Apple has revealed a feature-full version of Leopard and announced a software development kit for the iPhone during today's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC).

Developers, developers developers...

Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs started off his keynote presentation with some figures on Apple developers. He first pointed out that the company counts 950 000 registered developers (Apple Developer Connection) and that about 5000 of them attended the WWDC.

He then highlighted some game developers such as Electronic Arts, which is bringing game titles by dozens on the Mac this year, including Need For Speed Carbon, Harry Potter, Madden 08. ID Software's John Carmack was also present and briefly talked about how exciting and easy is Mac games development these days.

Jobs also said that Mac OS X Tiger was a big success, with over 67% of the Mac users (or about 15 million) having it installed.

The secret features of Leopard

The main focus during this year's WWDC was on Apple's next iteration of operating systems, Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.

Steve Jobs demonstrated 10 of the 300 new features claimed for Mac OS X' major update.

As predicted just a few hours before the keynote kicks-off on MacScoop, today's big news was the announcement of a totally revamped user interface for Mac OS X.

It's not just a Finder revamp but a whole desktop and look-and-feel revamp, as Apple is making menus semi-transparent and is even getting rid of brushed metal user interfaces for a unified platinum flavor first seen in Tiger's Mail.app.

The Finder's new user interface takes the iTunes approach, with a new sidebar separated in three sections: devices, shared and places. It also adds a very powerful CoverFlow view which is compatible with most kinds of documents.

The Dock also evolves with a new look, a reflexion effect and Stacks. The latter lets the dock group your documents or applications in stacks that expand on click with a nice looking effect.

The Back To My Mac feature is based on .Mac and allows you to access or sync your home folder from any place through the Internet.

The Finder, SpotLight and Time Machine and Back-t-my-Mac are all well integrated with QuickLook, a powerful preview tool for Mac OS X. It works with various kind of files such as pictures, keynote presentations, Office documents or QuickTime videos. Multiple-page documents can be previewed without being launched. QuickLook also allows full screen previewing.

Jobs also reviewed previously showed features: iChat Theater, Spaces, Dashboard, CoreAnimation, 64-bit and WebClip.

The latest beta of Mac OS X Leopard will be made available to all WWDC attendees and registered premium developers.

Jobs pointed out with humour that the final version will ship in October for the same price as previous versions of Mac OS X, or $129 for all editions, including Ultimate. He refered to Windows Vista very complex pricing scheme.

More details on the new features Leopard brings are available on Apple's web site.

One more thing, Safari for Windows

Maybe the most unexpected event was that Apple would release a public beta of Safari for both Mac OS X Tiger and Windows.

Jobs first pointed out the 4.9% market share Safari enjoys in the browsers market and reminded that iTunes is doing well too, with far more monthly downloads than FireFox.

The new beta of Safari 3 is available on Apple's web site for immediate download on Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista platforms.

One last thing... iPhone and dvelopers

As recent rumours suggested, Apple also announced it would allow developers to create their own applications for the iPhone, thanks to Web 2.0 standards.

Apple says there is no SDK, it's all based on Web 2.0 and hosted at the developer's server so there are no distribution efforts for the developer. A recent MacScoop report claimed that Apple would not be ready to provide an SDK for the iPhone for this years' WWDC but assumed something was on the way.

Scott Forstall, Apple's Software division head, spent a lot of time describing how developers can interface their appliciations with the iPhone's services and can work with any application that uses the Web 2.0 standards (HTML, Ajax, Javascript...).

He also put some focus on the security level the iPhone offers, pointing out that the web service API's available for the iPhone are as secure as Amazon's or iTunes'.

Everyone would have bet on hardware updates

With Apple's consumer desktops not updated for several months, many Mac fans and Mac-centric sites were expecting Apple to make some hardware announcements and felt optimistic when Apple closed it's online store during the keynote.

The store opened again a few minutes after the keynote took end but no hardware updates were there. Renewal of Apple's consumer desktops is still pending though and could happen in the next few days.

A full coverage of this event was succesfully provided by MacScoop with success. We'd like to thank our readers who provided us feed live from San Fransisco and allowed us to make this coverage. You may check-out the transcript here.