GoGoGadgets

If I had to describe Apple’s event in one word it would be “impressive.” As everyone knows rumors fly around Apple’s existance everyday and you can never really forsee what’s actually coming next. This time many of the rumors were spot on.

Multitasking

Probably the star “tentpole,” as Apple called them, of the event if you had to assign it to just one. Steve and the team managed to set up a way to make multitasking useable, eloquent, and battery aware all at the same time. By simple double tapping the home button when you’re in any application a nice little dock sildes up and you see your running applications.

Developers

If you’re not a developer feel free to skip down to the next section. So what’s this mean for you? Depending on how you look at it this could be a little bittersweet. Yes, you have the opportunity to have processes running in the background but in order for apple to maintain a halfway decent battery life this is what they did. They enable certain 3rd party APIs to run in the background for your application. For example, there’s a background music API. So if your application wants to hang out in the background you have the opportunity to do that. As far as music goes they even got a little better than that. The playing indicator is turned on and off from your application something that was previously only affected by the iPod, and the lockscreen music controls will control your application. Besides the music API they also enabled VoIP, background location, push notifications, task finishing, and the next tentpole.

Fast app switching

Very similar to multitasking this feature will mostly affect games. If you play games on your iPhone you know that most of the time if you get a call or a text message you have to quit out of the game to the other application and you lose all of your game data. Fast app switching to the rescue! This allows developers to save the state of their game so when you switch out and back in you are in the same place you left off! One word, yay!

Developer

Again skip if you’d like. So what’s this mean for you guys? This means you can impliment a simple snippet of code in order for your application to place nice with everything else. No matter what your application, you can set up this API to save your state. The biggest use case to me is games where it’s going to soon be vital for you to have this set up.

Gamecenter

This “tentpole” is going to change portable gaming forever. If you’ve ever played any games with this icon in the corner you kinda know how the system works. This happens to be OpenFeint. Mainly what it does: is you link yourself to an OpenFeint account so that when you get a score it is sent to there leaderboards in order to put you up against other players. Well they are probably crying right now because game center is going to take over. Very similar to OpenFeint, all your high scores will be stored and put up against other players, but gamecenter takes you a few steps further. Achievements are all the rave on xbox live and game center will incorporate that into games on the iPhone or iPod touch. As Steve Jobs showed us, the number of games developed for the iPhone os is a ridiculous. 10x anyother platform and more than 85 million units are in people’s hands right now. This social gaming platform blows Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP out of the water.

Developers

What’s this mean for you. You can integrate this fantastic system directly into your application, very similar to OpenFeint, and then you just have to sit back and watch apple do the rest. Amazing right? Yes.

Mail

As everyone who read my rant knows I’m very underwhelmed with the features in the current mail application. 4.0 to the rescue!!!!!(mostly). Jobs answered our prayers giving us a unified inbox where we can aggrogate all our mail, multiple exchange account service, by not my desired mail account organization. Hey 2 of 3 isn’t bad. Although I won’t get into the downfalls of the contacts and calenders applications…

Developers

This just means you won’t have to go in to 10 different mailboxes to check all your email. Yayyyyyyy!!!

iAds

I’m not going to lie I despise ads. I rarely click on them and they really just look terrible. iAds to the rescue(ish). iAds is just like it sounds. It’s an ad platform that directly integrates with the OS allowing for more functionality and a better looking interface. You’ve probably noticed the “ads via the Deck” stuff in tons of ad supported applications. Those always look terrible and never make me want to click anything. So why is iAds cool? Since it’s built into the OS you can do tons of cool stuff. Steve demoed three different use cases that actually made me want to click them. The first was Toy Story 3 (these ads were all apple made with no endorsement from these companies, although he does own pixar), which when you clicked it gave you a game like interface to play around with. You could look through characters and in general it was just a cool interface. The potential for these ads is amazing. I would even want to click on some of these to just play around without ever leaving my application.

Developers

What’s this mean from you? You can leave the deck and make MORE money with the help of apple. Of the revenue from the ads, 60% will go straight to you. Definitely not a tiny sum. You will be able to toss some code in and be ready to go making more money for better looking ads.

Folders

“Folders” is awesome. Mainly you can organize your applications in folders you make in order to reduce clutter and keep yourself organized. By just dragging one application on top of another you can group them together with a name of your choice and be organized with a very stack like interface. You can even put these folders on your dock to keep them acsessable. Yay again!

Other stuff

Those will by far be the most notable features but there are tons of others (over 100!) some of those are definitely worth a mention.

Access to new APIs some of the best being Calendar, in app SMS, Quicklook and the photo library
Digital zoom, although this is okay it makes very pixelated images
Underlined misspells, something I’ve been begging for forever
Change wallpaper, something people have been asking for since the phone came out
Text message character count
Places and faces in the photo library

Roundup

Overall this keynote has been the biggest for the iPhone since the release apps and a public development program before iPhone OS 2.0. All the major software features people have been waiting for are there. Steve jobs said it perfectly, “we may not have been the first to the party (on the subject of multitasking) but we will be the best.” No longer do 3rd party developers have to keep me here, there are still things about the system that I don’t like but these features answer a lot of my issues with the iPhone OS. More than enough to keep me happily on board the apple train for a while longer. Does this mean andriod is dead? No. The iPhone still isn’t on verizon. Who knows if it ever will be. And both the open and closed systems that are Google and Apple have their own distinct advantages and disadvantages. The war definitely rages on, but now there is no longer reason to be sad that you have an iPhone instead of a Nexus One. And if 4.0 doesn’t suit you. It’s already jailbroken.

About Bob

I'm a cool guy :) Honestly I wish I could say more. If you knew why I couldn't you would think disgraceful things about a company many of you hold very dear to your life. It really wouldn't make any sense but you would hate them. I can tell you that technology is my life. It's what I love to do. Which is why Jason and I started all of this.