June 6th, 2008

Rumor Mill: All things WWDC

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 7:57 am

Categories: 10.6, Safari, WWDC, iPhone

Tags: Picture, Apple Mac OS X, Operating Systems, Advertising & Promotion, Software, Apple Mac OS, Marketing, Jason D. O'Grady

Hey there, it’s Jake (Jason’s evil twin). It’s Friday so that means I get to write my crazy rumor column today. It’s also the last business day of the week before WWDC, so you can probably guess what today’s installment is going to be about.

So, there’s this phone and everyone’s talking about it and it’s going to get announced in Steve’s WWDC keynote on Monday. You may have heard of it? Here’s a picture of the one of the boxes received by Australian Apple reseller. It’s ominously marked:

SUBJECT TO TERMS OF NDA
DO NOT OPEN UNTIL TUESDAY JUNE 10TH, 2008

 
(Photo: MacTalk.com.au via MacRumors)

The box says “June 10″ because that’s when the WWDC keynote arrives in Australia. I say open that bad boy up, take some pictures, email them to me, then start looking for a new job. It looks like some of the massive shipping containers from China marked “Electric Computers” are starting to get distributed.

CrunchGear posted some pictures of banners hanging in Moscone which read “OS X Leopard, The world’s most advanced operating system,” and “OS X iPhone, The world’s most advanced mobile platform.” There are several more in Gernot Poetsch’s Flickr set.

CrunchGear also reports that AT&T employees getting iPhone 2 training beginning today.

CNet throws fuel onto the WWDC fire with pictures (two more) taken of more banners hanging inside Moscone. They apparently contain a few new icons like the green “flux capacitor” in the bottom right of this shot:

The US Patent and Trademark Office has recently published patent application 20080122796 with many features related to the 3G iPhone.

The device supports a variety of applications, such as one or more of the following: a telephone application, a video conferencing application, an e-mail application, an instant messaging application, a blogging application, a photo management application, a digital camera application, a digital video camera application, a web browsing application, a digital music player application, and/or a digital video player application.

The application also mentioned support for inline media, including Flash and Windows Media. Among the 25 inventors listed is Apple CEO Steve Jobs. (Tip: MacRumors)

Another hot rumor coming out of San Francisco is that Apple is going to either preview/demo/release to developers a build of Mac OS 10.6. What’s interesting about 10.6 is that it’s rumored to be kicking PowerPC to the curb for good. In addition to being Intel only, 10.6 is also rumored to be Cocoa only meaning that Carbon apps are also toast.The word is that 10.6 would ship to us mere mortals at Macworld in January 2009. The upside is that the new OS will be the fastest thing ever to hit the desktop. Too bad most of your applications won’t work with it.

Although Apple has trademarks on the words “Cougar” and “Lynx” – logical names for the next cat – there’s a rumor that Apple’s going to name Mac OS 10.6 “Snow Leopard.” If so, that’s the lamest name ever. If anything, a type of Leopard could be used for a “hundredth” decimal release, like 10.5.4, but not for a “tenth” decimal release like 10.6. Tenths should get new names, Apple. One theory is that Apple needs to use a lame name for 10.6 because there are now UI or front-end features and they’ve only got two good cat names in their trademark database and want to call 10.7 “Cougar” and 10.8 “Lynx.”

Personally, I just want to know about Mac OS 11 (or “XI”)- code name: “Nigel.”

What have you heard?