortcut for opening new tabs from the address bar is different from both Firefox and IE 7—with them you just hit Alt+Enter and the address pops up in a new tab.

I realize it's an Apple app, but can't we follow some standards? (Clearly, I don't own a Mac, so your Mac standards mean nothing to me.) Which, depending on how much of a stickler you are for an aesthetically unified computing experience, Safari's steadfast refusal to pick up any of Aero's UI elements might drive you a little nuts. The sole tiny corner for resizing the window is bothersome to boot, since I'm used to just grabbing and dragging.

Final thoughts? Definitely worth a download. You might like it, you might not, but overall it's a solid experience. – Matt Buchanan

WWDC 07 [Gizmodo]
Safari 3 Public Beta [Apple]

Well, we're not sure what we'll hear. At the very least, we should get new, previously "top secret" Leopard OS features. There might be a new disk format and brushed-metal iMacs in our future. The wild money is on some kind of a multi-touch tablet device, but that just seems, I don't know, a little Gatesian.

We do know that Steve's speech will not last 3 hours and we know that every registered developer gets a handy tote bag, to facilitate the toting of their new beta copy of Leopard. Want to see it?

Made you look! See, it's just a dumb tote bag. The eBay bidding starts at $3,000. (Just kidding! Sheesh!)

For a tidy round-up of WWDC keynote guesses, rumors that will be confirmed or smashed about two hours from now on your very own beloved Gizmodo Dot Com, visit the Apple 2.0 blog. Hey Phil: when the iPhone comes out, won't you have to start calling your blog Apple 3.0? At least, that seems to be the gist of The Economist's love letter to Mr. Jobs. See you at the show! – Wilson Rothman

Continuing Coverage of Apple WWDC [Gizmodo]

We'll be able to deliver the words from El Jobso's mouth to your LCD faster than any other blog by minutes. With nice photos. Cool, huh?

Bookmark this page. We'll update it with a link June 11th, Monday morning, well before the Apple Keynote starts at 10a.m. PST. And we'll have friends along.

Adam Pash from Lifehacker is going to be coming along, as are several other journalist friends. Vincent from Slashgear, and Gizmodo Alum Richard Baguley. Matt Hickey of Crunchgear will be there; as will ever-present fellow tech blogger and arch-rival Ryan from Engadget (recently and rightfully promoted to Editor in Chief). It's going to be a lot of fun, even though I don't think any hardware will show up. This show seems to be all about Leopard. (Rawr!)

Maybe we'll stop by TUAWs get together after we're done. (Any other parties going on afterwards?)

Man, I'm stoked to be able to get the news to you guys that much faster. Big thanks to Tom and Ian over in Gawker Tech, our tiny little dev team with huge hearts and brains. But I'd be lying if I wasn't nervous about stress testing new software on such a big day. No guts, no glory, hmm?

I've also got new camera gear. And I've been lifting weights and eating spinach. And I got a haircut. So come on down and visit us on Monday by visiting Giz. Or, if you're on the floor, please say hi and drop a high fiver on me. We'll be wearing one of FSJ's "Free Steve" shirts. – Brian Lam

If you can't recall all the public features, here's a refresher you can glance through before the big show on Monday. The secret features revealed there should be substantial, considering the OS's long delay to October.

Time Machine

Leopard's most radical concept is Time Machine, a way to back up your computer without actually going to the hassle of backing up your computer. The system journals every change on your disk, giving you access to older versions of your work. Want a file you just overwrote or deleted? Use Time Machine's browser to scroll back a few days, then pluck your data from oblivion. Of course, if your drive goes poo-poo, your Time Machine is useless. We're impressed, but we'd be more impressed if Time Machine could go forward in time to when our blog posts are already written, 10 hours from now.

Time Machine can backup, on the fly, to an external or network'd drive. Here's the official Apple video.

Mail

I personally use Mail, and I'm super excited over two tweaks that'll appeal to organizing freaks. The first is the Notes box. How often do you send yourself an emails as reminder notes? The new Mail has a dedicated box that formats Notes messages so they look like Post Its. The Other function is the ToDo list. Mail lets you highlight text in any app—even document files in Finder7mdash;and turn them into things on your ToDo list. Sweeeeeeet. Mail also does stationary now, in HTML. Just like Outlook Express did 5 years ago. The templates included range from photo album to ecards. They're nice. Here's a video.

iChat
It's fargin awesome. We're talking app screen-sharing over iChat video (so you can show off slideshows, or powerpoint, or even videos in Quicktime.) Then, there's iChat's backdrops. The backdrops can overwrite your messy room with a photo of a beach, or of Times Square. The coolest thing? iChat supports video backdrops—one example they had was of someone appearing to be riding a rollercoaster. Then, there's Screen Sharing, which I didn't hear Steve talk about during the keynote. I assume it's a VNC type of remote control. Apple's video here.

Spaces

All the new Macs support high res LCDs. But even the biggest LCDs get crowded after you open a spreadsheet, a mail program, and a browser. So that's where Spaces comes in. Spaces lays your application windows out across 4 virtual desktops that you can quickly switch between. You can zoom out to see all 4, then drag apps between each virtual desktop. BTW, this has been around for a long time in Linux machines. Gotta love how Apple accuses M$ft of copying, while they've copied third party apps like Konfabulator since Tiger.

Dashboard and Widgets

Dashboard, if you don't know, is a program that runs useful mini apps called Widgets: They can check the weather, check stock prices, rock some basic calculator action, and loads more. (Here's Apple's directory of Widgets.) What's new? A Widget creator that seems more suited for developers, and a way to turn any part of a webpage into a Widget. Eh.

Spotlight
Spotlight is OS X's search service that can find not only files, but images from iPhoto, email from Mail, and contacts from Address Book. You get the idea — you can search your system for whatever. What's new here is support for searching Mac's across the network, and support for additional search syntaxes. Meh.

iCal

The big new thing about iCal is group calendar support, using the CalDAV standard. Using a compatible WebDAV server, you can automatically schedule meetings during times when everyone is available, and automatically request meeting rooms. (So, we're one step closer to iCal being useful for workplace use.)

Parental Controls for Net-Access

Parents can limit internet access on machines by remote control. It wasn't announced at the Keynote, but Giz found this sidebar on the Leopard website.

Bundled Apps
Bootcamp, the software that helps Windows Machines run on Macintel machines, comes out of beta and will ship with Leopard. So will Front Row, Apple's media browser, and Photo booth.

Core Animation
Core Animation is a developer tool for scripting graphics. It's best explained by watching an example of a program.

64 Bit Support
Leopard is Apple's new operating system, due to hit the shelves in the spring of 2007. The OS has been written to fully support 64-bit apps and the Quad Xeon 64-bit chips in the new Mac Pro desktops. And at the same time run older 32-bit apps. All without emulation. – Brian Lam

[*this post was excerpted from a previous article on Leopard]
OS X Leopard [Apple]
WWDC 2006 Keynote Video</> [Apple]
WWDC 206 Keynote Transcription [Macrumors]

Wired has a piece on core animation, the developer animation suite that will make regular apps sparkle.

Also, Computerworld is predicting an alliance between Apple and Google to incorporate some of Google's web apps into .Mac. That should make loyal users of the stagnant .Mac platform happy. Or at least content enough to keep shelling out for that @mac.com address.

Here's our wishlist.

• Tight integration with iPhone. There's going to be iTunes and iPhoto integration for sure, but let's get some stuff like proximity detection, auto-file system syncing, auto-syncing of Mail, Safari, and even remote control of your Mac from your phone over Wi-Fi. Heck, why not make it a super fancy remote when you're watching AppleTV or FrontRow.

• A better Finder. Better known as FTFF. For something that integral to everyday usage, that thing sucks.

• Native Windows apps like Parallels. How about Apple just buys Parallels and integrates their development right into the OS? That'd be something.

Those are the big three. How about you? What would you like to see in Leopard? – Jason Chen

If you're looking for excellent liveblogging and fantastic pictures of the new Leopard features Jobs is pulling out of his one-size-too-tight jeans, this is the place. We'll be there in force, so stop by and say hello if you see someone wearing pants that say "iPhone Goes here ->". – Jason Chen

Next Monday is Apple's WWDC keynote. We never miss it, and nearly no tech journalists in town miss it. And judging by reader feedback, you generally care about something like an Apple Keynote more than the entirety of CES. (And our server logs back that up.)

That makes me kind of sad, because I really would have liked to meet with a lot of those companies, who would undoubtedly be showing off cool things. It gets my pasty blogger ass out of the house, too. And allows me to practice those interpersonal skills that are fading oh so fast as I work at Gizmodo. So I have a plea: Next time you come to town, maybe it's best not to hold the press meetings the same time as one of the two or three biggest days of the year for SF tech writers. – Brian Lam

In light of new rumors about and their LED plans, we may be getting some surprise announcements about those changes there as well. Or, if the Mac Pro release before NAB was any indication, we might get a release the week before. – Jason Chen

We'll be there in full force to cover the entire keynote as usual. And if you're there, stop by and say hello. – Jason Chen

Update: Apparently developers will get a beta, not the feature complete beta.

After that, they'll probably transition to Leopard talk, giving up some more features there as well, and showing new things developers can do.

Of course, we pulled all of this out of our ass, but it seems likely, no? – Jason Chen

Update: We just spoke to Apple and the Keynote's actually only 1.5 hours. Ignore everything we said above.

WWDC 2007 Keynote Scheduled: Monday, June 11th 2007 [Macrumors]

Brilliant photoshop again by Jesus Diaz

Apple's going to be focusing on Leopard, media content delivery, immersion track for new developers, developer tools, and whatever else they usually focus on there. So don't get your hopes up. Those enthralled guys (NO GURLS ALOUD!) are all developers. – Jason Chen

WWDC Agenda [Apple via News.com]