WWDC 2009: What will Apple do?

The banner caption indicates the focus of Apple's developer conference will be on features of the iPhone OS and third-party apps.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Trying to predict what we'll see at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this year gives one the slight feeling of deja vu.

Heading into the annual conference last year, we knew there would be three basic topics covered in the event's opening keynote speech: OS X 10.6, the iPhone platform, and new iPhone hardware. You can bet that WWDC 2009--sold out for the second straight year--will hit on those same three areas. But there are still plenty of questions surrounding the specific details of what we'll see Monday morning when the conference opens at San Francisco's Moscone Center.

We know that the human headliner of the kickoff event, the conference keynote speech, will be Phil Schiller, vice president of marketing. Apple has promised he will discuss iPhone OS 3.0, which should be available this summer, as well as Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

The other headliner, that will invariably steal the show, will be new iPhone hardware, if it is indeed introduced. It seems a good bet since it's practically Apple tradition now to introduce the latest update to its incredibly popular smartphone at WWDC. The device may not be immediately for sale, and Apple could wait to roll them out in July, like last year. But the No. 1 reason Apple is likely to debut the phone Monday is that the point of WWDC is to teach developers how to work with Apple's mobile and desktop operating systems. It wouldn't make much sense to bypass the opportunity to familiarize them with new application programming interfaces (APIs) for new iPhone hardware.

Of course, rumors have been bubbling since at least January about a second-generation iPhone 3G. Some of the more credible leaked photos and uncovered clues seem to point to a more evolutionary update to the phone's hardware, instead of a major change like last year's upgrade to an iPhone that could handle 3G wireless service. Things that appear likely:

• It's easy to see Apple keeping the 16GB model of the iPhone, and introduce a 32GB version, while keeping the prices the same: $199 for the smaller, $299 for the larger.

• A new camera with the ability to take video.

• A magnetometer built into the phone's hardware.

Speculation regarding a discount version of the phone in a smaller capacity with fewer features for $99 has cropped up also, mostly from Wall Street analysts. Apple already has a 10.8-percent share of the smartphone market, and lowering the price by $100 would be a way to expand the user base even further. But like most things with Apple, we won't know what they're going to do until they decide to tell us.

Beyond rumor, speculation, and grainy photos appearing online, it's impossible to know exactly what to expect. Despite that, some are already saying the anticipated keynote will be underwhelming compared with most years, with Steve Jobs sidelined, and no early signs of any sort of monumental update to the iPhone hardware.

Most of the updates to the iPhone will have to do with the operating system update, which Apple already detailed at a special event in March. We know for sure iPhone OS 3.0 will add some features iPhone users have been demanding since the phone's debut in 2007: background processing, system-wide search, the ability to copy, cut, and paste, multimedia messaging, and an option for a landscape virtual keyboard. There will also be 1,000 new APIs available to developers creating applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch platform. Apple didn't discuss every single one of those at the March event, so it's certainly possible Schiller and whoever else joins him onstage could have saved one or two of the best things to unveil Monday.

Apple has also promised to give more details on Mac OS X 10.6, which the company announced at WWDC last year, and promised it would be ready in "about a year." Apple will likely give us the release date on Monday.

Leading up to the event, rumors of a Verizon service plan option on the iPhone, and the unveiling of an Apple touch-screen tablet have surfaced. Those are likely wishful thinking--for now. Though those rumors could both become reality, it's not likely they'll appear at WWDC. AT&T's contract with Apple to offer the iPhone is said to guarantee exclusivity for five years. And most agree a touch-screen tablet wouldn't be available until 2010 at the earliest.

Of course, many WWDC attendees may still be holding out hope that Jobs will make an appearance Monday. Apple has been clear that Jobs' return as CEO is scheduled for "the end of June," though it's impossible to say for sure whether he would simply attend the conference or not.

We'll be live-blogging the keynote speech, which is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. PDT on Monday. So please be sure to come back and read about what Apple is announcing as it happens.

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Microsoft: Obama's tax plan may hurt U.S. jobs

Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer offered an unwelcome economics lesson to the Obama administration this week: Higher taxes have consequences that Washington policy-makers may not especially like.

Ballmer said Wednesday that if Congress enacts President Obama's plans to impose higher corporate taxes, a sensible thing for Microsoft to do would be to move jobs offshore.

"It makes U.S. jobs more expensive," Ballmer said, according to Bloomberg News. "We're better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S."

Last month, the president announced a plan to rewrite tax law by preventing U.S.-based multinational companies from "deferring" and keeping profits offshore, which can lower their tax bills.

The current U.S. corporate tax system is unusual because it taxes income that Microsoft and other companies make in other countries, even if they already paid foreign taxes on that income. That makes U.S.-based companies less competitive than, say, Irish firms that don't pay taxes on foreign income and aren't hit by double taxation; deferred taxation is a way to lessen the sting.

If deferred taxation is eliminated, it becomes more tempting for a company to move its headquarters from Seattle to Dublin. That's voting with your feet.

That's why business groups have opposed the president's plan. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says it will "impede growth in the U.S. economy, (and) cause the loss of jobs." The National Foreign Trade Council called it "counterproductive."

Microsoft says it employs about 95,000 people worldwide, and about 56,500 in the United States.

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Tony La Russa sues Twitter over alleged fake tweets

Let he who has not been fooled by a fake Twitter page cast the first stone.

Yet, though Kanye West has demanded that Biz Stone and friends do something about fake feeds, St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa has gone one step further.

He's suing.

According to the Associated Press, La Russa who is, let's not forget, a lawyer, was appalled to discover someone had set up a Twitter account allegedly bearing his name and a sick sense of humor.

Tony La Russa is on the right

(Credit: CC SD Dirk)

According to the complaint, filed last month in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco, one tweet of the now now-deleted account read, on April 19: "Lost 2 out of 3, but we made it out of Chicago without one drunk driving incident or dead pitcher."

For those of you who don't follow baseball closely, Cardinals pitcher Darryl Kile died in his hotel room in 2002 of an arterial blockage. While relief pitcher Josh Hancock was killed in a car accident, after which his blood-alcohol level was said by authorities to have been twice the legal limit.

Quite a sense of the jolly, this Twitterer.

However, unlike other fake Twitter pages, the fake La Russa feed did apparently include a few words that read: "Bio Parodies are fun for everyone."

It will be interesting, should the matter ever come to court, what weight might be given to this alleged disclosure.

In his lawsuit, La Russa allegedly claims that the tweets were "derogatory and demeaning" and that the feed damaged his trademark rights.

However, it seems as if he is giving an intentional walk to the person who actually created the fake page. Which is an interesting decision.

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Long space flights will make you short, fat, and bald

Technological progress always comes with a hefty price. (Unless it's a PC, I suppose)

So I must admit to feeling a little heartskip at hearing that the search to commune with aliens in the outer beyond will leave humans looking like, well, porky aliens.

According to a report in the Telegraph, scientists believe that long flights into space will not have beautifying effects on the star-crossed trekkers of the future.

In fact, they will make them short, fat, and bald.

I wish I could find more comforting words to describe their fate. Just as I wish that more people would realize that "bald" does not equate to "ugly."

A long time spent up in near zero gravity will mean that humans will not have to make an effort to get off the couch. They won't have to do anything to stay warm either. And no exercise means, well, blubber.

Will these be trekking humans waiting for plastic surgery?

(Credit: CC Jurvetson/Flickr)

The otherworldly atmosphere will also mean that humans won't exactly grow, as muscles and bones will not develop in the way they do here in the gyms of the earth.

Astrobiologist Dr. Lewis Dartnell from University College, London, also said that fluid will pool in humans' skulls and there will be no need for protecting yourself from the cold. Which means your face will bloat and your hair will fall out. Oh, and don't forget that you'll be fat, too.

"With little effort required to move around in microgravity and an environment that is never too hot or cold, future spacemen and women are likely to become pretty chubby," he said.

But here is what Dr. Dartnell did not conceive.

On every future long-haul space flight there will be plastic surgeons ready to nip, tuck, and weave you back to beauty in a perfectly painless, weightless environment. Jowls too puffy? Let's pop that air out. Hair dropping out? Let's graft a little from your other regions.

Yes, it will be not unlike the masseuses on the original Virgin Atlantic Airways.

We must never think negatively about technological progress. Science will always find a way to keep us just as beautiful as we are today. I mean, what else do we need science for?

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Google debuts Chrome for Mac, Linux

A developer preview version of Google's Chrome is now available on Mac OS X.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Updated Jun 4th 8:53 p.m. with download links and further details and 9:47 p.m. with hands-on testing results.

Google released Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux Thursday--but only in rough developer preview versions that the company warns are works in progress.

"In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM," Google product managers Mike Smith and Karen Grunberg said in a blog post, evidently trying to employ a little reverse psychology. "Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software."

Until now, Google's open-source browser has been a Windows-only product, and some Mac and Linux users have been clamoring for their own version. Google coders have been working to rebuild some Chrome components, such as its graphical interface and its sandbox that isolates different processes from each other, to move beyond just Windows.

Google offers three versions of Chrome: stable, beta, and developer preview. The Mac OS X and Linux versions fall into this last, category, the most buggy and least tested and complete.

Chrome for Mac OS X sports the same new-tab interface as the Windows version. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The Flash plug-in won't work, for example, so forget watching YouTube videos. Printing or bookmark management aren't implemented yet. And privacy controls aren't fully baked. Google said there are more than 400 bugs that need to be stomped.

Even though only released for the experimental crowd, the new versions are a big step forward for the browser. First, the versions will plug into Google's auto-update service that automatically downloads new versions. Second, the products bear the Google Chrome brand, not just the Chromium label of the only incarnations available until now. And third, a much larger audience will be helping Google debug the code through automated crash reports of the new versions.

Not everyone can try the Mac and Linux versions, though. Google spokesman Eitan Bencuya said the Linux version is supported only the Debian and Ubuntu incarnations of Linux, and the Mac OS X version only works on Intel-based Macs.

I gave the Mac OS X version a 40-minute whirl and was delighted to find one of my favorite Windows features--fast launch. Pages loaded reasonably quickly, too, though a few times the browser seemed to hang while loading one.

Chrome has edged up to 1.8 percent of the browser market--small but good enough for fourth place.

(Credit: Net Applications)

The only pages that didn't work for me were Yahoo Mail, which told me I had an unsupported browser, and those that required Flash. But a number of complicated JavaScript-based sites, including Gmail, Flickr Organizr, and Google Docs, had no troubles.

The animation around the tabs is pleasing, but also helps your mind grasp what's going on. A new tab rises up from the window frame. When you close a tab, the adjacent ones slide over to fill the gap. The active tab is lighter, though the other tabs are not as relatively dark as in an earlier build that I tried.

I experienced what I thought was one crash I feared brought down my machine, but after about 15 seconds the browser and machine became responsive again as if nothing had happened.

I was pleased to see the three-finger left or right swipe work to page backward and forward. However, some keyboard shortcuts were flaky--or perhaps I just have to learn new ones.

Google isn't saying when the new versions will make it to beta status, much less stable. "It's unclear. This is a first step," Bencuya said.

After years of near-dormancy when Microsoft's Internet Explorer ruled the roost, the browser world again is on fire, fueled by competition and a new generation of more interactive Web applications. Mozilla is on the cusp of releasing Firefox 3.5, as is Apple with Safari 4 for both Windows and Mac OS X. Opera 10 is in beta, and even battleship Microsoft is slowly starting to speed up with the weeks-old Internet Explorer 8.

The Mac OS X version, 3.0.182.5, is close to the latest Windows developer preview, 3.0.183.1.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

According to Net Applications statistics, Internet Explorer remains the king of the heap, with 65.5 percent market share in May 2009. Firefox has 22.5 percent, Safari 8.4, and Chrome has edged up to 1.8 percent since its launch in September.

All this variety means Web developers have to test their sites to make sure they work with more versions. Because Chrome uses the WebKit engine for interpreting and displaying Web page coding, the same engine Safari uses, Google argues that Chrome should be similar. But Chrome uses a different engine for JavaScript called V8, and Web-based JavaScript instructions are at the heart of much of the present proliferation of elaborate Web pages and applications.

The browser challengers argue that having multiple browsers on the market means that Web programmers will aim more for supporting standards such as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and JavaScript. And indeed, Microsoft made a standards mode the default for IE 8. However, varying interpretations of standard and varying degrees of support complicate the matter, and a large number of people haven't upgraded from IE 6, much less IE 7.

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Report: Steve Jobs on track for June return

Apple CEO Steve Jobs briefly addressed his state of health onstage at an Apple event last October.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET News)

Steve Jobs is on track to return to the helm of Apple this month after nearly six months of medical leave, according a report in The Wall Street Journal that cited unnamed sources.

Jobs announced in January that he would be stepping down temporarily from the chief executive post whilerecuperating from a hormone imbalance, and a return to the company this month could coincide with an appearance at the Worldwide Developers Conference, which opens Monday in San Francisco. The centerpiece of the conference is expected to be the App Store and the new features of the iPhone OS 3.0, but there has also been speculation that Apple will unveil a new iPhone as well.

Jobs, 54, has been the subject of heated speculation regarding his health since last June's Worldwide Developers Conference, when he appeared to have lost a great deal of weight. At the time, Apple insisted that Jobs' health was a private matter but revealed in early January that Jobs was suffering from a hormone imbalance that was impeding his body's ability to absorb certain proteins.

"He was one real sick guy,'' said a source whom the newspaper described as having seen Jobs in recent weeks. "Fundamentally he was starving to death over a nine-month period. He couldn't digest protein. (But) he took corrective action.''

Last week, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told the Journal that Jobs seemed healthy and energetic.

In August 2004, Jobs underwent successful surgery to treat a rare form of pancreatic cancer, which sidelined him until September of that year. Much of the speculation over the past year had been over whether that cancer had returned.

Tim Cook, Apple's chief operating officer, has been running the company during Jobs' absence. Apple has said Vice President of Marketing Philip Schiller will deliver the WWDC keynote address, assuming Jobs' customary role as he did at the Macworld conference earlier this year.

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