WWDC 2007 — Safari coming to Windows!

The Worldwide Developers Conference 2007 (WWDC) started today, but there weren’t many new things revealed as I had expected. A large majority of the time was spent going over features that users can expect to see in October when Mac OS X Leopard is released, but the coolest thing in my opinion is that Safari is coming to Windows. More on that below…

I listened to a streaming audio version of the Steve Jobs Keynote and was able to put things together by following Engadget’s live coverage. They did a great job snapping images and posting them as quick as they could, so all of the images below were taken from their site. Here’s the overview of what was talked about:

• EA games are coming to the Mac
• An overview of 10 features that will be found in Mac OS X Leopard
• Safari running on Windows XP and Vista
• What’s the iPhone have for developers?

–EA Games Coming to Mac–

EA is taking a big step in releasing games made for Macs, and the new selection being made available in July includes:

• Need for Speed Carbon
• Battlefield 2142
• Command & Conquer 3
• Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix

Then in August Mac users will see Madden 2008 and Tiger Woods 2008 being released for the Mac operating system.

–Mac OS X Leopard–

The new Mac operating system will have more than 300 new features included. Here are the 10 features that Jobs detailed at WWDC 2007:

1. Leopard has a new desktop with a 3D-looking Dock (also has a reflective appearance which is slick) and transparent Menu Bar at the top. There are “Stacks” in the Dock which are essentially folders that expand in the Dock.
   
2. New Finder that has pretty cool features like Cover Flow for your documents:
   
   The new sidebar adds built-in searching and “smart searches” that can do things like find files from today:
   
3. Quick Look lets user preview files without having to open the application, and many of the popular file formats will be supported out-of-the-box. For those that aren’t included, they can always be added by the developers of the applications.
4. Leopard is completely 64-bit! 32-bit apps will still be supported and ran side-by-side with the 64-bit Leopard. To demo the speed difference between 64-bit and 32-bit, Jobs opened a 4GB photo which took 28-seconds with the 64-bit machine and 81 seconds with the 32-bit.
   
5. Core Animation: Improved graphics and animations for the operating system make it look even more amazing. Here is a screenshot from a demonstration where he did a search for “water” as a tag on the videos, and the filtering of the videos happened instantly:
   
6. Boot Camp is, of course, shipping with Leopard which is compatible with XP and Vista.
7. Spaces…essentially virtual desktops on a Mac, except they are on steroids. You can drag things from one “space” to another, which is indeed very cool.
   
8. The Dashboard is getting some new features, including a new “movie time” widget which checks for movie times at your local theater. It also allows you to watch movie trailers right there, without need to visit a site.
   
   You can also use Web Clip to make widgets out of nearly any site, which examines the site for the content that you would be looking for. You can even customize the area that the Web Clip selects for the widget.
9. New features in iChat, such as sharing your videos or photos where they will be shown right there in iChat.
   
10. Time Machine lets you set-up backups in a single click, and it just backs up everything so you don’t have to specify exactly what you want to backup. These backups can even be done to a networked drive over a wireless connection. One of the cool things is that you can restore just a single file, and you can even find the files by searching for them via Spotlight. Alternatively you could restore your entire Mac.
    

Jobs closed up the features by making fun-of Vista, saying that the Basic version is $129, Premium version is $129, Business version is $129, Enterprise version is $129, and the Ultimate version is $129.

–Safari on Windows–

Oh, but then Jobs said there is one more thing! Safari 3 is coming to Windows! I’m really excited about this because it will make Website testing a lot easier. Jobs did say that Safari on Windows beats both IE and Firefox when it comes to rendering time, but will that be enough to attract new Safari users?

You can go ahead and download the public beta (found here) which was made available today. It will be interesting to see how people latch on to it.

Jobs did hint at distributing Safari with iTunes since they get more downloads of that in a days time than Firefox, so that should help boost their market share a little. Especially since most people will be oblivious to the fact that the software is also installing a browser, because we all know people who click right through the installation screens without reading what they say.

–iPhone–

The iPhone is coming June 29 as we all knew, and Jobs took the time to tell the attendees that developers will be able to create great AJAX apps that work beautifully on the iPhone. There is no SDK needed for developers since the iPhone has the full Safari engine in it. If it works in the newest Safari available for Windows or Mac, then it will work
on here!

Of course developers can also make Web 2.0 apps that make a phone call, check your email, or pull up an address on Google Maps.