The World­wide Devel­oper Con­fer­ence 2008 had an unusual high atten­dance (52.000 atten­dees). CEO Steve Jobs announced a couple of inter­est­ing items during the event: Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leop­ard), Mobile Me and of course the iPhone 3G. The ses­sion of Mac OS X 10.6 this after­noon will be cov­ered under non-​disclosure, so don’t expect any offi­cial fea­tures or announce­ments to be coming from Apple but as usual some infor­ma­tion is cer­tain to leak. The iPhone is finally coming to the Nether­lands, sorry you guys who’ve bought it recently on eBay. Again and again I’ll tell people the same mes­sage, it’s a devel­oper con­fer­ence not a con­sumer event. So for those who are dis­ap­pointed wait for the next event and you’ll be amazed!

MobileMe will hope­fully bring the long over­due upgrade to .Mac. Now I only have to wait until July 11 to buy myself an iPhone 3G.

Apple’s iPhone SDK press con­fer­ence will be held at 10:00AM PT / 1:00PM ET

08:00AM - Hawaii
10:00AM - Pacific
11:00AM - Moun­tain
12:00PM - Cen­tral
01:00PM - East­ern
06:00PM - London
07:00PM - Ams­ter­dam
09:00PM - Moscow
03:00AM - Tokyo (March 7th)

Due to the nature of Adobe Flash plugin, Adobe’s pro­pri­etary soft­ware would need to be recom­piled and opti­mized for the ARM archi­tec­ture for run­ning on mobile devices like the iPhone/iPod Touch, so is stated by many web­sites. Quick­time wasn’t build from the ground up to sup­port these devices either (power and memory con­sump­tion wise). But not all QuickTime’s codec’s are sup­ported only H.264 video, up to 1.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Low-​Complexity ver­sion of the H.264 Base­line Profile…(see iPhone Specs for more infor­ma­tion). My ques­tion is: IS THIS TRUE? Adobe is oper­at­ing on Apple’s play­ground (Format Wars). HD-​DVD has left the build­ing in favor of BR-​DVD. But the dig­i­tal format for video isn’t decided yet! H.264, Win­dows Media or Adobe Flash. Adobe has an install base of 90%> it even comes bun­dled with Mac OS X. Quick­Time is installed on every com­puter with iTunes (Apple’s Trojan Horse) and every Mac. Apple and Adobe are com­peti­tors busi­ness wise: Final Cut Pro isn’t one of Adobe’s favorite appli­ca­tions. Apple is expand­ing hor­i­zon­tal in the soft­ware market. Rumors even point to trou­ble in the mar­riage of Apple/Adobe when Apple released iPhoto. Apple had to down­grade iPhoto’s fea­tures. When Adobe bought Macro­me­dia, there was no com­peti­tor left in the market and com­pe­ti­tion is always good! Either Apple will solve our prob­lem or Adobe will the market demands a solu­tion. I am not a big Flash fan as you prob­a­bly know so I am not cheer­ing on Adobe side.

iTunes (Music) (Games) (Movies) Store hence the name! iTunes already left it’s origin a long time ago. Apple should work out some­thing (iMedia Store or what­ever). iTunes is a strong brand, but it doesn’t cover it’s orig­i­nal propo­si­tion any­more! Apple lost the Com­puter in it’s name to state: more then just com­put­ers. The iTunes brand has to be updated! It’s an online store where the con­sumer can buy music, games, movies, audio­books etc. not just music! If I’ve under­stood cor­rectly Apple’s is going to offer soft­ware in it’s line-​up. The iPhone/iPod Touch are the first to receive it’s apps through iTunes.

Online ser­vices are the next big evo­lu­tion­ary thing after Web 2.0. You already see some com­pa­nies making the shift, like Adobe with it’s Adobe Pho­to­shop Online (PSX), Adobe even branded the Pho­to­shop line with a new very much dis­cussed (Web 2.0 Aquaish) logo. Google is also exper­i­ment­ing with online apps (Cal­en­dar, Docs, Talk etc.) and Apple already has it’s .Mac ser­vices for years (thanks to WebOb­jects). I think and pre­dict that a lot of com­pa­nies will offer these kind of ser­vices in the future and see a tighter inte­gra­tion between web-​based appli­ca­tions and desktop-​based appli­ca­tions, maybe even elim­i­nat­ing their desk­top cousins and trans­form into a sub­scrip­tion based model.

As I men­tioned in an ear­lier post, I would be offer­ing a mobile ver­sion of this weblog. It’s been run­ning in beta form for a while now and I think it’s ready to be unleashed into dig­i­tal cyber­space. You can approach this opti­mized ver­sion with you iPod Touch or iPhone by enter­ing this URL in your browser: http://​mobile.​dig​i​tal​ren​dezvous.net and if you have the latest firmware 1.1.3 (4A93) and the Jan­u­ary upgrade for the iPod Touch, you’ll see the magic of Web Clip. So dig­i­tal­ren­dezvous | mobile is ready-​to-​go.

Apple has made an iPhone acces­sory, a Blue­tooth head­set. This was men­tioned ear­lier during the Keynote of Steve Jobs at Mac­world Expo. It’s cur­rently unknown when this is going to be released and how much its going to cost.