This morning when I woke my MacBook Air from sleep I found a nice prompt asking me to upgrade from .Mac to MobileMe, being a good Apple fan I followed its instructions (well not really instructions, just a software update). The update included iTunes 7.7 as well as a MobileMe preference pane.

The MobileMe update added a new preferences pane to System Preferences, the new icon is titled MobileMe and replaces the .Mac icon. Most of the settings are identical inside of the preference pane except it cannot communicate with the MobileMe servers as of 8:40 eastern on the 10th of July 2008. The iDisk is still titled iDisk unless Apple updates it to a new name sometime soon and the same sync-able items are still listed under Sync (no new ones yet).

Check software update for your copy of MobileMe today.

It appears that Apple will be including Sun Microsystem’s ZFS file system in 10.6 Snow Leopard Server. For those of us who dislike HSF+ and all the issues that are associated with it, this informal announcement by Apple on the Snow Leopard site is a welcomed change. We can only hope this will be available in the regular, non-server version of Snow Leopard.

For those who want more information about ZFS and Snow Leopard, read ZDNet.com’s article on ZFS for Snow Leopard or check out Apple’s Snow Leopard Server site, which mentions it officially. Also, Wikipedia has a great article on ZFS.

Steve Jobs’ Keynote was THE event here at WWDC, the event that everyone wanted to attend. While many people I spoke with in line waiting to grab a seat at the keynote came to WWDC strictly to watch the keynote, many others are here primarily for the sessions and labs. See my posts: Waiting in Line @ WWDC, The line moved… A little, and On the way to the Keynote.

At the keynote Steve introduced iPhone 3G, MobileMe and Snow Leopard, all of which were in one way or another predicted beforehand. The iPhone 3G is slimmer, blacker/whiter (in 16Gb only), faster, cheaper and available July 11th. MobileMe is replacing .Mac as Apple’s syncing and online storage service, Apple also extended support to Windows computers and added push services. Snow Leopard, the next version of OS X (10.6) was also announced and should be available in about a year. See my posts: Snow Leopard is the next OSX, iPhone 2.0 Software, MobileMe, iPhone’s First Birthday, iPhone 3G and WWDC: Day Two + Snow Leopard.

OS X 411’s coverage of WWDC08 was superb and I wasn’t expecting to to go so smoothly. Since I’m attending WWDC as a student I was worried about even getting into the keynote, last year Apple denied access to students. Luckily, this year Apple allowed everyone into the Keynote and I was lucky enough to grab close seats. Just how close? Well, we were less than twenty rows from the front, my friend Jason guessed about ten (see the picture below for the pure awesomeness). We had the actual iPhone development team sitting in the row in front of us, I’m not sure we could have gotten any closer, VIPs were in the closest rows, Al Gore was one of them.

In addition to having great pictures I updated the site with new information within seconds of it being said and had photos up shortly after I updated the text. Although I did not cover the keynote word-for-word like other sites, I got my readers the information FAST. The person I was attending WWDC with checked sites like Engadget, and I had photos and news up before them on a few announcements (I guess there is something to be said for the “little guy”).

Yesterday (Monday) was the big day here at WWDC, the keynote overshadowed everything else offered here. Everything outside of the keynote here at WWDC is covered under the nondisclosure agreement all WWDC attendees had to sign/agree to, so I can not speak about specifics from the sessions. What I can speak about however, is Snow Leopard, the just announced version of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system.

Snow Leopard - Apple’s new OS X was announced yesterday by Steve Jobs at the WWDC08 keynote. While it wasn’t covered in great detail during the keynote, Apple has posted a Snow Leopard site. The Snow Leopard site says that Apple’s focus is changing gears, from adding features, to enhancing OS X’s underlying technologies. What the “average” Snow Leopard user will see will not be new features like Quick Look or Dashboard, but instead improved applications. Snow Leopard will speed up everyday programs (both Apple and third-party applications) on your system. Whether this speedup will be enough for the “average” mac user to upgrade is something I haven’t figured out yet, my personal guess is that third-party programmers will write programs strictly for Snow Leopard, just like many are for Leopard now. This may or may not be enough of a reason for mac users to upgrade. Check out Apple’s Snow Leopard mini site for more on Snow Leopard.

Today, Tuesday was not as grand as the “keynote day,” but it was none the less informative for WWDC attendees. I took my camera with me to the sessions today, but didn’t take any pictures (mainly because nothing was worth snapping a picture of). The crowds were almost as huge as the crowds waiting to get into the keynote, and even a large queue formed outside of Moscone Center before Apple allowed us to enter.

I just arrived in San Francisco, and the first thing I did was stop by Moscone to grab my badge for WWDC and check out what all Apple had done to the location.

Apple has two huge Apple logos on the building, which make it easy to spot. The inside is also covered with Apple stuff, mainly about the iPhone and OS X.

Today Apple posted the session schedules for their 2008 World Wide Developers Conference, WWDC for short. 

See Apple’s WWDC08 Schedule here.

I plan on posting more about WWDC08 soon, what I can say is that I will be attending it as a student courtesy of Apple and their Student Scholarship program. See my personal blog for more on my attendance.