The 2006 edition of the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote was not historic but a really great one. Apple has introduced Leopard to developers and officially finished the transition to the Intel architecture several months ahead of the schedule announced a year ago.

The Keynote started with a little message from the "PC" character of Apple's latest ad campaign, the PC urged developers to take a year off. Steve Jobs then started his speech, as usually, with some great numbers and facts: 4200 developers from 48 countries in the audience. He reminded that Apple has achieved record Mac sales this quarter and claimed that the market share has been skyrocketing in June. He did not take a minute on the iPod as the event is mainly focused on Macs and software (good point!).

Mac Pro and XServe:

The audience didn't have to wait much before the first announcement which was the very anticipated Mac Pro introduction.

Steve Jobs first detailed the advantages of the Intel Woodcrest-based architecture present in the new Mac Pro line-up. The two processors inside every Mac Pro (across the line) runs at 2Ghz to 3Ghz with 4MB of cache on a 1.33Ghz Front Side Bus and a 4-channel 256-bit 667Mhz memory bus.

The Mac Pro keeps the same enclosure while it is totally redesigned internally, giving less room for cooling and more for storage as the Mac Pro can now hold up to four hard drives and two optical drives. The unit includes four PCI-Express slots, five USB2 ports, two FireWire 800 and two Firewire 400 ports.

The Mac Pro comes in a standard configuration that includes : 2x2.66 Woodcrest dual-core processor (four cores at all), 1GB of RAM, 250GB of storage, NVIDIA 7300GT graphic chip with 256MB of VRAM and a 16X DL SuperDrive. This configuration is priced $2499 and there are several Build To Order (BTO) options such as a X1900 XT or NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 graphic chips, until 16GB of RAM and until 2TB of storage. Processor can be configured in BTO between 2Ghz and 3Ghz dropping the Mac Pro's starting price to $2124 in the minimum configuration (2Ghz and 160GB of storage).

Apple also introduced a new line-up of XServes, also based on the Woodcrest Xeon 5100 chips. The specs are similar to the Mac Pro. The new XServe includes redundant power-supply (option) and are said to be three to five times faster than their G5-based cousins with their two dual core 2Ghz Xeon 5100 processors (four cores at all) and their ATI Radeon X1300 graphic chip. The XServe "base configuration" XServe with 1GB of RAM and 80GB of storage is priced $2999. BTO options now include up to 3Ghz Xeon processor, built-in SuperDrive, Fibre Channel PCI-Express, Dual Channel Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express and Dual Channel Ultra320 SCSI PCI-X, up to 32GB of RAM and storage up to 750MB.

Phil Schiller came on stage so as to perform some live speed tests. He showed how the great processor combined to a superior architecture resulted in a Mac Pro that is really faster than a DELL workstation that costs $300 more. Overally the Mac Pro is said to be 1.6 to 2.1 times faster than the PowerMac G4 quad.

The Mac Pro ships immediately while the XServe will be available by October. Notice that PowerMac's are still available.

Leopard:

After these great hardware announcements, Steve Jobs started talking about Mac OS X by thanking developers for Tiger's 86 million lines of code. He followed by a short history sum-up since the introduction of Mac OS X and started joking on Microsoft for their poor roadmap. He added that, last year, when Redmont was urged by Apple to "start their photocopiers", they actually took it seriously and did it.

And now comes Leopard, the next major release of Apple's operating system. Jobs told the audience that he will show ten of the hundreds of new features in Leopard. He did it as follows:

1) True 64bit : Mac OS X Leopard will include full 64bit support. The developer tools will compile in 64bit seamlessly and every 32bit application will be run at full speed and without emulation.

2) Timeline : Scot Forsall went on stage to present a feature that is integrated with the finder and allows you to restore older versions of your documents at any time. The feature is enriched with a great "time machine" effect showing a timeline at the right, moving the timeline bar, shows older versions of a folder, of the picture library or anything else.

3) Boot Camp : Introduced earlier this year as a beta, BootCamp will be included in a "better" and finnished version with Leopard. It's a boot manager that allows any Mac user to install and boot on Windows on an Intel-based Mac.

4) Spaces : This is the implementation of the well known of Linux users virtual desktops feature. It allows you to arrange your windows in four different desktops so as not to get messed when several application are running on your Mac. The feature includes a screen thumbnails effect so as to switch between desktops.

5) Spotlight : Apple's desktop search application is now better integrated with the Finder and includes improved syntax for search with AND/OR/NOT operators so as to improve results accuracy.

6) CoreAnimation : This is not a feature intended to the end user but actually an API for developers allowing them to add animated effects to their applications very easily. The demonstration of this feature was quite impressive, it is possible to animate whatever you want, including windows, pictures and videos. That will help developers to create impressive applications for Leopard, just like helped CoreImage and CoreVideo on Tiger.

7) Universal Access : Apple has improved universal access so as to allow everyone to use Mac OS X very easily. The speech synthesis now sounds impressively, it's like a real voice.

8) Mail : Apple's mail application has much been improved. It now supports HTML and allows the creation of stationary mails. It also has ToDo-lists and incoming mail can create a ToDo item. It is also possible for the user to create notes.

9) Dashboard : The feature introduced with Tiger has also been significantly improved. Not only Apple has added more widgets but users can now create widgets effortlessly with WebClips which allows to get any part of a web page and transform it into a widget. Dashcode allows developers to create sophisticated widgets and includes a visual CSS editor and a Javascript debugger.

10) iChat : Probably the most improved application of Leopard, the chat and audio-video conferencing software now allows to use Photo Booth funny effects and change the background during a video-conferencing session. The application also includes a major new feature called iChat Theater. It allows you to present pictures, movies and even keynote presentation through an iChat video-conferencing session.

More information, screenshots and videos of Leopard is available on Apple's dedicated section.

During the presentation, Jobs told that there are still super secret features that will be unveiled later. As for shipping date, Jobs told Leopard will be coming in Spring 2007.

Leopard was the second and last part of the keynote, Jobs did not say the magic phrase "One more thing this time". Apple announced very great products and focused on the Mac platform. The rumour mill did not seriously expect other things than Macs and Software, so no real disappointment, though we would have loved to see some Core 2 Duo upgrades.