WWDC: Jobs keynote focuses on Leopard, Safari and iPhone

Macworld - SAN FRANCISCO -- Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference kicked off today at San Francisco's Moscone West convention center with a keynote address by CEO Steve Jobs, during which he praised Intel Corp. for its work in moving Apple's hardware to Intel processors, talked up gaming news on the Mac platform and then laid out the features that will be introduced with the release later this year of Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard."

The focus of last year's WWDC was the transition to Intel microprocessors, noted Jobs. "We did that transition successfully, and everyone did an awesome job," he said, including engineers inside Apple and the developers present at this year's conference. Jobs then invited Intel CEO Paul Otellini up on stage and handed him a polished stainless steel disc that read, "Our sincere thanks."

Jobs then introduced Bing Gordon, co-founder and chief creative officer at billion-dollar game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. "I have two daughters; they live on their MacBook," Gordon said. "I have friends in business; they live on OS X. Our CTO at EA lives on Mac, and we're seeing EA technologists move to Mac in droves. And what do they want, in addition to a Cinema Display? They want to go to Apple stores and see EA games. And so that's what we're going to do."

Gordon said that EA is going to bring "four of our biggest titles" to the Mac starting next month: Command and Conquer 3, Battlefield 2142, Need for Speed Carbon, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. What's more, EA will be bringing sports games to the Mac in August, beginning with simultaneous launches of Madden 08 and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08.

Jobs next introduced John Carmack, owner and chief technology officer of id Software, the company behind such games as Quake and Doom. Carmack demoed a heavily textured 3-D environment built with id Software's next-generation technology running on Mac OS X -- and encouraged attendees to watch for other Mac-related announcements coming at QuakeCon, id Software's annual gamers convention.

Talking about 'our big cats'

"Now let's move on to our big cats," said Jobs -- a sly reference to Mac OS's code names, all of which are based on wild cats -- Mac OS X v10.4 "Tiger" and Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard" being the focus. "Two-thirds of our users are running Tiger," said Jobs. "That's unprecedented in our industry. Ninety percent of our customers are running the current or current-minus-one release."

The first new Leopard feature Jobs touted was a new desktop. The default blue pattern of old is gone, replaced with an image showing grass with dew. More to the point, the menu bar at the top of the screen now adapts to what users put on the desktop. As part of the revamp, the dock is more translucent than before, and it includes two new features: Stacks and a new Downloads folder.