Tomorrow morning at 10AM PST Apple will be holding its “Latest Creation” Media Event. TheAppleBlog will be there providing you a steady stream of updates on everything announced.

You can get your live coverage fix via two methods tomorrow.

TheAppleBlog Live — This is the fastest way to get updates and the most interactive. In addition to our own updates (with text and photos), you can send in a comment/thought/observation and if we feel it’s relevant, we’ll post it for the thousands of others reading the updates. Our coverage will start around an hour before the event begins.

TheAppleBlog Twitter — We’ll be tweeting updates here, so be sure to follow@theappleblog.

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Stay tuned….
(Eddie Hargreaves is onsite, and Nick Santilli is transcribing comments)

2 minute warning:
Standard pre-keynote music is playing: Gnarls Barkeley, Beck, Gorillaz, U2, Coldplay, Green Day

Other than Steve’s standard single computer setup, there is another table with two displays on it.

John Hodgman onscreen impersonating Steve Jobs:
‘I quit’ and ‘I’m shutting down all of Apple’

Vista Jab

Zune Jab

Steve appears onstage at 10:04:
5,000+ attendees (biggest ever in Apple history)

First, let’s go back a year.
Successful Intel transition
Thank you to developers for making Universal App transition
Special thanks to Intel for all the hard work

Inviting Paul Otellini onstage

Jon Ive made an award for Intel, per Steve’s request
It’s a small disc made out of polished stainless steel

Paul says ‘the best still to come’

Steve:

Next up: great news about games
11:08AMEA, #1 publisher of games, coming back to Mac in ‘really big way’

CCO Bing Gordon onstage

Bing says everyone he knows uses Macs and OS X and they all want EA games on simultaneous release

Starting in July, 4 titles
C&C 3
Battlefield 2142
Need for Speed Carbon
HP and Order of Phoenix

Harry potter demo

Starting in August: Madden NFL 08, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08

Id
John Carmack going to show something ‘really sweet’ and premiere today
Lights turn orange

For the last 2 years, they’ve been working in secrecy. This will be the first time shown anywhere!

Dune buggy racing environment – cross between Myst and Episode I pod racing
Release on Mac, PC, PS3, 360 same time

Another Id/Mac announcement later…

On to Leopard (!)

Steve:

22M Active Mac OS X users
67% Tiger
23% Panther

Leopard disc uses time machine background
Leopard still set for October
300 new features
We’ll see 10 this morning

1. New Desktop
New Dock icons hover above translucent block
Menu bar is half transparent
Blue background is gone
Dock background is 3D looking
‘Stacks’ will clean up desktop [they finally come forth!!!]
Prominent active window
‘Stacks’ are simply folders in the Dock that allow rapid access to items inside them
When clicked, they reveal in grid or arch shape

Example: Downloads ‘stack’ in Dock by default

Help Menu has a search box
When window is dragged behind Dock, visual changed occur
Quicktime and Preview have refined looks
In Safari, PDFs viewed via Heads Up Display
Spotlight icon no longer blue

2. New Finder
Easy to browse and share files with other computers
Back to my Mac feature lets you share files over the Internet using .Mac
Cover Flow added to Finder
4th button added to Finder views
Coverflow is the 4th view
The sidebar looks like iTunes 7
Submenus: Devices, Shared Places, Search For
.Mac knows IP addresses of home, work computers
Demo of CoverFlow capability
New default icons in Home Folders
Can cycle through pages of PDf docs directly in CoverFlow
Can cycle through slides of Keynote Presentations
Can connect other Macs, PCs directly from Sidebar and use Coverflow view
New tab in .Mac called “Back To My Mac”
Will find your other .Mac machines and put in Sidebar

3. Quick Look
Preview files without opening applications
Text, images, movies, PDF, Word, Excel
Has Plug-in model for other files
Full-screen preview capability
Files appear in separate window that has basic viewing capability

4. Leopard is 64 Bit “top to bottom”
Both Unix and Cocoa are 64-bit
A single version of Leopard runs both 32-bit and 64-bit apps
Demo:
Loading 4GB image in a 32-bit app and a 64-bit app
[Gasp from the crowd upon seeing how detailed the image is]
Custom app is called GigaImage 64

5. Core Animation
Automatic animation
Higher production values
“ottomatically” uses OpenGL acceleration
Took first-run movie and made it live and interactive
Shows video that looks like Apple TV opening video, but is interactive and searchable

6. Boot Camp
Since March 2006, more than 2.5M downloads
No more CD burning to install drivers
Complement to Parallels and VMWare
(Shows Vista running Solitaire and Minesweeper)

7. Spaces
Group applications, instantly switch between groups, move applications between groups, get birds-eye view
Can switch between spaces using keyboard shortcuts

8. Dashboard
Adding Movies widget
Can buy Tickets on Fandango
Webclip
Movies widget also shows trailers
Shrinks down to only show movie poster
Webclip button can auto-select certain portions of a web page
Can select different borders for each widget created by Webclip
Dashcode will ship with every copy of Leopard

9. iChat
Bringing fun from PhotoBooth to iChat
Better audio – AAC-LD
Tabbed chats
iChat Theater
Photo Backgrounds
iChat Theater allows one user to show another photo slideshows, keynote presentations, videos
Anything that works with Quick Look works with iChat Theater
iChat backgrounds can be video, not just photo images [tie directly to iPhoto or Movies folder?]
One is the Star Wars hologram effect
One is the Conan O’Brien mouth gag – Uses image of Steve Ballmer [hahaha]

10. Time Machine
One-click setup, automatically backs up everything to local hard drive or network server, also wireless
Can search back in time for lost files, preview them with Quick Look, restore them (even entire computer)
Can use USB, FW HD or use Wireless Base Station with attached drive

[jab]
Basic Version $129
Premium Version $129
Enteprise Version $129
Ultimate Version $129
[/jab]

ONE MORE THING…

Safari
18.6 million Safari users
Want to grow Safari’s market share substantially
Windows version of Safari! [!]
Safari 3 in Leopard, XP & Vista
iBench: HTML performance on XP:
IE=4.6 seconds, FF=3.7, Safari=2.2
JavaScript performance: IE=2.4, FF=1.6, Safari=less than 1 second
Google & Yahoo search are built in
Can drag tabs around and off into separate window
Safari in Windows uses Aqua scrollbars
6.64 seconds iBench test for Safari, 13.56 for IE

500M iTunes downloads to Windows…
Public Beta Today of Safari for Windows & Tiger

One Last Thing…
iPhone
Ships in 18 days
6pm

What about developers? They’ve been trying to come up with a solution to let developers write great apps.
Full Safari enginee inside iPhone
Web 2.0 + AJAX apps for iPhone that will run on Safari
They can integrate with iPhone services
Instant distribution, easy to update, and secure (sandboxed)
No SDK required

Scott Forstall, VP iPhone Software demos an app that can be written for iPhone
Applications run in the Safari browser

Steve recapping: Leopard, Safari for Windows, iPhone development

fin

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