Apple’s WWDC is a yearly event where the company shows off its latest and greatest tech – whether that be hardware or software. Last year’s WWDC focused more on software, as Apple demoed iOS 5, Mac OS X Lion, and unveiled the iCloud. That event took place from June 6th through the 10th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Although the iPhone 4S was launched last October in a special media event, Apple has launched previous iPhones at WWDC. This year’s exact dates for WWDC have not been announced, but speculation has put it at June 10th-15th, as WWDC is historically a June event.

MacRumors points to Moscone’s event calendar, which previously had June 10th-15th blocked out for a generic “Corporate meeting.” Currently, the dates have shifted to June 11th-15th, but it’s still scheduled for a corporate meeting, a placeholder for WWDC that has been used before.

Of course, this information relies on a few speculations – one if which is the validity of DigiTimes, which has definitely been wrong in the past. Last week, Foxconn sources said it was “go time” for production – something that would suggest a summer launch. It appears that the intensified rumor season is upon us.

In the past Apple has released new iPhones during their summer Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), but sadly this year there was no such announcement. Artsy coffee drinkers were totally bummed out by this.

A report from a Japanese website sets September 7th as the date of Apple’s next media event, which is speculated to be when Apple unveils the iPhone 5. MacRumors asked the blog for the source of the speculated date, and they found that it came from a “source in the know” and not a product of guesswork. If you look at the dates of past Apple media events
in September, the dates jive: September 9th, 2008, September 9th, 2009, and September 1st, 2010.

If the date of the media event turns out to be accurate, there are no guarantees the iPhone 5 will be announced.

Apple’s suppliers are rumored to begin shipments of the iPhone 5 in September, but AllThingsD still suggests that we won’t see anything until October. If you combine these rumors, they kind of make sense. Apple could announce the iPhone 5 in September, at the rumored media event, and be ready for an official release in October.

From the photos emerging and the commentary on Twitter, it is clear that many think he looked gaunt and unhealthy. Many are saying that that his voice sounded weak. Leander Kahney at Cult of Mac has a different opinion, saying “There was a lot of good stuff unveiled by Apple this morning at WWDC. But the best news? Steve Jobs looked pretty healthy. Yeah, he didn’t spend much time on stage. Yes, he looks thinner than normal. Yes, he had to hitch his jeans up a couple of times. But all-in-all, I thought he looked pretty vibrant and energetic on stage.”

This reading of the situation seems to be in total opposition with the views on Twitter, with nearly every tweet I’ve seen regarding Jobs’ health saying that he didn’t look good. If you go by the market, they also seem to agree that he didn’t look too great.

It seems that Job’s poor health and appearance at the WWDC has had an effect on Apple stock. According to the AP, Apple’s stock is down 1.3% in afternoon trading. It was up this morning, but fell shortly after Jobs left the stage. Apparently investors are worried about the effect Job’s declining health may have on the company. It seems unlikely that even the unfortunate event of Job’s death would derail the company, however. Apple just became the worlds most valuable brand according to a report by Millward Brown

Jobs received a warm ovation as he took the stage, coming out to an ironic playing of James Brown’s “I Feel Good.” During the keynote, he discussed their new Mac OS X Lion, iOS 5, and their new cloud services entitled iCloud.

Here are a couple of photos snapped of Jobs, the first courtesy of Engadget and the second courtesy of tweet from xdamman, via his Instagram account.

Here’s what the Twitterverse is saying about Jobs’ appearance:

From what you’ve seen, what do you think?

When Apple initially announced the conference, they put the focus on their operating systems:

At this year’s conference we are going to unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS. If you are an iOS or Mac OS X software developer, this is the event that you do not want to miss.

But the most speculation has surrounded the iCloud, Apple’s upcoming cloud services launch. Everyone began to speculate when filing revealed that they company had bought the iCloud.com domain name. Just a few days ago, Apple made it official: the iCloud would be a big part of the WWDC 2011. They also confirmed Lion OS X and iOS 5:

At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software – Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple’s advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch; and iCloud, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.

Apple Insider has photos of the WWDC banners, further confirming the agenda:

But what else will be revealed in the Keynote, scheduled for 1 pm EST on Monday? Steve Jobs will be giving the address, we know that. What could he unveil? New MacBook Air? New Voice features? iPhone details?

Well, the folks over at Krazybig have developed a way for you to play along at home: WWDC 2011 Keynote Bingo.

As Steve announces all the cool new stuff like iCloud movies and wireless sync, get 5 in a row for Bingo!

We’re not sure exactly what Mr. Jobs will say, but we can be sure that there will be a lot to talk about on Monday afternoon.

The Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, and Steve Jobs’s keynote in particular, has posed a problem for Twitter in the past.  And so have any number of other occurrences, for that matter, making references to Twitter and downtime almost clichd.

 Twitter Celebrates Lack Of Outages

But yesterday, Biz Stone, the company’s co-founder and creative director, wrote on its main blog, "It looks like we were spot-on with our estimate of ten times the normal traffic today.  Our preparations held and Twitter stayed up.  Only one unexpected disruption occurred and that was a network problem in our data center which caused a few minutes of service disruption some time after Steve Jobs’ keynote.  With that single disruption, our uptime during the event was 97.3%."

Stone also promised that Twitter’s accomplishment wasn’t a lucky, one-time shot.  "[W]e learned a lot during this stress test and that will translate to better performance down the line," he stated.

Any additional Twitter outages still aren’t likely to cause the level of surprise generated by Amazon’s recent problems.  The company did well yesterday, though, so an acknowledgement of its improvement seems appropriate.

iPhone 3G

In addition to hardware design features like making it thinner and making the headphone jack flush with the body, the new iPhone will download considerably faster. In comparison to downloads on the EDGE network, the 3G iPhone can bring up Webpages in significantly less time. A photo-heavy National Geographic page, for example downloaded in 21 second on 3G while an EDGE download of the same page took a while longer.

Jobs claimed that Apple’s 3G phone was 36 times faster than competitor 3G phones from Nokia and Treo. Released in 22 countries on July 11, the iPhone 3G will cost $199 for 8 GB, and $299 for 16 GB. Besides Venezuela and China, it will be available in total in 70 countries.

Another improvement is to location services. Jobs demoed the satellite tracking of an iPhone as it traveled down San Francisco’s Lombard Street.

1. Apple will announce a new iPhone.
2. Apple will announce a new Mac computer.
3. Twitter will crash.

OK, so maybe we’ll only see 2 out of 3 coming true. Twitter has announced the steps it’s taking to try and handle what will likely be a huge increase in use today–with all the Tweeple talking about Apple.

Over at the company blog, Twitter has revealed three initiatives that should help keep the lights on…

1. “…utilizing more memcache, employing more read-slave servers, and by fixing some bugs for improved efficiency.”
2. “We have isolated and created on/off switches for many Twitter features. Should it become necessary to shed incoming load quickly, we can turn off features such as stats, pagination, and several others to preserve the reliability and timeliness of your Twitter timeline.”
3. Some secret “cool way” to help stability, that Twitter is not willing to reveal. (Update: It’s likely this partnership with Summize)

While everyone was surprised that Big Brown didn’t win at the weekend, there’ll be less shock shown, should Twitter go down. In fact, TechCrunch has news of Twiddict, a service that will save your tweets and post them, the moment Twitter comes back online.

I’m a huge fan of Twitter. I’ve amassed a network of 2,500 great folks. Suffice to say, my fingers are crossed that Twitter has finally figured out how to handle the load.

Comments

My very first thought was that they’ve wrapped a gui front-end around filesystem versioning or snapshots. That would be the logical way to do this; otherwise you waste a tremendous amount of unnecessary space for backup:

(From http://www.macworld.com/2006/08/firstlooks/leotimemac/index.php):

How will Time Machine work for people who modify gigantic files on a regular basis? For example, consider a 1GB database file. If I make a tiny modification to that file, Time Machine writes out another 1GB file to record that change. As a result, drive space on my backup device could quickly disappear.

A while back, it was rumored that Apple might be working on ZFS for Leopard. Is that how they are doing this? Well, maybe, but others say “ZFS is not in the Leopard discussed at WWDC in any capacity”

Maybe they added versioning to HFS+?. It wouldn’t seem all that hard to do given the metadata capabilities already present. Versioning itself isn’t all that new; it goes back to DEC’s TENEX and VMS filesystems. Even SCO implemented undelete with versioning. But no, the descriptions of Time Machine don’t sound like versioning: they talk about having a separate drive for the backups. So that’s probably not it.

So do they really duplicate data over and over again? That seems so unlikely. At the very least a simple version control diff method would cut down on that tremendously. But we don’t yet know. Wikipedia’s reference says:

It is unclear at this time whether Time Machine should be considered as a simple back-up utility or as a complete filesystem-level version control mechanism. Apple’s website merely states that an API will be released so that third party developers can take advantage of Time Machine.

And that’s where it stands for now.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

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A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com

During these sessions, developers often get to use new technology for the first time, and they are able to speak with the Apple engineers who actually developed the advancements. Apple prides itself on this point-”It is about the technology and the developers, it’s not about marketing,” said Ron Okamoto, vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. “When developers use innovations as their strategy, we do well together.”

In addition to hands-on sessions and labs, there will be presentation sessions and feedback forums. Although the spotlight will be pointed at new technologies, past innovations will also garner attention.

Apple’s shift to Intel processors, for example, was the focus of last year’s conference, and will still be a mainstay of discussion at this year’s gathering: in addition to the usual Mac developers, some Windows developers are expressing interest in Apple due to the changeover.

Apple’s developer program recently exceeded 500,000 active members, with strong student registration for the latest conference, particularly from outside U.S. borders. With so many new faces, it all comes back to innovation.

“Innovation is one of the things we strive for and something that we believe is part of the culture of our developer conference,” said Okamoto. “It’s about inspiring people-at the end of the day we think developers have more fun working on our platform.”

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

Ron Okamoto, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations, said, “Between our discussions with the MacHack organizing committee and the just-announced availability of room at the Create conference in New York City, this move became the obvious best choice for both Apple and the Macintosh developer community.”

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