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)

In the West & South Hall, Moscone Center (San Fran­cisco, CA) at Jan­u­ary 15 - 18, 2008 you can hear Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, deliver the Mac­world Con­fer­ence & Expo keynote address at the kick off of the biggest Mac­in­tosh com­mu­nity event of the year.

Apple teaser ban­ners have begun crop­ping up around San Francisco’s Moscone Center. They only state: 2008 There’s some­thing in the air. The sen­tence says it all!

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.

When Apple rebranded iTools to .Mac, Apple made fun of Microsoft’s .Net (.Net is Microsoft vision of an appli­ca­tion pro­gram­ming frame­work for future Win­dows appli­ca­tions). When Apple bought NeXT, NeXTSTEP and WebOb­jects were part of the pack­age deal. NeXTSTEP and WebOb­ject were light years ahead of any­thing out there. The pro­gram­ming envi­ron­ment was capa­ble of run­ning on sev­eral dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tems. Parts of NeXT’s soft­ware were later used as the foun­da­tion for Mac OS X. WebOb­jects is suc­cess­ful being used for the Apple Store, iTunes Store and .Mac (.Mac is Apple’s vision of easy to use Web Ser­vices).
I see .Mac as (online) soft­ware and soft­ware has to be improved and get new fea­tures over time. The devel­op­ment of .Mac is slack­ing and get­ting behind other ser­vices, is .Mac ever going to improve? Even Apple’s board of direc­tors asked Steve Jobs what was going on? If you com­pare .Mac to Google or Yahoo you’ll soon get the pic­ture. 1GB disk space… common Apple, that’s old school! Where’s the PHP sup­port? Where’s the stan­dards sup­port? You’ll have to keep up!!! I am even con­sid­er­ing drop­ping my .Mac account! 99 dol­lars a year for this? Sorry, Apple you’ll have to do better! But there’s light at the end of the tunnel, if we can believe the rumors. Leop­ard (Mac OS X 10.5) will offer loads of enhance­ments and even tighter inte­gra­tion with .Mac. I’ll sit this one out till Leop­ard, but if Leop­ard doesn’t bring any improve­ments I’ll def­i­nitely end my sub­scrip­tion and say .Njet to .Mac (njet means “NO” in russian).

Apple and The Beatles’ parent com­pany Apple Corps said Monday they have entered into a new agree­ment con­cern­ing the use of the name “Apple” and Apple logos, ending a testy trade­mark dis­pute dating back nearly three decades. Under the new agree­ment, which replaces a pact from 1991, Apple will own all of the trade­marks related to “Apple” and will license cer­tain of those trade­marks back to Apple Corps for their con­tin­ued use. In addi­tion, the ongo­ing trade­mark law­suit between the com­pa­nies will end, with each party bear­ing its own legal costs, and Apple con­tin­u­ing to use its name and logos on iTunes.

…We love the Bea­t­les, and it has been painful being at odds with them over these trade­marks. It feels great to resolve this in a pos­i­tive manner, and in a way that should remove the poten­tial of fur­ther dis­agree­ments in the future…

said Apple chief exec­u­tive Steve Jobs. The terms of set­tle­ment were not dis­closed. Now we only have to wait until their songs will come avail­able on the iTunes Store.