Grab your parka, hat and gloves and book your tickets early for WWDC 2009, June 8 – 12 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center West.

Apple announced the dates Thursday via its Developers Connection website for the annual conference that provides developers and IT professionals with in-depth technical information and hands-on learning about iPhone OS and Mac OS X technologies from over 1000 Apple engineers who created them.

Easily one of the most eagerly anticipated Geek festivals on the calendar, this year’s conference should draw even more interest than usual due to the impending arrival of iPhone 3.0 and Mac OS X 10.6, known as Snow Leopard.

Early-bird registration for the conference is $1,295 until April 24th, after which the entrance fee goes up $300. Current ADC Student Members and student Team Members in the iPhone Developer University Program can apply for a WWDC Student Scholarship for free admission to the conference.

For those who couldn’t be there in person, Apple has already uploaded this morning’s WWDC Keynote for your viewing pleasure in Quicktime. Check it here.

Image via Uberreview
WWDC is nearly upon us. San Francisco’s Moscone West is plastered with Apple logos. Rumors are in the air. Unannounced products are just out of reach. Rather than try to calm the fervor, I’m just going to pour some gas onto the blaze with the help of my friend Zoltar, The Fortune Telling Machine. It’s that time again — Cult of Mac’s Top 5 Unlikely WWDC wishes! Four of them are credible rumors, the other’s a crazy rumor that I started. See if you can tell the difference!

5. New MacBooks
With the rest of Apple’s product line moving to anodized aluminum cases, having MacBooks in retro-iPod white is looking jankier by the day. It’s high time that Apple revamped its low-end laptops to match the hot design of the current generation iMac. And if Apple wanted to throw a real graphics card and a higher-resolution screen into the mix, that would be nice, too.
Likelihood (out of five): Three. The MacBook has gotten a processor boost as recently as February, but this is a sorely needed shot in the arm for the product line, and Apple likely needs a Mac announcement in addition to whatever happens in the iPhone and iPod universe.

Updated: The Live blog is now available here. Bookmark it, and I’ll see you bright and early no ON Monday!

The next great keynote from Steve Jobs at WWDC is this Monday in San Francisco, and I’ll be there live-blogging on behalf of Popular Mechanics. I’ll provide the blow-by-blow account, as well as the most rapid-fire analysis I can muster. The actual page for the live blog isn’t up yet, but I’ll provide the link in an updated version of this post when it is. Once things are done over there and I’ve got my top thoughts synthesized, various Cult of Mac folks will be back up here providing our thoughts, speculation and wishes based on the latest and greatest from Apple.

It’s going to be a great one, folks. In the mean time, stay tuned for my two big pre-WWDC posts still to come. One will be a preview of sorts, but the other is something more like the epic analysis of the slow change from Carbon to Snow Leopard. I’m going to look at the designs of the iPhone and iPod touch to shed light on the strategies that they reflect, and also suggest possible future directions for the second iPhone based on those design principles. It will be partly based on a white paper I helped write earlier this year at my day job. It’s a good read and includes a similar dissection of the original iPod. If you want to bone up in advance, you can read it here.

Otherwise, stay tuned. It’s going to be a great week in the world of the Cult!

The greatest tradition of the run-up to a Steve Jobs keynote is the release of John Siracusa’s keynote bingo card. This year’s iteration is a twist on a classic Wired cover, which also got remixed for Leander’s recent cover story. Please read John’s post to get his thinking behind the card and also download the PDF to print out and follow along at home with.

Image: AP, via Guardian UK

Today’s rumors that Steve Jobs may introduce an incremental update to OS X called Snow Leopard at his Worldwide Developers Conference keynote provide a powerful reminder of just how effective the project to replace the Classic Mac OS has been. Buzz on the wires has it that Snow Leopard would be for Intel processors only, completely abandoning the PowerPC platform that Steve Jobs inherited at Apple in 1996. Some have even speculated that Carbon and the last pieces of the original Mac OS toolkit could be similarly discarded in the release. If all that is true (and the latter part is particularly hard to swallow without bricks of salt), it officially marks the death of the Macintosh OS at the hands of its proud successor, OS X.

This is a really significant achievement, and not because I’m nostalgic for MultiFinder. This officially marks the conclusion of the most patient, incremental, and down-right conservative campaign of change ever waged by one Steven P. Jobs. At a WWDC much like this one, just 10 years ago, he began to wage that war. Next Monday, he will have won. The Mac is dead. Long live OS X. To read why and how this happened, please click through.

So what is Steve Jobs didn’t introduce any new hardware in his keynote and the iPhone third-party application support is somewhat bogus? Core Animation, the new Desktop and new Finder or incredibly gorgeous, so watch Steve preach it on Apple’s official stream.

Technorati Tags: keynote, steve jobs, wwdc

Having spent a day with the beta for Apple’s much-ballyhooed Safari browser for Windows XP, I’m ready to pronounce it the fastest browser for XP that I’ve used on a regular basis. On the other hand, it also is riddled with the kinds of bizarre bugs only a public beta could expose.

Sometimes, it’s both the fastest and the stupidest browser on all of Windows. If you’re on the fence, click through to hear whether your working style is ready for this not-quite-ready-for-prime-time browser contender while stranded in the Windows world.

Technorati Tags: review, safari, software

It’s a beautiful sunny morning here in San Francisco, and Wired News will be liveblogging Steve Jobs’ keynote at WWDC. We have reporters. We have cameras, and we have press passes. Check it out here at 10 AM. Don’t forget to refresh.

Wanna know the No. 1 sign that we’re less than 12 hours from major product announcements by Apple? People are throwing up completely weak rumors that wouldn’t even get mocked normally. Chief among these at this very moment is an alleged rundown of The Stevenote address, which includes some errors so obvious that it even harms the credibility of the rest of the list.
The Google translation from the original German at Apfelkueche is quite interesting, but take a look at the detail. The new iMacs are alleged to have LED displays at 20 and 24″. Really? I’d be pretty surprised. After all, Apple just rolled out MacBook Pros last week, and only managed to go LED for the 15.4″ models, not the 17″ SKUs. Could Apple pull together a machine built around a display a full 7″ bigger than a model they haven’t even shipped? I doubt it.
The wackiest rumor of all is, of course, the iPhone@Home, an alleged 10″ multitouch tablet mainly for movie-watching and Internet surfer. People have been throwing around rumors for years that Apple would release a tabletMac, and this is the same old rumor, repackaged as a pretend big brother for the iPhone. Who knows? Apple might be ready. But I can tell you this much: NO WAY ON EARTH is Apple releasing a machine called the iPhone@Home that isn’t actually a phone and can be used anywhere, not just at home. The company is way too smart to use such a stupid name. Keep your heads up, kids, the FUD is flying right now.
Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: keynote, rumor, steve jobs