Apple Developers Eager to Get Hands on iPhone, Leopard

Mac OS X developers and Apple enthusiasts are anxiously awaiting the June 11 opening of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco to find out whether there will be any changes or surprises in the company’s product plans.

During his keynote, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is expected at the very least to show a feature-complete version of Leopard, the upcoming revision of Mac OS X, including the “top secret” elements that Jobs mentioned at his first Leopard announcement at the 2006 WWDC.

Apple has already reported that Leopard will be delayed until Octoberand developers and enthusiasts will be looking for confirmation that the company will hold to that schedule.

Another open question is whether the Apple iPhone, due to go on sale June 29, will be open to third-party developers.

During past WWDC keynotes Jobs has made surprise disclosures of new Apple hardware and software, though this annual event, unlike the company’s Macworld Expo, is targeted to developers, not consumers.

Known new features for Leopard include Time Machine, an automatic data backup and restore feature; Core Animation, an API that allows developers to easily create advanced graphics effects in their applications; Spotlight searches over a network; Spaces, a user-configurable virtual desktop feature; updated iChat and Mail capabilities; Dashcode, a tool for creating Dashboard widgets; and full 64-bit support.

Apple security has been tight on the “top secret” new features for Leopard. Though some have speculated that the new operating system will include built-in virtualization features, enabling Macs to run Windows applications (as Intel-based Mac users can now do by using third-party applications such as SWsoft’s Parallels), no evidence has surfaced to bump this up above the rumor classification.

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